Involuntarily, his fingers reached out to touch the characters that made up Clan Mudhorn. They slid downward, where Din Djarin was buried in the stone. And right below that, Grogu Djarin, the single other member of his clan, was marked among the rest of the warriors.

Din traced the name reverently, a knot in his throat and a pained crease in his brow. He remembered the stifled pride he held when it was first engraved, the melancholy that hovered close by when he realized that Grogu would never know it was there.

“What is your foundling’s name?” the Armorer had asked him, her tools hovering over the blank space beneath his name.

“But he’s...you said until he was reunited with his own kind,” Din had argued back halfheartedly. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure why he said that. Maybe, at the time, it still seemed like distancing himself would quell the everlasting pain.

“He is a member of your clan, is he not?” She had brushed her hand over the chiseled rock to cleanse the gathering dust from it. Then she stepped back to check her precise work from afar. “Clans are permanent. Even death cannot undo what the Creed has set in stone.”

Mando’ad Draar Digu by theunacknowledged (x)