I am a fire and I must burn today; gail

[Ramiel]

ghost king of the dale >>

It’s enough to wake him, her call.

It’s enough to shatter the silence he had ensconced himself in, to tear away the cloak of grief he had wrapped so tightly around himself.  He’d know that voice anywhere.  Even here amongst the dead (especially here, he thinks) it has the power to resurrect, to pull, to guide.  She is his black light at the end of the world.  He’d fought monsters in the name of the greatest monster of all.  He’d watched his sister disappear into the ether (he’d thought she was dead, and for a long time after wondered if that would have been a kinder fate).  He’d sacrificed his last vestiges of childhood to bring back together a dark god and his lady.  At first, it had all been for nothing.  He was simply another colt on a quest to cure his own boredom.  He hadn’t realized how high the stakes were, couldn’t have known that the two syllables he uttered on a whim - okay - would change his life forever.  But the effects had been immediate.  As soon as he stepped into the blackness of space, Ramiel knew in his bones that it meant so much more.  Carnage’s cross became his to bear; he took up arms and bled and pleaded and survived for her.

He will always answer her call.

But this time, he is slow to do so.  This time, his eyelids are like sails on tired masts, soaked by a thousand storms at sea – they rise, but slowly.  When he turns to her, he sees that she is smiling.  Here, in the soft glow bouncing off the waves, it seems all right for her to do so.  Despite the death all around them, her smile feels life-affirming.  He struggles to return it, but it is just as weak and watery as his golden gaze.  He’s still sleepy, too, but this is much easier to shake off.  Unlike his grief.  Unlike the knowledge that Tiberios will never again walk the rugged hillsides of home.  That, like Gail, he is condemned to a wisp of an existence on alien shores.

His face is like a wound that he cannot and will not hide from the black woman.  He’s shown her wounds before, and for a moment, he’s taken aback by this realization.  Maybe he’d been a hero, then.  His puckered, red-raw skin had been a badge of honor, had helped Gail understand what they had all survived in order to rescue her.  But now he thinks that his bravery had run parallel to his youthful naivety; he thinks both had died in the sand alongside his brother.

“Gail,” he says quietly, reverently into the salt air.  Upon first glance, Ramiel cannot find any of the woman’s pain in her eyes.  He continues to look anyway, searches for anything to distract him from his own.  How has she fared since Graveling returned to Beqanna?  He wants to ask, but the question stalls in his throat.  Why ask, when he knows the answer?  It’s far better to give her something instead - some seed of the life that blossoms beyond the grave.  “Graveling.  She’s well.  She’s coming into her own every day, I think.”  His voice is not as clear as it usually is – not as clear as she will have remembered it to be.  He wonders if it is temporary (grief-driven like a barb on his tongue) or if it is the accumulation of his years on the throne.  The stallion blinks at the thought, shakes his head. “I wish I could show you, somehow.” His eyes find the water again.  The churning waves sound like the langoliers, but he doesn’t remember them for once.  Quietly, more to himself than anything, he mutters, “there’s a lot I wish I could do.”  

ramiel