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— CARRIED —

• bier pole (1d6, two-handed)
• hand axe (1d6)
• dagger (1d4)
• chainmail (AC 5)
• coffin straps ×2
• hand bell
• chalk ×6
• torch ×6
• rope, 50'
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin

— WHO THEY ARE —

Fallow Cross buries four hundred people a year and keeps nine funeral houses to do it, so the houses compete, and what they compete on is the walk. A cortege that wobbles costs a house custom for a decade. Dolen carried for the house of Merrow for sixteen years at front left, which is the corner that takes the weight on a downhill turn. He set a coffin down badly once, in the wet, on Candle Street. The family has not used Merrow since, and he can still name the four other bearers and what each of them did wrong. He is not a soldier. He has been in fights, because a funeral is where a family meets and money gets discussed, and he found that a man who can stand still under a hundredweight of elm is hard to move on purpose. The pole he carries is a bier pole: ash, eight feet, a bronze ferrule at each end, because a bier pole goes down on stone forty times a day and the ends go first. He has replaced the ferrules twice and the pole never. The Mourners' Assize capped a full cortege at nine gold in the spring. It was meant to protect the poor and it closed the two houses that only buried them. Merrow was one. Dolen was fifty-one days out of work when Ivet Corrow put the Guild to him in a yard behind the granary, and the thing that moved him was not the money. It was that she had a list. He keeps his own. Two thousand one hundred and forty names in three books, everyone he has carried since he was nineteen, with the date and the weather. What Ivet told him about the Shrine of Mulvis is that a great many gnomes died in it and nobody wrote down one of them. He has not been able to put that back down. He is afraid of being carried badly. Not of dying — he has handled enough dead to have lost the taste for that — but of six strangers taking a corner too fast with him on their shoulders, and nobody there who would know it had gone wrong. He has said it once, as a joke, and let it stay a joke. He counts. Out loud, for corners and stairs and anything that needs four people to move at the same moment, and he expects the count to be kept. He says "on three" and means on three, not on the word after it. He is patient with the dead and short with the living, and Symon has pointed this out to him twice.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 49 events bereavement-guild-b1
• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 45 events bereavement-2
• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 5 events bereavement-1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · bereavement-1 Prison, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent. Four gloop guards. On three, ferrule first: one dead. The other three broke and ran, alarm into the shrine. No names. The count was kept.
• 2026-08-30 · bereavement-2 Prison again. Four gloop. Ferrule first, dented one held. Ivet sealed the ribs; spell spent. Nell's light swallowed. All of us on the fold; Symon tore it wide. Three broke, alarm through the shrine. Standing at three from a slab. No names. The count was kept.
• 2026-08-30 · bereavement-guild-b1 Prison, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent. Four gloop guards. Three spears through the links; held the corner at one. Ivet took the front, Symon and Nell worked the seams, Ivet dropped the fourth. All four dead on the flags. No names. The count was kept.