"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
(In the beginning, there was nothing.
In the beginning, there was a cluster of cells.
There was nothing that indicated life, and when the palomino queen miscarried she only mourned for a brief while, and then she was pregnant again (with the boy who would ultimately be her downfall, but that’s a story for another time). She forgot about the thing left on the sand, the creation that had not lived.
So when Graveling awoke, she was a ghost, and for years, she watched them – her mother (who did not live too long), her brother (who lived entirely too long), and her father.
There was a shift as a new realm opened up, created by the dark god’s magic and the ingenuity of those who partook in his quest. Graveling was able to solidify – not entirely, but somewhat. Suddenly, there were others.)
Although she is old, her new body – the one she was rocketed into as the new realm was birthed – is that of a foal. She is not used to doing anything but watching, and now she is made to move about, to exist in a new state.
She is adopted, in a way, by a dark woman named Gail. Gail is much more solid than Graveling, and it is strangely comforting. It isn’t long before she calls her mother.
Sometimes she finds Gail watching, staring out at the gray shores.
“They’ll come back,” Gail murmurs to herself, “they’ll come back, they can’t stay away.”
Gail does not speak over much of her past, and Graveling doesn’t ask. She has enough stories in her heart as she watched her family’s lives unfold and end – at each other’s hands, at the sea, by a virus winding its way through the bloodstream.
She looks for them in the realm, sometimes, and thinks she sees glimpses of them, but when she runs towards the figures they are gone, like will-o’-the-wisps, ghost lights leading her astray.
She asks Gail about her family, sometimes, but Gail didn’t know them. There’s a tangential relation there, a frayed rope of kinship, but not enough for Gail or know (or particularly care) about Graveling’s family.
She asks about Gail’s family, but Gail does not share much. She mentions a few children, and Graveling even meets a few. Atrocity, the first, who is strange and uncomfortable. Shiv, one of the last, who makes Gail visibly uncomfortable and does not visit long.
She learns in this realm she cannot watch them as she once did. This land is more permanent. They’ll come back, Gail had said, but Graveling doesn’t know who she speaks of.
The cliffs rise above him, a physical, foreboding reminder of his last time here. Though that first time, he had been on the Other Side of the cliffs. That time, he had felt the icy fingers of death rake both of his inky sides but he slipped through its grasp (he’d been smaller then, thankfully, and evaded its finality). That time, a dark god had sought their help but hadn’t obliged them much assistance in return (he’d cursed Carnage every day since he’d come back for leaving his sister a miserable mosaic). That time, he’d been a boy taken on a mission most men would find impossible or unbelievable.
He has a hard time believing it himself, sometimes.
Ramiel shifts from one reality to the next. The face of the rock watches him impassively, having perhaps seen stranger changes – and certainly more sinister changes – over the many millennia of its existence. His coat fades from black to pepper to white to nothing. Overshot it, he thinks, nervous as the moment grows nearer. His concentration is deep (though not as deep as it had needed to be at first, when the gift-curse was still baby-new) but effective. He becomes translucent, a pale imitation of his former self and a slight mirror of his future, of the grey that is already taking over his body.
He is alive until he isn’t.
Ramiel hasn’t worked out when exactly he dies during the change from man to ghost. At what point does breathing become a luxury rather than a necessity? When does his heart stop doing its job? And most importantly: why didn’t the stoppage of these functions align? When is death, really, when the heart stops beating or when you no longer suck in the air? More and more, he’s convinced it’s something else entirely. More and more he thinks it has something to do with thoughts and brains. Of course, his is untouched during the process. That’s the whole point of it.
Still, although he’s had a lot of time to think on it (all of it, from his untimely deaths to those waiting for him on the Other Beach), he’s nervous coming back. He’s a ghost now, though, and the cliffs seem to want him. Or rather, they want him on the other side. See-through as he is, he’s an imperfection amongst the solid living. He floats until he’s touching the granite with the delicate soft of his muzzle. The cliffs drive him forward until the flat of his forehead becomes indented by the unforgiving edges. If he’d been real, it would have hurt. But he’s thankfully, blessedly not, and he passes through unmarred.
In a few short blinks, he is out on the far side (so far that death is the only one-way ticket. Death, or the wielding of potent magic that is). The beach is there with its tepid spray and rolling waves. The sky is as translucent as he is; galaxies spread all the way to the horizon and the stars glint, even in the bright light. The ghosts are here and there, too. They mill about in their various hierarchies, unable to resist games of power even after their living bodies have become earth. Some of the ghosts stand alone or in pairs. These are far more interesting to Ramiel. He wonders what secrets they still keep long after it matters. He begins to walk and he wonders.
