The plants told him on the third morning after they had start preparing that Korr was acting weird.
It was a small and persistent feeling that carried there worry and concern for him. It was the western thorn vines who reported it first, that he was making a small disturbance at the back of the village, then the scream flowers picked it up and passed it along through the network, and by the time Chris was rubbing sleep out of his eyes and reaching for the water skin beside his bedroll, the whole Rootmind was humming with the same quiet note of wrongness and pestering him about it.
He didn't go directly to Korr first though, rather he went to look for Sera and found her under the cloud tree sharpening her sword with the kind of focused attention that meant she'd been at it for a while already and wasn't planning to stop any time soon. She glanced up when he sat down across from her, taking one look at his face and raised an eyebrow.
"You look like something crawled into your head and died."
"Thanks, its not like I've had trouble sleeping because i have to prepare fro a war or that i was roughly woken up from the first real sleep in a while." Chris took another long drink from the water skin. before looking at her "The Rootmind, or rather all the plants really are telling me something's off with Korr and his doing something they cant understand."
That had her frown and rest her blade next to her. "Off how?"
"I don't know. and that's part of the problem. The plants can feel it but they can't describe it and well I've noticed something going on with him i figured it was stress from whats coming."
"It's Korr though."
Chris blinked at that. "What?"
"He's been quieter than usual the last few days. I thought it was just him brooding about the scouts, but he's not the brooding type. He's the 'make a terrible joke and pretend everything's fine' type and believe me when I say the prospect of an army coming isnt enough to make him like this."
Chris stared at her for a moment, then stood up. "I'll go check on him."
Sera only rolled her eyes before looking at him as if she was staring at an idiot. "Take breakfast with you since you will need your strength to deal with him going through manopause."
"I don't think that's a real thing."
"Well its something I've seen you go through, mood swings and all so just go ease him through his." She told him with the ghosts of a smile as she shooed him away before returning to sharpening her blade.
Chris followed the feeling the rootmind gave him, guiding him as much as anything else to where it felt Korr was, and when he arrived he was greeted to the sight of Korr seemingly digging.
His armor and shirt lay neatly over to the side, something Chris had rarely seen him without and seemed to be working in the grey earth with a short-handled shovel, his grey skin slick with sweat and his shoulders moving in a slow, deliberate rhythm as he dug. The hole he'd been working on was already deep—deep enough that Chris could see the demon's full arms disappearing into it with each shovelful of dirt—and seemed to be long and narrow.
He realized what it was meant to be when he saw the rough headstone next to it, having been driven into the ground with clear care. Just a flat piece of local stone, unpolished and uneven, with something scratched into its surface that Chris couldn't read from this distance but figured was a name, or a date.
He didn't disturb Korr at first, instead he just stood there watching him dig. The demon didn't acknowledge him. Didn't even look up after noticing him, he didn't even pause, simply continued to dig with a slow and steady rhythm, like he'd been doing it for hours and intended to keep doing it for hours more.
Finally stopping he looked at Chris with a flat, unamused look. "You going to ask or are you just going to sit there staring?"
Chris just shook his head and let out a small sigh. "I figured you'd tell me when you were ready or at least explain to me why your randomly digging what seems like a grave when you where done."
Korr was quiet for a while. He didn't seem to move but his grip did tighten around the shovel before planting it into the loose dirt at the edge of the grave before seemingly trying to debate with himself before seemingly coming to a decision.
"My son," Korr finally said. The words coming out flat yet holding an underlining note of extreme emotion to them. "This is for him."
Chris didn't say anything, he didn't press, he'd known Korr long enough at this point to know he was about to tell him something rather personal.
"He died a long time ago. Long before I came to this stretch of rock and grey dirt that your steadily changing. when i lost him he was younger than you, but he was also stupidly brave, the way young men often are because they dont know what danger is." The demon's jaw tightened. "He died in a place that didn't leave anything behind for me to bury. No body, no bones. Not even a scrap of the clothes he wore to put into the ground, I couldn't even be told where he died to mark it so i could mourn over, nothing."
The breeze stirred the loose dirt at the edge of the grave and both of them could have sworn they could hear a child laugh come form deep in the village, it sent a chill down Chris's spine but he did what he could to ignore it.
"Because of that I started doing this." Korr gestured at the open grave, his eyes locked onto the village, slightly narrowed before shaking his head. "Every place I've started to settle into, every settlement and every camp no matter how short the time. Even every miserable posting the army stuck me in before I told them where they could shove their commission which led to my final mission i would dig a grave. My way of leaving a marker for my son, my way of remembering him." His voice roughened. "It's not rational, I know that. There's nothing in the ground, and the stone doesn't mean anything, the hole wont bring him back and it serves no purpose but I do it anyway because—"
He stopped himself, taking a shaky breath.
"Because you need him to know where you are," Chris said quietly for him.
Korr looked at him and for a moment something passed across the demon's face—not grief exactly, but something close to it. Something raw that he usually kept buried so deep that Chris wasn't sure even Korr knew it was there.
