"The Festival of Return"

Prompt: Rising from the Ashes

Amber watched as all Mossglen gathered for funeral rites.
The teenaged human astronaut was again disguised as an ape by her friends, Skyrunner the cheetah and Hazelnut the squirrel. The villagers were now used to her, told half-truths that she was a shipwreck survivor from overseas.
The deceased old boar was taken by bone-jeweled priests at sunset. Amber recognized them as carrion eaters, glad their feast was in seclusion from the village.
All night were shared memories, mourning and celebrating a good life.
Smoke rose the second day, signaling the priests’ feed was over. The villagers sang prayers, guiding the soul to rebirth or afterlife. Amber listened, fascinated, but too uncomfortable joining. The people took no offense, instead encouraging her to help create rainbows with lights and prisms, to protect the traveling soul from the Maw of Oblivion.
The bones were returned the third day, burned clean, wrapped in the boar’s carefully preserved pelt. These remains were placed in a well kept barrow on the town’s outskirts.
But the village was still bustling. When Amber asked, Skyrunner and Hazelnut explained about a holiday where the dead would return for three days.
Amber was roped into helping for the event, cleaning house, preparing food, and crafting grave goods. Then, everyone went into the barrow mound. Vast chambers and halls tunneled deep below ground, but the ceiling’s center was open to the sky. Each family had rooms with ancestors in alcoves, positioned as if they were sleeping.
Amber studied a winged lion, placed in honor as a village hero. Light caught her gaze as auroras blazed through the night sky.
But this planet had no magnetic field! How could that possibly–wait, did that lion just move?
The dead lion stretched his wings with a yawn, shaking as he stood up, his empty skin filling out and bones moving on their own, a faint rainbow glow surrounding him. The other dead woke as well, their families reuniting with joy.
Skyrunner and Hazelnut soon noticed Amber was missing. They found her curled in a fetal position under a blanket, badly shaken by the event.