Galvachren's Guide to Ithonian Funeral Practices

I don't actually remember much about writing this one- a reader suggested it on Reddit, but this was the first bit of writing I did after my grandfather passed away in late May, and I wrote it in a bit of a fugue. It holds up reasonably well, I think? (I've heard a surprising amount of similar stories of writers with similar experiences, so it's a thing, I guess?)
Meant to get it posted a few days ago, but between the book 7 audiobook release and getting sick for the second time this month, it slipped down the list a bit, alas. I think I'll probably be feeling back to normal tomorrow (fever's down today), but for now, I'm gonna go back to playing videogames while listening to Folding Ideas videos on Youtube.


Like most of Galvachren’s publications, Galvachren’s Guide to Ithonian Society and Customs has no discernible supply chain. No printer, no publisher, no paper supplier, no enchanter altering the magic of his books. This Guide, like many others, simply started appearing in libraries, bookstores, and private collections one year. It’s a slender volume, and one with many perplexing conclusions, where he treats what is normal as though it were strange. Included here are a number of excerpted entries from his chapter on Ithonian funeral practices.

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Ras Andis:

Ras Andan funerals are swift affairs, occurring within a day or so of the deceased’s passing. This is a pragmatic and practical decision— the heat and humidity of Ras Andis decay bodies unpleasantly quickly without magical aid. The bodies are loaded onto the city’s funeral ship, which departs each day at sunset and buries them at sea at midnight. When there are storms or other threats, the Guardian of Ras Andis dispatches ice mages to slow the decay of the bodies until it is safe for the funeral ship to depart. The wealthy often hire their own, private funeral boats, carrying out farewell ceremonies on deck, but the rest of the city does so before the ship leaves. The family and friends of the dead often, though not always, keep silent vigil over the sea from the city for until midnight, while the funeral ship is in transit. 

Emblin: 

Funeral practices in Emblin are surprisingly diverse. Apart from the lack of and aversion to magic, there is significant heterogeneity in Emblin cultural practices. Emblinese funeral practices vary from sea burial to cremation to sky burial to even, most unusually, simple ground burial. Outside of a few isolated mountain villages in the Skyreach range, ground burials and graveyards are deeply unusual on the Ithonian continent otherwise. Other common funeral practices- ice burials, root burials, etc, common across Anastis, are simply not performed in Emblin, due to the lack of appropriate mages. Emblinese funerals tend to be elaborate affairs, with ceremonies and wakes stretching out over a week or more. While box-style coffins are common, some villages instead use hollowed out logs, sealed at either end after the body is inserted.

Clans of the North-Central Skyreach Range:

The mountain clans have funeral practices that are, at the same time, highly diverse and yet highly homogeneous. The actual means of body disposal vary wildly from clan to clan, usually dependent on the specialties of the clan in question. Clan Yehal wraps the dead within the roots of their tree homes, Clan Castis cremates their dead, Clan Ferel sinks their dead deep into the bedrock below their hold, Clan Sabsen practices sky burials on a nearby mountain peak. Despite that variability, the actual funeral customs remain remarkably similar. The ceremony itself is always held within two days, barring active threats to the community. While family and friends obviously attend, with at least one Clan Elder to run the ceremony, further members of the clan will show up to witness depending on the prestige and importance of the deceased. For especially respected deceased, members of neighboring clans will join to witness as well. These witnesses are always silent through the ceremony itself, which consists of a retelling of the life of the deceased. Once the ceremony is complete, the witnesses join the friends and family in a raucous party, where laughter is as common as tears. 

A note on raiding: The highly ritualized raids between clans very carefully avoid funerals. Raiders will plan their approaches to villages to avoid ceremonies and processions, and, if they stumble across a large enough ceremony, will join in as witnesses sometimes— often without even knowing precisely who is being buried. There are a few cases I know of involving raiders attacking funerals, which inevitably results in outright, vicious warfare against the raider’s clan— usually bringing in multiple allies against the offender. Clan raiders do their best to retrieve their dead for burial, and their target villages seldom interfere with the retrievals.

Sica: 

Unsurprisingly, the burial customs in the tree city of Sica revolve around trees. On death, the family immediately delivers the body to one of Sica’s composting facilities, where fermentation, rot, fungal, and dirt mages spend around a week speeding up the body’s decay, turning it into fertilizer. After that process is completed, the family returns, then takes the fertilizer to be given to one of Sica’s many baobabs. Most Sicans will give the fertilizer to the roots of the tree they live in, in what is referred to a s a life-giving ceremony. Live-giving ceremonies often involve gifting the first name of the deceased to a young relative— few are Sicans who don’t bear at least one or two memorial names after their own. Since most of Sica’s baobabs contain hundreds or thousands of residents, there are life-gift ceremonies around their roots more days than not.

Lothal: 

Lothalan funerals markedly resemble Ras Andan funerals, save for being less organized. Rather than a single funeral ship, there are many, hired by the residents. The city provides a ship for the city’s poor, but any who can afford otherwise hire a merchant, fishing boat, or dedicated funeral vessel (which are few, and generally too expensive for most) to perform the ceremony, with the family onboard. The presence of the family on board the ship is the largest difference from Ras Andan funeral customs, along with the custom of tying a chunk of columnar basalt to the body, to bear it more swiftly into the deep.

