"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
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.
She can’t quite smell ghosts (that would be a bit much for a simple medium), but she can almost hear it, scratching at the edge of her consciousness like an itch you can't quite reach, or like the radio in your car when it's turned almost (but not quite) all the way down.
And so she heads off, leaving the jungle's warm embrace behind as she heads, rather more than less blindly, in the direction where she thinks this strange static might be coming from. She chatters to Rain as she goes, but Rain is no help to her here. Rain hadn't known anyone who knew Ramiel; there's no way for her dead sister to share any information about the boy.
Once Wrynn reaches the meadow, it is almost sunset. She pauses on the edges of it, glancing around, feeling sure that the source of the static is here – and then she spots him.
It's truly easy, considering the way he looks. She recognizes him now (well, sort of), one of the others from the quest, and she immediately narrows her eyes. He sure doesn’t seem dead, and the dead aren't allowed to be up here, so that means he can't be dead. But he's also decidedly not exactly living. Otherwise she wouldn't feel itchy-scratchy like she does. Whatever he is or isn't, she knows already that she needs to approach him. He seems to be a little bit disconcerted with whatever is going on, and if she can help him in any way, she's going to.
Rain and her friends fall into the background as the bay girl approaches the boy. They are almost of an age, he perhaps slightly older than she, but this doesn't concern her. Wrynn has never been much of one to be fearful; timid, yes, but not fearful. And that timidity is obvious in the delicate way that she approaches him, walking carefully, quietly, almost as though she's afraid she might wake him from a dream. She is a pretty thing, small for her age, bay with just the slightest hint of greying. Around her barrel snakes a still-healing wound from a tentacle in the ruined land where they'd both fought monsters, and her delicate knees are still healing from the skinning they'd endured as she had leapt from hiding place to hiding place to dodge the all-seeing eye monster. But her eyes – bright, interested eyes – are as deep and beautiful as ever, their colors a shifting diaphanous rainbow array of colors.
She reaches him and notes that he looks even more ghostly up close. She wonders for just a moment if she'd be able to speak with him the way she does with Rain and the rest of the dead, but then decides that it's just easier to speak aloud anyway. She watches him in silence for a moment, knowing that he'd likely recognize her just as she'd recognized him. Especially the final ones, they'd all know each other. They'd all know. "Do you think you're a ghost?" She asks, gently. Her voice is small, quiet, but soft and pleasant. She speaks like someone who is used to being ignored, or told to quiet down, even though she's never been told that in her life.
The forest shelters him for a time, but eventually someone finds him.
He sees her approach out of the corner of his eye at first. A small, wayward girl, he thinks dismissively, not Gail, not her. The ghost-boy retreats further under the canopy, sure the other will pass by and he will remain unnoticed. But her steps bring her ever-closer. Their eyes meet, and he becomes sure that she is, in fact, heading towards him. Ramiel moves forward to intercept her, not realizing until after that he phases through the bushes between them in order to do so. He hesitates then. She is only a young girl, and though he recognizes her face, such unusual movements might still frighten her. If he hadn’t already experienced the land of the dead and everything in between, he knows he might have been frightened. Now, little can scare him. Or so he thinks.
Once she’s close enough, he realizes that he does know her. Knows those ever-changing eyes, knows that slight build that makes her appear younger than she probably is. He knows that she is the girl from the quest – but the one thing he doesn’t know is her name. Instead of commenting on their recent jaunt seemingly outside of reality, he simply gives her his name. “Ramiel. How about you?” The grey colt steps even closer, encouraged by the way she seems to accept his appearance (or at least, she doesn’t run away). And though he hadn’t considered that others might not be so open until that very moment, it’s comforting to think that they might.
Her voice is softer than he expected, like birdsong or mousetalk. Used to the boisterous range of his sister and the smooth iron of his mother’s voice, Ramiel has to almost strain to hear it. He thinks about her question, but it doesn’t take him long to find the answer. “I suppose I am.” He concentrates on his solid self then, imagining his actual skin until it becomes visible once again. Mastery of this strange shifting is coming easy to him. He’s glad, because he doesn’t fancy waltzing into the Dale and frightening anyone. Not until he’s explained himself, anyway. “At least sometimes.”