Unlike the last time, there isn’t a sense of wrongness when he moves across the sands. A chill doesn’t threaten to overtake his still-warm skin; pressure doesn’t squeeze against his sides (a pressure that wants him out, Out, OUT). He doesn’t feel like he is going against the concentration gradient of death, like his first visit when he was very much alive. Now, he borrows death, wearing it like a second skin that can be easily shed back on the Other Side. He looks back there, towards the cliffs where he knows he can cross once more into Beqanna. It’s comforting to know that safety is so close, that he doesn’t have far to flee if the need arises.
The ghost looks for a black shape achingly familiar for its attempted retrieval. And perhaps because he’s looking for her (or perhaps they are anchored for all their trials together) he finds her almost immediately. Gail. “Gail,” he repeats out loud, like the first time he had met her. It’s still bitter on his tongue and he thinks she can pick up on it, can hear it in his words. He amends it immediately, apologetically. “Did Carnage find you, at least?” Because he knows it’s pointless to voice the other things he would otherwise ask first: can you come back, why didn’t you follow us, are you stuck here? He knows all of those answers. Only this question will give him some semblance of happiness depending on how she answers.
It is only then that he notices another lurking nearby. A buckskin girl with silver in her hair and a lifetime in her eyes. She seems older than the other children (the children that had sent Wrynn home with their hope) though she doesn’t look it. He smiles vaguely at her but he is distracted. Gail seems like the purpose he came for, the cornerstone of this latest journey to the afterlife – a follow-up visit with a long-dead friend. He’s ever polite and she’s so very persistent that it almost seems compulsory to pull her into the conversation, so he says, “hello.” And then asks, “who are you?”
Gail is dead but not dead. She is unlike the other denizens of this place; there is a life to her. But it is a strange life, a transplant. She belongs nowhere and so Beqanna made this place for her, this limbo.
It is better than the end of the world. There is no stutter-stop of time resetting, over and over again. She can move. She can grow. She looks for her children and finds most of them. Some of the reunions are joyous; others are strange, fraught with moments neither speaks of.
(Shiv has the most hideous burns, and a glint in his eye that reminds her of Carnage. His father’s son, after all.)
The girl, too, is strange.
Gail does not know what it is, exactly. Why she chooses this girl of the other wayward souls. But there is something, and Gail raises her.
And then, the most peculiar thing – the girl grows.
She came to the afterlife a newborn, a ghostly form. But since then, she has grown. She is still a foal, but she has progressed, she is not in the stasis that most of them are.
So she waits. For one of them to come back.
(She knows they will. There are old friends here, old lovers. Family, mothers and fathers and siblings.)
And when they do, she has a plan. A ludicrous plan, but one she clings to nonetheless.
****
Graveling sees him first. Even wearing his ghost skin, there is a difference to him, a wrongness.
“Gail,” she says quietly, pressing against her dark side, “look.”
****
Gail looks, and smiles. The anchored, dying woman on that other beach – the one at the end of the world – is gone, and returned is the woman who was once a queen, a proverbial Helen whose face launched a thousand ships.
“Ramiel,” she says. She pauses a moment, then, “yes, he came. He found me.”
And left her, like he always does. But he’ll be back.
A thought occurs to her, and she studies him.
“You aren’t…” she pauses, “you’re not dead, are you?”
****
The strange man speaks with Gail. Gail seems to know him, asks him strange questions (of course he’s dead, thinks Graveling, we’re all dead).
“Hello,” she says, standing tall, though her withers barely come to their stomachs, “my name is Graveling.”
He still dreams of the langoliers and perhaps he always will.
In these dreams, he hears the clanking and clicking of the machinery. The stuttering, irregular pulse grows ever closer, his fear increasing proportionally with the distance. Maybe he wouldn’t tremble so terribly if its approach was more predictable, if he could anticipate every clank and whir. But the inorganic beat is as wild and untamed as the end of the world should be. Every CLANG drives him closer to the beach. Each WHAM sends him further into the sea. He tries to drown out the sound, but the crashing waves are barely a shhh when they reach his ears. When he can no longer feel his heartbeat (because it has burst from fear in its hiding place?) he relinquishes himself to the ocean, sinks deep into its murky depths. Even under there, though, the langoliers reach him. He cannot escape.
Ramiel wakes drenched in the mornings, but thankfully, never from sea water. That would have been too much.