"I like to think he watches over me and the places i make his resting place," Korr said. "Wherever I dig the grave, wherever I put the grave stone, I like to believe that if he is still out there—any part at all, that by doing this he knows where I am. That he can find me. That the grave gives him a place to find me." He paused. "It's stupid." He whispered.
"No, it really isn't."
"No, it is. I know what happens to the dead. I've killed enough of them to be certain. There's nothing left after. Just meat and memory and the meat doesn't care where you put it most of the time." Korr's voice was hard, like he was trying to argue himself out of something he couldn't stop feeling. "But I still do it anyway. Every time because the alternative is to never do it, and that would be like he was never here at all. No means of remembrance..."
Chris looked at the grave. At the rough headstone with its scratched inscription then to the careful, deliberate depth of the hole in the ground.
"What does the stone say?" He asked gently. Korr looked at him then to the headstone, he didn't touch it, rather he stood in front of it with his arms at his sides and his back to Chris.
"It's his name along with the day he was born and... And the day he died." The demon's voice was barely above a murmur when it broke. "And the words: may you find the peace i never could."
Chris felt something tighten in his chest when he heard that. Finding his gaze drifting to the village around them—the cloud tree in the center of the village, its mist curling over the walls, the thorn vines and the spike bushes and the various other thorn bushes and plants he had between the outer and inner walls.
"He'd have like it here," Korr finally said. The words coming out as barely a whisper. "That's why I kept digging the grave deeper this time. Every time I think it's done, I look at this place and I think how he deserves more than a shallow hole in the ground, something more than i have given him before now."
Chris said nothing as he knew there was nothing he could say, instead he stood up and left, returning a few moments later with a shovel of his own.
Korr looked at him and to the shovel clearly confused. "What are you doing?"
"Helping." Chris plainly before he drove the shovel into the loose dirt at the edge of the grave. "You've been at this for who knows how long and your shoulders are shot, i could see it by how you seemed to struggle a bit, you either strained or tore some muscles on your left side."
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't need help." Chris cut him off. "I'm doing it anyway tough. Now i know how stubborn you are so you can either stand there and watch or you can pick up the other shovel, but either way this special spot will be made into exactly what you need it to be and then we're both going to keep preparing."
Korr stared at him for a long moment before letting out a breath that might have been a laugh before picking his own shovel back up.
They dug in silence after that. The rhythm was different from working with the plants, it was just two men moving dirt out of a hole in the ground because it meant something special to one of them and Chris found it oddly soothing, he didnt need to think or focus, for a brief time he didn't need to care about armies or demons or the thing in the dungeon or even the voice that kept whispering in the back of his head. He just dug.
When they where done Korr inspected it with a critical eye, running his fingers along the edges, checking the depth at each corner, adjusting a few spots where the dirt had crumbled. Fastidious and precise. Like the grave needed to meet some standard that only existed in his head.
"This is good," he said finally. "This is the deepest one yet and the smoothest."
He said it with the quiet satisfaction of a craftsman finishing a piece of work and Chris realized that in some strange way that's exactly what it was. Not a burial. Not a memorial. A piece of work that Korr had been building, one hole at a time, in every place he'd ever stopped long enough to pick up a shovel or felt deserved this kind of tribute.
Korr climbed out of the grave and stood beside Chris, both of them looking down into it. The morning light didn't reach the bottom—just shadows and packed earth.
"You should know," Korr said, still looking down into the grave, "that I don't do this for sympathy, understanding or whatever it is you humans do when you want someone to feel better about things that can't be fixed."
"I know." Chris said softly with a nod.
"Good, because I'm not telling you this because I want you to look at me differently. I'm telling you because if we're about to fight a war together—and we are—then you should know a bit more about the person fighting next to and for you, along with what they carry on there shoulders, the girl to, she has her own shadows she needs to face so be there for here should that day come."
Chris looked at the demon beside him and simply nodded. they had spent a lot of time together, same with Sera, he got to know both of them and yet only now, under the pressure of what was coming did the walls they always seemed to have around them begin to slowly start coming down.
"I know who I'm fighting next to," Chris said plainly. "It's the same person I've been fighting next to since they got here."
Korr raised an eyebrow. "An insufferable demon who you should know by now knows whats best thanks to his combat experience?"
"That, and a demon who just wants to rest as much as the women with a sword does yet I selfishly keep pushing them to help me as they are the experts."
The ghost of a smile crossed Korr's face but was gone before it fully formed, swallowed by the usual mask of grim indifference, but Chris saw it and filed it away in the growing catalogue of things that proved Korr wasn't as hard as he wanted everyone to believe.
They stood there for a moment longer, two men who'd both lost everything standing at the edge of a hole in the ground that meant more than it should to one of them. Then Korr picked up his shirt and pulled it back on along with his armor before they made there way back toward the village proper.
Chris didn't know if what Korr seemed to believe was true or if Korr's son was somehow out there watching over them due to a hole in the ground. He honestly didn't know if the dead even cared about graves or markers or the words scratched into rough stone.
But he knew that Korr believed it. And right now, that was enough because it helped his friend feel better, and at the end of the day that was all that truly mattered to him.