Crossing the threshold of death is easy, he finds.
Before, time and gravity had pulled at his bones, compelling him along routes forcefully. He’d had no say in where he would end up. Once the edges of his hooves touched the wormholes, they propelled his body onwards to whatever fate (or their dark god) had in store. But even as he feels the hot remnants of his grandfather’s fire behind him – even as he fills the burned-out gap the man had created – he knows all has changed.
He melts his way back home.
Or at least he thinks he has. He thinks the flames had reached him at first as he watches his skin grey then go translucent. He ponders the irony for a moment – to get so far only to be accidentally crisped by his own dead grandfather – before he begins to understand. The cliff rock closes behind him, and for a moment, he is trapped within a tight, granite coffin. The striations on the walls will be the last thing he sees. But just as the panic sets in, the walls all around him become as transparent as his skin. Ramiel tests the boundaries of his quickly changing surroundings, gingerly nosing the walls and finding them surprisingly fluid. As fluid as he is, himself.
He is becoming a ghost, yes, but he isn’t trapped with the rest of them.
With a deep breath, the boy steps through the veil.
It tingles his skin to pass through the cliffs, but he emerges otherwise unscathed. He looks back one more time. The cliffs rise dizzyingly high but they are back to solid stone. Ramiel’s gold-flecked gaze travels down them and then to where his feet are half buried in the course sand. He’s shocked to find that he still looks like a ghost; he can see the individual grains of sand through his legs and feet. He thinks about trying to pass back into the Other Beach, to ask Erros and Adolpha if something was now wrong with him, if he belongs to the afterlife now, but he decides against it. Gail, he suddenly remembers, maybe she passed through somewhere else.
Ramiel makes his way to the meadow, thinking it might be the first place she would visit upon re-entry. He flickers between different degrees of solidity as his concentration grows and wanes. It’s a strange sensation, this constant change. In his haste, the young stallion finds himself tripping over rocks and branches when he is solid. But when he is far less so, when he can see through his own skin, his feet seem to pass through the various obstacles.
By the time he reaches the meadow, the sun is falling fast in the sky. He pushes through the trees ringing the open expanse but doesn’t completely emerge from their depths. Instead, he lingers in the darkness, a pale imitation of his solid self; a ghost in search of a life. He doesn’t know that he will never truly complete the mission that he had been sent on, doesn’t know that the life he still looks for doesn’t exist in this plane anymore. He only knows that he made her a promise, and he means to keep it.
r a m i e l
what a day to begin again