They feel real, these dreams. Sometimes he thinks Carnage will never really leave them. He’s not sure about the others, but he’s almost sure of himself. Sometimes he thinks the time he is asleep doesn’t belong to him anymore, that their dark god has claimed it for use as his punishment. He has failed Gail, why shouldn’t he pay for his failure? The intermittent nature of the nightmares reminds him of the langoliers, so much that he thinks it cannot be a coincidence.
Can he even believe in coincidences anymore? When it feels as if your life is pulled by the strings of unseen forces and shaped by strong hands, what is there left to anticipate? He’s surely seen everything there is to see already; what surprises remain in the world? Even here, on this stretch of newborn sand, the young stallion has already grown used to the idea of walking amongst the dead. It’s normal to see the pale figures shifting in a blur all around him. The once-firm line between life and death being erased is no longer revolutionary. Ramiel’s always felt like an old soul, but now he seems almost ancient.
Finding Gail calms him more than it should (more than finding a half-ghost in the afterlife would to anyone other than the last six, perhaps). She looks better than the last time he saw her. It seems more impossible than anything so far on this impossible day - that a half-dead woman could look better - but she does. There’s a strength to her stance, a spark of life in her glassy eyes. He wonders if it’s the girl’s doing, if she’s given her purpose. It’s wonderful and sad all at once, this empty motherhood with no chance to see the fruits of her labor. The girl is as dead as the rest of them – she will not grow up and she will not live.
His smile grows in earnest when Gail says that the dark god found her. At least she has that, that moment and now the girl. Little comfort for eternity, maybe, but she will have other things too. Visits from him, for starters, and conversations with Wrynn and the other five (if they so choose). Her gaze turns critical then, and when she voices her concern, his smile falters. “Only to come back here.” He shakes his head slightly, realizing it’s not the full answer. “You didn’t doom me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Not to being a ghost like her anyway, but the nightmares, perhaps. “I can be like this back in Beqanna, too.” It’s not something yet seamlessly integrated into him, but it’s becoming so more and more every day.
The girl mirrors Gail’s new confidence, straightening herself when he addresses her. “Graveling,” he repeats, testing the name on his tongue. Wildly appropriate but still so sad, he thinks, then wonders if the filly knows it is both. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” The grey ghost looks at her thoughtfully for a moment before turning back to Gail. He wants to ask Graveling who her parents are, wants to send word back to them if he can, but he doesn’t want to offend the girl at the same time. Afterlife etiquette is a dangerous, new frontier. If anyone has explored the bounds, it’s likely the anchor-woman. “Is there anything I can do for either of you?”
The langoliers were never meant to be a nightmare shared.
The langoliers had been theirs, Gail’s and Carnage’s. the symphony to the end of the world. She’d followed him to see how the world ended, had gone with him when he’d asked. And he’d wanted to, too. She believed it then and she does now. In the moment, he had wanted to see the world end.
But something had changed. His thoughts had shifted, some Other’s magic had crept out, snatched him back and left her in stasis.
She doesn’t think of it, often. She had lifetimes to wonder at the way the world ended as the hours set and re-set themselves. Lifetimes to wonder if Carnage had left her there by accident, or on purpose.
In dreams, of course, she does think of it. In dreams there is nothing but the sound, the black sand squelching at her legs.
Death does not terrify her (she’d died once already, and spent a century waiting for the world to end), but the langoliers do. The nothingness they had promised had been somehow more terrifying than death, in a way she cannot entirely articulate.
She hadn’t wanted Carnage to send others, to subject them to the nightmare, to the noise, to the blankness of a world ending. It was not their lot.
Worse, she is scared to see them returned. Scared they will die, that they will be unable to stand what Carnage put upon them (he told her pieces, and she filled in gaps, and the stories are nothing short of horrifying).
Ramiel alleviates it, for the moment. He is not dead. Not in the ways she’d feared, at least. She exhales a breath of relief. Foolish, because she doesn’t need to breathe, but it’s a habit she still finds herself with.
“I’m glad,” she says, “I worry about all of you.”
***
“What are you?” Graveling asks. She pays no attention to Gail’s soft tones, to the concerns and reliefs playing across her dark face. Graveling is far more interested in the stranger, the intruder, who seems that he should belong, but doesn’t. Who even says he isn’t dead!
(Ridiculous. They’re all dead, here.)
***
“Ramiel,” she says, pauses. She regards him. She can see, even in his ghost-form, that he is grown. He is handsome. In another world, she might have grown to love him (he reminds her a bit of Mryddin, the same kindness, the same strength). None of that matters now, of course.
“Graveling is…different,” she manages, “she doesn’t realize it because she’s only been around the dead.”
