Fire was burning.
Bernard's corpse had already been burned to charcoal, but Kallen continued casting Light Incineration on him.
Back when he worked at the Funeral Society, whenever a corpse needed cremating, he always worried that the Crematorium Society would skimp on fuel and fail to burn it thoroughly, leaving him to take a little hammer to it afterward.
The effort was nothing to him. What worried him was that the clients might not receive all the ashes, since some of the larger remaining bones were difficult to fit into an urn.
Whatever the case, Bernard had once been a friend of Puer, Jennifer, and Phileas;
out of professional dedication, Kallen would not let Bernard be left with that regret.
Finally, after the burning had left a large depression in the pit floor, Kallen bent down and blew on Bernard's now-fluffy corpse.
Bernard had been roasted brittle and reduced to ash,
and with that single breath,
the framework that had still maintained a human shape became a pile of crystalline bone dust.
Kallen picked up the broom in the cave. Its head had long since rotted away, leaving only a stone handle. He carefully sifted through the ashes with it, confirming that no impurities remained and that no gallstones had survived the burning;
then Kallen took a large stone basin and put all of Bernard's ashes into it, truly leaving not a speck of dust in the cave.
Once that was done, Kallen carried the stone basin to the shore. As he walked along the water, he used a spoon he had found in the cave to scatter the ashes into the sea, one spoonful at a time.
He walked and scattered them all along the way.
After scattering them all, Kallen lowered the stone basin into the seawater and