The grey hesitates for a breath before voicing a new worry. “Do you think that means I’m both alive and dead sometimes, too?” Concern for a thought he’s not considered until that moment furrows his brow as he looks questioningly at the bay girl. He smells the Jungle on her (recognizing it from her sister Ea, though of course he doesn’t know their relation). He knows that the Dale and the Amazons are friends, knows that his brother will soon join them in the mountain kingdom. Someday, maybe, he will see the mysterious jungle for himself. But for now, he’s more interested in the daughter of that place – interested in the repercussions of the quest they shared. “Did Gail follow you back? I had hoped to find her here.”
She listens to him intently, not giving him her name not because she guards it, but because it isn’t important compared to him and what he's going through. She can see instantly that he is rattled, that he's trying to come to terms with something, and she's interested to note that it must not be only she who has come back from the land of the dead with a little something extra.
He thinks he's a ghost sometimes, and she wonders if he's right. She looks him over with the eye of one who's an expert, and maybe she's as close to an expert as anyone gets on the subject. After all, she can talk with those who are actually ghosts, for sure. But she's too polite to ask them until she's sure he's done speaking, and so she waits in silence while his words run together and spill out of his mouth like worry.
"No, Gail couldn't come back." she says, and her voice is just as sad and defeated as his would be if he knew for sure. They had had the same focus, perhaps both felt pulled by the once-mother. And in the end, perhaps, both had failed her. "I don't think…she could, really. Not properly." she sighs, her shifting, color changing eyes a storm of rainbow as she looks at him sadly. "There's rules, Ramiel. I don't know what they are but I know they're there. And we'd have had to break them to bring her back." she's starting to understand things now, now that she's got an open line of communication to the land of the dead. There are reasons why the dead and the living can't cross over. It's just not right.
She supposes, in time, he'll learn too.
"I don't think you're dead." she states flatly, although her voice is still almost impossibly quiet. "I think you're either dead, or you're not, and that going back and forth is a real big problem." she thinks of the stories she's heard from some of her friends of the occasional horse that's gone to the underworld and come back. "That happens sometimes, where a horse gets dead and then gets un-dead. But it's not often, and it's not at will." she looks at him as though she's studying him, as though she's looking through him. "And besides, I can't hear you. I think I should be able to hear you, if you were really dead." never mind that she's talking about a kind of hearing that no foal their age should ever be able to understand – the kind of hearing that lets her speak to the dead.
"I think maybe you're just a ghost, but sometimes. Not all the time." she purses her lips, looking at him carefully. "Can you control it, or is it random?" She is not probing, not rough, just gently curious. She is the sweet mouse, impossibly innocent even though she's danced with death and flirted with the end of the world. She might be walking around with a symphony of the dead in her mind, but she's not dystopian. She's young, quiet, and happy.
06-22-2015, 01:13 PM (This post was last modified: 06-22-2015, 01:15 PM by Ramiel.)
It’s just as he suspected – that Gail hasn’t and will never come home – but the truth still hurts to hear. Maybe he wouldn’t have believed it from anyone else. Maybe he would have kept searching until he himself was on the threshold of death, a desperate old man forever with unfinished business. But he knows she is telling the truth in the very core of himself. She was there with him on the beach; she saw the end of the universe. If anyone knew where the black light still shined, it would be her. He frowns deeply, the corners of his mouth pinching into his muzzle.
It’s his first true failure (all of their’s really, though he doesn’t know the extent of the other six’s guilt) and it weighs heavily on his mind, even as the girl studies him. He can see her concern in the narrowing of her rainbow-eyes, and in the back of his mind, he registers and appreciates it. He is glad she isn’t scared of him, glad she doesn’t turn tail and run like less braver foals might. If she had shown the slightest bit of hesitation, Ramiel isn’t sure he would have been able to handle it. This interest is far better. He may be a source of study, a curiosity, an oddity, but at least not a cause for concern. Not to Wrynn, anyway.