Graveling snorts, looks at her. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s close. It’s a terribly childlike gesture from a girl who’s existed in limbo far too long, and for a selfish moment Gail wants to say nothing, to keep her here, raise her as her own.
“I think she can go back.”
The fact that she worries almost makes it all worthwhile.
Almost, but not quite. Almost, because for all their efforts - all their impossible trials through time and space - it had been for naught in the end.
It’s not the entire truth, of course. The adventure itself has played out again in his dreams, almost as often as the langoliers appear in his nightmares. It’s terribly thrilling to relive the splendor and terror in equal amounts. In the moments of sleep, it feels like every step can be his last. He can feel the tar pit sucking at his feet. His heart pounds as Oorn, the giant mollusk, pulls him free with its tentacles. He’s free but he’s moved ever closer to its devastating mouth. It clanks and chitters menacingly; saliva curls and drips from the corners of its lips… He sees the alien sky, though, too. Just before Oorn clamps down, his eyes trace the galaxies and star trails far above. It’s mesmerizing, and as the shelled behemoth yodels its victory, he watches the light play across dying world, almost oblivious. He wakes with his heart pounding and muscles tensed to escape. These nights are manageable, though. The ground feels and smells like the Dale, and he always knows he’s been dreaming. Unlike the end of the world and the langoliers. When he dreams of them, they seem to follow him into consciousness. When he is awake, they are still there, clanging in the corners of his mind.
He’s grown because of it, too. He’s also grown independent of it – his coat has peppered, more gray than black, he’s filled out and muscled – but this doesn’t matter as much. What he’s learned about himself and others (about the vanities of the magical and the hidden strength of the forgotten, too) has given value to his quest. It wasn’t a total failure. Despite only moving the black anchor part of the way home, but not all the way, they had succeeded in some small way. He thinks Gail knows this and doesn’t resent them for it. He hopes she can see that her loss (of her proper place amongst Beqanna’s living) has been a gift split six ways.
Ramiel’s thankful to be a part of the whole, even if he’s still learning his place and purpose in it.
“Wrynn is well,” he says in response to her worry, hoping to assuage some of it. “She’s rather taken with the young spirits who sent her back. She tries to give them a glimpse of the Other Side for their benefit.” The young stallion smiles at the thought, proud to relay the news to Gail. This symbiotic relationship between the dead and living is new for all of them, and he’s glad the bay girl has forged her own path. “I’ve not met with the others yet, but I will.”
Graveling’s eyes bore into him the entire time he is addressing Gail. It might have disturbed others to have the unflinching gaze of a dead girl focused on them, but not to the boy-who-became-a-ghost. His golden eyes, like diluted honey in this form, simply mirror her curiosity. What is he? He thinks he knows, thinks the answer is easy. But he’s learned that nothing is easy in this lifetime, no response fully explains every nuance and oddity that his new-self possesses. He wants to tell Graveling that he is a ghost, but he doesn’t, because he often isn’t one. “I wish I knew, exactly. I am alive most of the time, back in Beqanna. But I can become like you and Gail, a spirit, whenever I need to.” He disappears then, slowly blinking out of existence. It’s as good of an explanation as any for the young girl (he doesn’t know that she’s lived longer than him, stuck like Gail in a different medium). He comes back quickly but not all the way, finding that he is unable to. They can still see through him to the beach beyond.
The older woman speaks again and he turns back to her. It’s clear from her tone that he’s found the right question to ask. It’s obvious that she’s been waiting for their return, that she does have a request burning in the back of her brain. He waits, receptive to whatever she will ask. Of course he will do it, and try not to fail this time. When she gives a voice to her thoughts, though, it is his turn to worry. Wrynn told him there are rules, and though he’d been bitter and angry over it at the time, he’s come to accept that she’s right. The dead belong here, their sanctuary by the shore. He doesn’t believe it will work to bring Graveling back to the Other Side. But who is he if he doesn’t try? “If you think it’s possible and that’s what she wants, I will take her back.” He looks at the girl, because it is her decision as much as it is theirs’ – more so, even. “Graveling, will you accompany me to Beqanna?” Ramiel smiles but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. What will Gail do when she’s gone? Who will keep the iron in her eyes and sustain her spirit? Her worry will become his when he thinks about her alone in the afterlife.
Carnage had never given her monsters. His magic never worked on her the way it did on others (part of the reason he could never quite forget her – she was a mystery, an enigma). It only works when she allows it to, like when they had first gone there, to the apocalyptic beach, when the langoliers sounded distant and time had not yet stopped.
