It gets you in the first two episodes, when a girl with a shovel learns her entire village has been dead the whole time and the man who shot them, Hampnie Hambart, the so-called Man-Eating Toy, is her father. Ai Astin digging those graves one by one is the thesis: this is a show about the labor of letting people go in a world where God locked the gate and nobody new gets born. The Ortus arc, a city where the dead just keep living as if nothing happened, and Alice Color's part in it, is the kind of quiet gut-punch most 12-episode fantasies never earn. Visually it's shameless about beauty, soft light and painterly backgrounds against a dying world, and the score carries scenes the script sprints through. Because it does sprint. Light novel compression leaves threads dangling and holes you can drive a hearse through. Watch it anyway, for Ai deciding that a gravekeeper's job is mercy, not disposal.

Fifteen years ago, God abandoned the world and sealed Heaven's gate. Now the dead cannot rest and the living can no longer have children, so the world is slowly grinding to a stop. Ai is twelve years old and one of the last children alive. She becomes her village's newest Gravekeeper, one of the mysterious beings who lay the dead to rest through a proper burial. Everything changes when a gun-carrying stranger in black arrives and exposes the dark secret hidden beneath her quiet village. With her place as Gravekeeper suddenly in doubt, Ai sets out on the road to put the living dead to rest, learning more about the world God left behind. The result is a supernatural fantasy with strong threads of mystery and psychological drama.