“Rules,” he spits out, the word bitter as brine on his tongue. There are always rules: don’t venture into the mountains, don’t approach strange horses, don’t be hasty or irrational or thoughtless. He used to think rules were put in place for a reason. He used to admire the safe boundaries that rules provided, felt comfortable in the safety net of his guidelines. But Carnage has shown him differently. Their dark god had bent the rules to his own ends, had grasped at futures that were supposed to happen and re-sculpted them to his will. If he has learned anything from the quest for Gail, it is that he is in control of his own destiny. Rules can be broken, one only has to learn how to do so.
“I think I could do it.” He says quietly, not entirely sure if he believes himself. “I think I could go back.” Ramiel remembers how he had poured from the cliff walls like liquid, how his ghost form had passed through granite as easily as it would a cloud. The bay girl asks him if he can control it and so he shows her. He does it slowly, his black fur going grey then translucent. He lingers at this midway point, craning his neck to look through his own stomach to the forest beyond. It’s still unnerving, and the young stallion hesitates before fading all the way, afraid he won’t be able to come back from it. Finally, he’s completely invisible.
He circles around the Jungle girl, his feet passing through the grass without a sound. He can feel the motion – can feel where his limbs are in relation to his movements – but he cannot see them. A thought comes to him then and he is compelled to try. With a deep breath, he passes through Wrynn. Shocked that it is possible, Ramiel loses concentration when he emerges on the other side of her and becomes solid once more. He wonders if she has felt anything. Her words have not been lost on him, however.
“So you can hear them, the ghosts from the beach? Do they talk freely, or do you have to ask after them?” The boy stands closer now, not having moved after his pass through. Up close, he finds the girl quite pretty. Perhaps she’s made more so because they were comrades, in a sense. They share truths that few will ever understand, except each other. He smiles when she gives her name. It feels like cement on their relationship, at least to him. It feels like they will have many more stories to compare over the years, that their shared experience was only a jumping point for greater adventures. "I'm glad we both made it out alive to meet each other properly."
For all that Wrynn may be gentle, and delicate, and small, and overly optimistic, she is almost impossible to frighten.
She has a child's incredible resilience, that little core of iron covered in sugary sweetness. He could be a thousand times more horrible, be a monster (quite literally) and she'd approach him with the same open-mindedness and ready goodwill that she'd brought to bear on the first monster she'd faced in the quest, the one that had floated in space and sucked her in and spat her back out again, right where she'd needed to be.
It is that optimism that has allowed her to weather the fact that her mind is no longer her own, that she's got a connection to the dead, that she failed to bring back the dead but can share with them a tiny fraction of her own existence. It's her iron-willed optimism that allows her to function. And it's that same optimism that makes her accept the rules that Ramiel seems to scorn. It is bitter to him, but to her, it is simply as it is. Gail could not come back, but Wrynn would do whatever she could to make that state of things pleasant.
She listens intently when he mentions going back. She doesn't doubt it; she might not have doubted it even before she became what she is now. She might not have doubted it even before she could hear the thoughts of the dead. He seems to be something close to dead sometimes anyway; why couldn't he go back and visit them. She nods, pensive.
She watches intently as he transforms. It does not shock her; she watches him with the steady gaze of one who has already seen too much, of another youngster who has seen worlds ripped apart and devoured right before her very eyes. What's a ghost when you've seen and heard and smelled the world ending? She follows him even after he turns invisible, and she does not shiver when he passes through her.
She is comfortable with their closeness, and does not seek to move away. She feels a kinship with this boy. Perhaps it is only natural that she is closer to one who is closer to dead; she's most at her ease with the voices in her head, the ones that are currently silent, letting her put her focus on Ramiel (and perhaps, quite a bit interested themselves).
"Yes, I can hear them." her voice is still quiet, but she doesn’t hesitate to meet his eyes. "They talk freely most of the time. It's mostly the ones our age though. They…" she pauses then, trying to think of how to describe it. "They sent me back somehow. I owe them a great debt. I wish…I really wish I could've brought them back with me. They deserve to know what it feels like, what all of this feels like." she nods her head toward the meadow, alive and vibrant around them. "I couldn't though. Not with them, not with Gail. This isn't there place, anymore. For a lot of them, it never was." She pauses for a moment, and then remembers that she hadn't finished answering his question. She looks at him. "If I want to talk to someone in particular, I have to ask. And I can usually get anybody. My sister Rain is usually around and talks to me. Sometimes her friend Kora too. And sometimes lots of others."
