work was busy as hell tonight, and I'm only just now getting to sit and settle down. I know I basically vanished for a quarter of a year, came back and apologized, and then promptly vanished again. Sorry about that. I no longer remember where the hell I was in these rambling essays about my life and the people I know.
I started doing this blog with a purpose. I have meandered away from that purpose into a thick slurry of yaoi, but I will try to at least break up the celebration of manlove with some actual original content from time to time. *sigh*
I read somewhere that the earliest signs of emergent civilization usually take the form of death rituals, so let's talk a bit about funerals and the like on planet Ruby.
first off, that thousand year Barrier was awesome for the development of magic, but less awesome in terms of dispersing culture, so there isn't the variation on Ruby that you get here on earth. Large city-states innovate, then get copied by other large city-states, and if the innovation is in art or entertainment they eventually abandon whatever it was as poor people eventually get ahold of it. This is culture in a nutshell, I guess. But as I've said before, on Ruby we burn our dead so that they do not come back to devour our brains every couple of years (or months, depending on the region). There are ghosts on Ruby, but I don't think our ghosts are the same thing as the ghosts here. Ghosts aren't the souls of dead humans, but rather a strong psychic impression of a person which lingers in the local magical field. They are a nuisance, but hardly the dangerous tragedy that they seem to be here. If they even happen here. Nobody seems able to agree on that.
So someone has died. You take their body and put it someplace off the ground, preferably where air can get underneath them a bit, like on a table or something. This makes it less likely that your funeral procedure will turn into an Emergency Funeral Procedure unexpectedly. The family of the deceased puts them in their home, strips them, washes them, binds any wounds they might have. They cry, and talk, and say goodbye. Usually the dead person will remain in the home for about a day so that people who knew them can creep in quietly and say anything private that they might need to. Then, the person is wound in white cloth from neck to feet and burned. A long time ago they used pyres for this, and in some places they still must, but in cities there are places you can go where they have enspelled stone and metal boxes. You put the body in the box, and close the lid, and the spells incinerate the body. Usually a poor family will carry the person by hand; no coffins, although they may press a table into service if necessary. After the incineration is complete, the family will take the ashes (not any teeth that might not have burned, though) back with them and usually they'll bury the ashes somewhere near the person's home. Usually families, especially large and well-established troikks, have a place set aside. Family members will often choose to put small tokens into the hole with the ashes--not things belonging to the deceased, mind you, but things that represent the connection between the deceased and those who remain. Cover up the ashes, make a marker, and you're done.