Drowned Funeral

Eldīha, a scholar and devoted of Nui recorded her understanding of Ralisu funeral customs during her time in the city-state of It'ūa as an emissary of the Celestials.

The Ralisu have the strangest funeral customs. They wrap their dead up in seaweed—long, slimy, greenish yellow leaves that grow underwater—and leave them in a seaside barrow with one entrance back to land, and another leading into the ocean. Then, they'll leave their dead there for the tides to come ebbing in, to drown the corridors in saltwater until the corpses are washed away. They claim the tide is a servant of their goddess dreaming far beneath the waves, and by surrendering to it—to that surging water, moved by some forgotten will or limb of this goddess—the dead and their deity will be reunited and made whole once more.

I pray I shall not die in these lands, where my celestial masters' reach is so weak as to allow such a barbaric custom to linger still. The thought of being left in such a dark, damp cave filled with slime and rotten fish and gods know what else without the fires of our makers until reaped by the malignant ocean waves, it does not sit well with me.

But to die and left beyond the reach of Moon-Mother's light is not the worst of it. Those who are left behind after the tide subsides once more—whether they remain lying on that altar on which they were placed, of left lying in a lost corner within the slithering caverns of the caves which connect to the barrow—those are lost indeed. To be left behind is to be abandoned, and that means that a crime against their very goddess has been committed.

Now begins a hunt for the crime committed, and in the worst case the entire family of the deceased becomes accused themselves. Once that happens, the judgement is not left to the mortal court, but that of the dreaming goddess. The accused are left to be taken by the tide. If they drown, they were innocent and accepted back into goddess' grace. If they still breathe, they must be guilty and abandoned by their sea deity, and thus must face the court and its judges—immediately after they have been interrogated for a confession, of course.