He smiles at her, and she returns it. She likes him, she's decided. Something about him feels endless, as though they could talk here all day and never run out of things to talk about. As though they're meant to click, to stay the course, to bump along the road of life in each others' orbit.
"I'm glad too." a quick pause, and the smile fades a little bit. "Have you talked to any of the others?"
She doesn’t make a move to indicate she has felt him pass through her. It’s a good thing, because all of a sudden, Ramiel realizes how unwise he had been to do it. What if he couldn’t keep hold of his control all the way through? What if, halfway across, he became unwittingly solid again? What might have happened then? Foolish, he chides himself, selfish to put your own curiosities before another’s safety. She seems unharmed, at least, but he still shakes his head. Every part of his newfound abilities is unchartered territory; every test is a risk. And as much as he has to know exactly what he can and cannot do (as much as his own curiosity drives him to find out as much as he can, as quickly as he can) the black boy cannot allow his innate inquisitiveness to overrule his good sense.
Fortunately, Wrynn proves hardy and completely unfazed. She is a listener, a ponderer (maybe even a jury, deliberating evidence and his proof of life or non-life) but she is not judgmental. He is wholly grateful he has run into her first after leaving the beach.
His eyes are bright gold and curious as they meet her’s, made more alive for the weight and depth of the conversation they are having. He feels at once like he is solving life’s greatest puzzles and also having trouble with others, as if by answering certain questions, he creates more overall. There are truths to be had, however. Gail is dead. That door closes quietly and not all the way. He knows that he can visit her if he wants (he doesn’t know how he knows; he only feels it as a certainty, like the nerves firing in his brain, sustaining him). They are connected to that other place, he and Wrynn. The wormhole that pulled them down, down, down had created the beach of souls, and in turn, had created a connection between the final six. They are parts of a whole, he is beginning to realize. They are the first and only (thus far, anyway) bridge to the dead. There are implications there, hints of responsibilities to come. These truths weigh on him, but fortunately, he has someone to share the weight with.
Wrynn has her own worries. He listens, eager to help because she has done the same for him. “Yes, they do deserve it. They all do. You can help them remember, though.” He shakes his head because that’s not right - they hadn’t even experienced it in the first place. Not all of them, anyway. He remembers seeing the army of foals marching away on the beach when Gail had told them to find loved ones. At the time, he hadn’t known they were helping Wrynn. He only knew how sad he had been at the sight, how filled with regret he was for lives he knew nothing about. “Or, if not remember, help them learn. If anyone can, you certainly seem capable of it.” Ramiel touches his muzzle to the girl’s shoulder firmly, encouragingly. Her coat is the color of tree bark slowly being bleached by the sun. He thinks of the oaks and maples of the Dale’s foothills and he suddenly aches for home.
A thought catches in his mind for a moment, piercing and painful and reminiscent of home. He’s trying to discern it through his hazy other thoughts when the Jungle girl has another question for him. The thought is crowded out as he looks back at Wrynn. “No. I’ve not met with the others. Have you?” He turns it back on her, trying to ignore the persistence of that lost thought. It’s almost easy, because he really is curious to hear her answer. Would they be allied for life? Would they seek each other out in the future; would they play a part in maintaining the afterlife? “Do you think we are meant to be a link to That Beach now? I feel as if we are. I just don’t know where to start.” A face swims in his mind then, and he knows what – or whom – the thought was incessantly trying to have him recall:
“My sister,” he suddenly remembers, jerking his head back from Wrynn’s side. He hadn’t seen her since that point in space. They had ridden on one of the space rays to the first wormhole, but after that, she had disappeared. “have you heard a voice belonging to Joscelin? She was with me in the wormhole…and then, she wasn’t.” She wasn’t on the beach, either, or at least not that he could see. There had been so many ghosts, though. Who’s to say she wasn’t pressed among the herd, a new soul squeezed and displaced by death. Ramiel’s expression changes from wonder to dire worry as he searches the bay girl’s gaze, looking for any sign she gives away.
