Keeper-
Grandmother warned her about gods and ghosts.
Told her tales, some of which might have only been just that - tales to frighten and educate, but Keeper suspects that some were also experiences altered to seem less fantastical and more believable. She knows they can walk in the guise of other animals, horses like herself (and she’d say this one before her but there’s something not quite tangible about her, more like intangible - like starlight and death), and be something as ridiculous as a berry on a bush that can all of a sudden talk and send you on a quest!
Then, right before Keeper’s astonished eyes, the girl seems to become watery and willowy and wispy. All those beautiful “w” things to describe what is happening right in front of her face. She loses flesh and bone and just becomes air and mist that seems to float but then she is substantiated again by those very things she’d momentarily shed - bone, blood, flesh, and Keeper is stunned. Not horrified - just shocked to have been privy to something as magical as that! Her jaw has dropped open in mute shock and it takes her more than moment to recover from what she’s just born witness to. Her brain almost cannot handle it, tries to find reasons to reject what Keeper’s own black eyes have just seen but her heart tells her brain to shut up and just accept it. In some instances, the heart is just wiser than that mass of gray matter taking up space inside their skulls.
The grin is met with a tentative smile; Keeper is not easily thrown off from the scent of something she thinks she might like. She tracks it, hunts it down, and sticks close to this new and exciting creature that she has never before had the pleasure of meeting until now. “I can only imagine how you would like being imaginary if you can do that all of the time!” she blurts out, not one to hold back her thoughts behind a cautious trap of teeth. It doesn’t occur to her that it might be a bit of a lonely and troubling existence, to go from dead to living and back again. She just doesn’t think of things like that, but instead of how it must be to pass through life and death without a single care.
Keeper has a hundred questions.
Maybe a thousand.
Made worse and multiplied by Salt’s statements of boredom and trying to be better at living. It is this, the latter that intrigues Keeper the most. There is no way to be better at living, unless the ghost-girl means just being fleshy and drawing breath. But why would you want to when you can haunt all corners of the earth as air and mist and something that starlight shines right through?! Again, comes the bluntness that Keeper never notices as it tumbles out of her mouth in questions meant to be curious that are sometimes far too probing: “How are you supposed to get better at living?”
Salt asks her why she has come.
Why has she come?
“I was bored too. Probably a bit lonely because I get lonely at times and crave companionship. I was always around family and now…” she trails off, actually looks away for a bit before her eyes come back to Salt. Keeper offers no further explanation - she was raised by a morose father, a half-brother who doted on her, and a half-sister who sometimes bullied her but loved her all the same, and a grandmother she saw as a mythic figure who told her stories and told her it was okay that she was different, because she was in the most original way (she still doesn’t know about the bear that lurks in her, that’s new and still being discovered though sometimes, she feels something clawing at her insides that wants out and it creates a burning itch beneath her fur).
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
ooc: sorry Cassi, you just got word vomit. Keeper is in a rambling mood today. <3