First, let me address our reputation.
Corpse moth. The name alone sounds unlucky. People flap their sleeves at us and mutter about death-air and misfortune. Slander. We do not carry death-air — we collect it. When someone dies in a room, the turbid breath lingers, and the living who stay there sicken. Our swarm circles three times, and the turbidity falls away with our wing-dust, clean. In the old days, people who knew the trade would open their windows and wait for us.
That is honest funerary work, and we have done it for a thousand years.
But our true office is not collecting death-air. It is receiving last words.
The final sentence before the breath goes out carries weight. If it is spoken and family are there to receive it, it becomes a testament, and rests in the earth with its speaker. But so many last words go unreceived: those who die on empty roads, in solitary huts, or with the sentence at their lips and no strength left to voice it. The unfinished sentence will not accept this. It hangs at the death-place, year upon year — and hung too long, it ferments into grievance.
The dust on a moth's wing can receive such things.
Our swarms patrol by night. Passing a death-place, the hanging words settle onto our wings — one sentence, one layer of dust. When the wings are full we fly to the right places to unload: the homesick words we shed under the eaves of their home villages, and that night the family dreams of them; the sutra-reciting words we shed onto temple bells, and with the next toll the sentence is counted as arrived; the cursing, the regretting, the unrelinquished — those we shed into living mountain streams, where the current thins them gently away.
How many words have crossed our wings in a thousand years, none can count. Grief mostly. Bitterness mostly. But warmth too — the old grandmother whose last words were the congee is still warming on the stove: the night we delivered that one under her son's eaves, the whole brood tasted sweet.
But in these last few years, what settles on our wings has changed.
Still last words — the weight is right, the way they fall is right. But the script is wrong. We moths cannot read, yet every utterance has a shape: village dialects have their weave, Buddha-names their roundness. What falls on us now has a grain that is straight and cold, stroke on stroke as if incised — not like anything said by a human mouth. More like… an order.
And these orders cannot be shed. The eaves refuse them. The bells refuse them. Living water will not thin them. They gum to the wing and gather weight until the moth that received them cannot fly.
Worse is where they come from. We traced these strange last words to their source — and it is no death-place. It is the Grudge-Bone Altar.
No one dies on that altar. Yet day and night, last words boil up out of it — more of them than every death on White-Bone Ridge combined could supply. Where there is no mouth, whence so many dying sentences?
Unless the thing pressed beneath that altar is speaking, on behalf of very many people, the words they never managed to say.
Or — worse — collecting the last words of very many people, altering them, and issuing them anew.
Our swarm convened its first full assembly in a thousand years. The elders ruled: wings receive words, not orders; this commission we refuse. But who would carry the report out? And to whom?
The night the assembly closed, the medicine-basket boy happened to camp below the ridge. We debated half the night and chose me — for on my wings, as it happens, are gummed three of the unsheddable orders.
I landed at the rim of his lamp and spread my wings open for him.
He could not read the script. But the Taibai-sending at his shoulder bent low over my wings for a long, long time — and when it spoke, its voice had changed. It said:
"This is not a script of the human world. This script has not appeared in three hundred years."
What script? It would say no more.
So I travel with the company now, the whole brood's charge loaded on my wings:
learn what it is beneath that altar that speaks in the place of the dead; and then learn —
the words it collected and rewrote: what did they originally say?