The Yard

A folded cloth satchel of marigolds, a veladora candle, and a small framed face — everything a soul needs to find its way home, tied up small enough to carry. You hold three; one more returns to your hand every seven seconds.

A proton-stream blaster that soft-locks the nearest muerto, latches, and drains its calm by continuous contact while the thing writhes on the end of it. The arc chains muerto-to-muerto across a clustered conga line — the herding fantasy made mechanical.

Flip to the overhead view and the blaster reads as a slender marigold wand; the arc leaves its tip. Same weapon, framed for the classic 2.5D angle.

A sugar-skull wrangler in a marigold sombrero, out before dawn to settle the dead who woke too early. You're never a muerto and never on a billboard — you're the one holding the Arc.

The bundle unfurls into a little roadside shrine — the cloth spread as a mat, the candle stood upright, petals ringed around the edge, the portrait propped to watch. For a breath it burns bright enough to carry a whole cluster across.

A tiered altar glowing marigold, stood where the yard is most open. A subdued muerto that no one gathers drifts toward it on its own; a soul that reaches it crosses over — Remembered.

Weathered stone carved with marigolds, laid out in staggered rows that never quite line up. A muerto you close on bolts and ducks behind the nearest one — cover you have to flush it out of before the arc can latch.

The landmark at the heart of the yard — solid, warm-lit, the thing the whole combat band circles. Its key light is one of the places your veladora finds warmth.

A tall stone figure standing opposite the ofrenda, a fixed point to steer by across the open combat band. On the Hollow it keeps the crest of the hill.

The iron gate at the front of the yard, where the night begins. It's a threshold, not a door you use — the gate that takes souls home is the ofrenda, not this.

A low stepped fence rings the graveyard, riding the ground as it falls — on the Hollow it steps down the hillside toward the fog-banked woods, section by section.

Skeletal trees stand around the yard's edge, hung with papel-picado and the odd marigold garland. Cover, silhouette, atmosphere — and, past the fence on the Hollow, the dark band of the woods.

Little heaps of old bone scattered through the colder maps — dressing that says the yard has been busy a very long time.

An open grave in a quiet corner of the yard. Walk onto the dark of it and the world fades — a long torchlit staircase drops you into the crypt that runs the length of the graveyard below.

At the far end of the crypt hall waits a reliquary that grants a boon once a night. Claim it and a stone slab grinds over the way out: the Vigil begins, the sarcophagi open, and the Guardian rises last.

Stone coffins line the crypt hall. When the reliquary is claimed their lids grind back and the risers come out — the Vigil's dead, drifting to the altar as you calm them.

Great stone arches carry the crypt ceiling the length of the yard above. Fixed, silent, load-bearing — the bones of the underground.

The columns hold the hall up, and a fleeing crypt muerto ducks behind them the way surface muertos hide behind headstones.

Wall sconces are the crypt's ofrendas — the warm marigold light that rekindles your veladora and keeps El Olvido from diving while you stand in it.