The North Coast: 

While there are no great cities along the northern coast of Ithos, there are a great many small to mid-size cities, bearing a vast range of burial customs. Most are fairly recognizable— like the common tide burial, where poorer coast cities leave bodies beneath the high tide line, to be taken out as the tide comes in— but there are three that are particularly noteworthy.

In many northern cities, the dead are frozen by ice mages as swiftly as possible. The family then takes a short time to organize a ceremony, whereupon the block of ice containing their loved ones is set adrift at sea, blown away from shore by wind or water mages. In the deepest parts of winter, where ice girds the shore, sometimes the frozen tomb must be stored in specially prepared warehouses until the ice clears. Even in the far north of Ithos, however, the ice seldom stays longer than a few weeks.

In cities closer to the peat bogs common up here, mummification is often practiced. The body is carefully prepared by embalmers— specially trained alchemists— then sunk into the depths of the bog, accompanied only by the closest family members, while friends and more distant family members wait for them back in the city for mourning.

In the minor lich city of Solemn Vitay, all burial is handled by the stone and dirt lich whose name graces the city. The handover of the body is an elaborate ceremony always graced by one of the lich’s avatars, and the corpse is taken into the carefully maintained catacombs in the depth of the lich’s demesne. When the demesne is attacked by rogue great powers, the populace of the small city retreats down into those catacombs, to be surrounded by the bones of their loved ones.

The Cult of Solintus:

There are three types of funerals atop Solintus. The first, and most noteworthy, is for the Honored Dead. The immense castle-bearing snail will extrude his shimmering nacre over the body of the honored dead, turning them forever into an iridescent statue to dwell in the halls of their family. At least, until that family is dishonored or cast down, whereupon the honored dead will be given the funeral rites of the Simple Dead. The second type of funeral is for the Simple Dead, those neither honored nor dishonored. These are placed into the growing nacre of Solintus, to be sealed into the shell of Solintus for decades, even centuries, until the great snail decides it is time to shed one of his castles. The final type of Solintan funeral is for the Dishonored Dead. They are simply cast from the back of Solintus with the rest of the trash.

Theras Tel:

Like in Sica, the dead of Theras Tel are composted— but rather than for trees, these are composted for the mushroom farms in the caverns beneath the city. To account for typical human squeamishness, the composted dead of Theras Tel aren’t fed to mushrooms meant for direct human consumption— they’re either composted fully into dirt first or fed to alchemical reagent mushrooms.

The Radhan:

Though their funeral rites themselves are quite secretive, the Radhan are known for sea burials, whether on sea ships or sand ships. Sand burials are exceptionally rare in the Endless Erg by non-Radhan, save after naval battles— given the harsh conditions of the sand sea, most desert cities, like Theras Tel, have some way to reuse their dead.

Alikea:

Alikea is noteworthy for having two entirely different traditions of funerary rituals. Outside the capital, cremation is the common practice, carried out swiftly after death. The ashes of the dead are mixed in with funerary paints, which are decoratively painted onto the mourning family each day until the paints are used up, whereupon the mourning period is ended. The dead of the Alikean capital, on the other hand, are carefully preserved behind wards that slow decay by keeping out humidity and heat. When sufficient dead have accumulated, and the mages monitoring the volcano rising up at the city’s heart signal that it is safe, a great procession carries the bodies up the slopes en-masse, to be deposited in one of the many volcanic vents on its slope. There, their bodies will be worn away not by rot, but by the caustic fumes of the volcano. Despite the many rumors otherwise, bodies are not thrown into the mouth of the volcano. Some scholars have suggested that cremation and volcanic gas burial derive from the same cultural origins, but there are far too many differences between the two traditions for that superficial similarity to matter.

A note on commonalities of practice:

Outside of the so-called “Invisible Cults”, and possibly the Radhan, there are no appeals to the supernatural at funeral ceremonies among the cultures of the Ithonian Continent. The power structures of Ithos— and, indeed, across most of Anastis— have entirely subverted religion into a tool of personal and state power. Funerals, as such, are extremely seldom religious rituals, outside a few notable exceptions like Solemn Vitay. Instead, they’re civic and cultural issues.

There are two most noteworthy features of Ithonian funerals is the speed at which they are carried out. There are seldom long viewing periods, and few cultures wait longer than a day or two before disposing of the body in one way or another. The exceptions are often stable, powerful nation states or mana deserts like Emblin. The second noteworthy feature is the scalability of the funerals— when needed, it is easy for cities to carry out huge numbers of these funerals at once.

The obvious and likely correct conclusion here is that the speed and mass scalability of funerals are a product of the great power attacks so common in lethal political environment of Anastis, along with its frequent natural disasters. The dead and wounded are common, and there is much rebuilding to do. All funerals are a product of their environment, shaped by necessity, history, and circumstance over grief.

The speed and scalability of Ithonian funerals are tragedies in and of themselves. Not just for the dreadful implications, but for the cultural richness that is lost thereby. In a kinder, gentler world, who knows what spectacular funeral practices might have risen from Anastan magic and Ithonian cultures? 

It is hardly the only thing of value lost to the violence of Anastis, but it is a loss I find particularly worth mourning.