Perrin Ashgrave's Kite

Perrin Ashgrave's Kite

The story, as it's told in what few fragments survive, begins with a gnome named Perrin Ashgrave, three generations back from the Lostkeeper I've written about elsewhere, which I promise is a coincidence I only noticed after the fact.
  Perrin's husband was lost in a deep-works collapse, one of the old mining accidents Clockworks doesn't advertise in its official histories. No body was recovered. No grave could be dug, and in a culture that takes burial seriously, that absence sat like an open wound nobody knew how to close.
  Perrin built a kite from tin frame and parchment, the story goes, and carried it up to the smokestack district alone, at night, and let it go into the thermal draft rising off the works where her husband had died. She told anyone who asked that she wasn't flying a toy. She was giving him somewhere to go, since the ground hadn't been able to take him.

Why It Became Tradition

Others had lost people the same way, in the same works, with the same absence of anywhere to grieve properly. Perrin's kite gave them a shape for it. Within a decade, "cutting a Windskiff's line" had become the accepted farewell for anyone gone with no body to bury, not just miners, and not just in the district where Perrin first did it.
  I can't verify most of this against contemporary record. Perrin Ashgrave may be entirely legendary, invented later to explain a custom that arose more gradually and less romantically. I've made my peace with not knowing for certain, which isn't something I say often about my own research.
  What I can verify is this: I've watched perhaps thirty of these farewells now, across every district I've ever worked. Not one person cutting that line has ever looked like they were performing a myth. They look like people finally allowed somewhere to put something that had nowhere else to go.
  Whether Perrin was real or not, she got that part exactly right.
  I've never been able to decide whether that makes the historian in me uncomfortable or grateful. A myth that may be entirely invented is still doing real work in the world, thirty grieving families deep and counting. I've stopped needing it to be factual before I let it matter.