Lychgate

One night a year, the lantern under the lychgate on St. Ivo's Hill burns until dawn. One night a year, they come.

Silas Whitlock has kept the cemetery above Wexmoor for fifteen years. He is thirty-four, broad and heavy-shouldered from digging the hard clay of the hill, with warm tan skin, a hairy chest, tousled dark brown hair, a short dark beard, and a hillside full of quiet company that never talks back. For eight years he has watched two hooded figures walk up the path between the stones on All Souls' Eve and stop at the edge of the light. For eight years they have watched him back.

Corvane is a mountain of ashen-pale muscle with long black hair spilling from his hood and a full black beard, taller and broader than Silas, quiet as falling snow, and the tall silver scythe is his. Oren is dark-skinned and silver-haired, clean-shaven and built hard, all cheekbones and wicked smile, and he never stops talking. They have walked every road there is, side by side, for three hundred years.

Tonight they have come for the stubborn old soul who taught Silas everything, and he refuses to go until sunrise. So the reapers have to wait.

And on this one night, the veil is thin enough that they can touch. And be touched.

Their hands are cold. Their mouths are not. There's a word that stops everything, and all three of them know it. Not one of them wants to say it.