"Are you sure we're doing the right thing?" asked a voice in the darkness, just loud enough to be heard over the scraping and panting that had been disturbing the nightly silence for a while now.
"Yes, we are. You know that it needs to be done," replied a second voice, slightly out of breath and slightly annoyed.
"I know, but…" The first voice stuttered into silence. The scraping stopped.
"What is it, then?" demanded the second voice, followed by the kind of hesitant silence that always happens when someone is too embarrassed to answer a question, but knows that he has to.
"It's against their law, Ty," whispered the first voice.
"Their law, that's it," replied the second voice, belonging to the man named Ty. "Why should we care about their law, Wyn?"
"We should care, because we're on their territory," Wyn replied. "We'll be in trouble if they catch us."
Ty sighed. "Then why don't you stop arguing and start digging again? The sooner we're out of here, the better."
The conversation was replaced once more by scraping, panting and the noise of earth and stones being heaped together against their will, but there still was a distinct feel of doubt in the air. After a few minutes, Ty had enough of that.
"What is it, Wyn?"
"What? I didn't say anything!"
"Yes, I know, you didn't say anything very loudly. What is it?"
Wyn hesitated once more. "You know when Allyssa left all these years ago to live here?"
"Of course; if she hadn't, we wouldn't be here now, right?" said Ty slowly.
"What if she doesn't want to come back?" The word fell out of Wyn's mouth before he could stop them.
"She is our sister, Wyn." Ty's voice was calm, like the air before a thunderstorm. "She does not belong here. She belongs to us. Her funeral should take place in our world."
"She already had a funeral, Ty," Wyn whispered.
"Allyssa's body is lying in a wooden box, buried in dirt. You can't call that a grave; and I bet my life she didn't get a real funeral."
"Not real to our standards, no," admitted Wyn. "But real for the world she chose to live in. For the world she chose to die in!"
"I don't care what she chose to do!" Ty was shouting now. "She was crazy out of her mind, I don't care what she thought. She belongs to our world, and I will not let her body and soul rot in this place."
Wyn had always been scared of the temperament his older brother had inherited from their mother, but now he couldn't let go. They argued back and forth, forgetting where they were and why. Wyn loved his sister and the thought of her soul being stuck in this world, in her decaying body, scared him out of his wit, but so did the thought of living here, and Allyssa had apparently enjoyed that. Ty, on the other hand, didn't really care about his sister; what he cared for was the tradition of his people. He couldn't force Allyssa to stay where she belong while she was alive, but she was dead and helpless now, and he intended to take advantage of this.
Quietly and curious about the fuss, the sun crept up the sky behind them, bathing the scene in twilight.
Ty stared at his brother's face, grey and without colour, but determined to get a point across.
"Wait, why can I see you?" he asked, rather bewildered.
Wyn turned, and was surprised to be facing the morning sun. "I guess it's the start of a new day. We should get out of here."
"Not without Allyssa," hissed Ty and dug into the earth beneath his feet furiously. He was surrounded by earthen walls a bit higher than his knees. He hoped that it wasn't far now.
A loud crack announced that his hope had come true.
"Wyn, help me!" he ordered and Wyn obeyed out of habit.
Together they removed the last earth from the coffin to reveal a wooden lid. A unicorn was carved into it, probably where the chest of the dead person inside was meant to be.
The brothers climbed out of the grave just when the guard of the cemetery came around the corner on his first round of the day. He liked starting early, because he enjoyed the silence before the mourners arrived to argue whose grave was the most well-kept. Now he stopped and stared.
Ty, oblivious to this new witness of his misdoing, let himself fall to his knees and stuck his shovel in the crack between lid and body of the coffin. With some effort he opened the wooden box and stared at the peaceful face of his dead sister.
"All right, let's go," he said, lowering himself down towards the corpse.
"Are you really sure about this?" Wyn asked for the last time.
Before Ty could shout at him again, the guard unfroze and came running down the path in a hurry.
"Hey, what are you doing?" he called. "Stop that!"
Wyn turned in surprise, but his brother's hand caught him at the ankle and dragged him into the grave. He yelped.
The guard, whose name was Will, arrived just in time to see two men and a female corpse vanish, leaving behind nothing but earth, an empty coffin and a lot of chilly morning air. He sat down then, closed his eyes, and considered other job opportunities.

In another world, with a rather loud plopping noise, Ty, Wyn and Allyssa's body appeared in a room full of people. The people were all a lot cleaner and better dressed than the brothers, and definitely less dead and decaying than Allyssa.
Seen from the perspective of a maggot that had chosen Allyssa as temporary home and was a bit disturbed now by the feeling of leaving it's reality entirely, the room was huge, round, and the kind of white you get in a room that is made of thick glass or maybe diamond walls. The maggot didn't know this, of course, so it just thought "white" and "big". Then it crept slowly back into Allyssa's head to hide.
"There you are," said a woman who looked like the mother of the three new arrivals. "Just on time." Disapprovement was audible in her voice and visible on her face in general.
"You know it was impossible for us to leave earlier," Ty defended himself and also his brother; he couldn't help that. "They say that ghosts roam human cemeteries for an hour, starting midnight, and we can't have all these witnesses. Poor lost souls, it probably would have been the best entertainment they've had in years."
"You have done well, son," said the elderly man that was the father of the three. "You saved your sister's soul from turning into a ghost. Now she can rest in peace in her own world."
He clapped Ty on the shoulder once and then took Allyssa from him to lay her down on a crystal pedestal in the middle of the room. The people standing close to it stared at her in disgust. Her once perfect body had an unhealthy grey colour with some purple bruises. It also had been transformed from the slim, elfin form that was characteristic to her people, to something more... human. Human, in this case, means imperfect. Thick thighs with cellulitis and a slightly bulgy stomach, for example. And round ears, that was worst of all.
"She doesn't look like she belongs here anymore," said Wyn quietly. Ty hit him hard on the back.
"It doesn't matter what she looks like, she's one of us," said his mother sternly. The others didn't seem to be convinced, but quickly hid their looks of doubt before her eyes.

When the maggot dared to look out of Allyssa's ear again, it saw people standing around the body, probably in a circle (it couldn't see the other side of the pedestal), with arms outstretched over the body, murmuring quietly. The last thing it noticed was a lucent wall rising up around its home. It didn't have time to flee.

Wyn was the last one to leave the grave chamber. He couldn't stop staring at his sister, forever captured in the clear stone that didn't let things live, except for the soul of the dead elf within. He hoped that the human stories were true, that her soul had already left her body the moment she died. He knew that she never wanted to end like this, like the rest of them.
"I'm sorry, Ally," he whispered.