She wonders, sometimes, if that is why she could not fully come back. If there was some part of her that did not want to.
She loves him, he is a vital organ to her, a heart sewn up in her chest, but she’d given him so much, perhaps she could not give him any more.
It’s a mystery she doubts will be solved in her lifetime (or her existence, she supposes – she wonders if she will exist forever, and the idea is strangely horrifying).
They are, after all, indefinable.
“I’m glad,” she says, and she is. They are changed, too, from this – mediums and ghosts, souvenirs from their time here.
****
“You’re strange,” says the girl, unware of her own strangeness, her tenuous existence between ghost and flesh, that she’s at the cusp of something, a crossroads.
****
Gail laughs a little, touches her muzzle to the girl’s body. Sometimes she seems solid and sometimes not. Today is a more solid day, she can almost feel the warmth. She wonders what she’ll do without her.
(If she can go, of course.)
Part of her wonders if she could bear children here. She wonders if they would be born flesh or ghost, or something in between. She misses children – she’d always been happiest as a mother, though her children seemed to meet gruesome ends (Shiv had been struck by a silver woman’s lighting, she’d learned, and she knew the fates of the others, having outlived them).
Ramiel poses the question, and Gail waits for her reply.
****
The strange ghost-not-ghost looks at her. Asks if she will accompany him. Fear bubbles forth, a new emotion. There are other worlds than these, and the idea is overwhelming.
But she wants a story. There are no stories for her, here – she’s learned that, in the years. She doesn’t grow or change.
“I’ll go,” she says, sounding so much braver than she is.
The ghosts are silent specters as they move about their not-lives. Most pass over the sand, leaving neither a sound nor a hoofprint in their wake. The waves shush against the shore, softer than the breaking of more tumultuous waves on the Other Side. He wonders what forces drive the waves here, wonders if the moon still has some effect in such a strange place. Do the sun and moon even behave the same here? Are there fire-soaked sunrises on the watery horizons? Do the ghosts turn their gazes heavenward to watch the moon arc across the starry sky? There is so much to learn here in this baby-new sector. The fear of being trapped still festers somewhere in his stomach, though. He wants both to stay and go home all at once; his curiosity and anxiety are at war within him.
Gail’s presence helps, at least.
She had taken on an almost mythical quality during their ordeal – their holy grail at the end of an impossible quest. She had been the unfindable and unseen, the unwitting damsel waiting in distress for all of eternity. To Ramiel, she had seemed like an anchor. If he could only tie himself to her, he’d never become lost again (Carnage wouldn’t allow it, surely). They had lost her again in unexpected fashion, but this time, at least she could be reached.
She is an anchor in a world with many doors now, where before, there had been none.
He feels like he will always be able to find her, will always be drawn to her whenever he chooses to come back. This beach is probably more than meets the eye. He plans on nosing every corner and searching every grain of sand. He plans on meeting his ancestors both recent and ancient, (how wonderful is it that that possibility now exists!). It occurs to him, then, that he can meet nearly everyone who’s succumbed to age or the dark whims of another: kings, queens, heroes and villains. The grey ghost wonders if he’ll be able to bring any of them back to his benefit or to their’s. Gail seems to think Graveling is special – perhaps there are others just as different, just as deserving of another chance…
The girl calls him strange, and he laughs. It’s loud, resonating off the nearest dunes and filling the dead space. It sounds almost artificial here, too colorful in such a monochromatic place. He cuts it off quickly, grinning instead. “Most assuredly,” he says, flicking his tail that disappears and reappears as it moves across his hocks. Strange but comfortable in his otherness. He’s always been a proud creature (proud of his parents, proud of his home, proud of the company he kept) and becoming a ghost has only cemented his unwavering confidence. Ramiel watches the black women as they wait for Graveling’s response. What will she do when the girl is gone? He wants to comfort her but doesn’t know how. What words can restore one from the numbness of being alone? Maybe there are others here that she can turn to, he thinks and hopes.
She will need the company, because Graveling soon accepts his offer. He nods, noticing the diluted strength poured into her voice, as if she had to add it in. She must be terrified, he thinks, imagining how he would feel in her hooves, trading in the only life she’s known for a world she won’t believe. Everything will overwhelm her on the Other Side; every sight, smell and sound will be magnified. “I will be back,” he tells Gail, saying goodbye without actually saying the words. He doesn’t need to. Probably he doesn’t need to tell her he’ll be back, either, because it is obvious. She is the black light in this world that is dark with mysteries. He’ll likely need her again just as she might need him.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he smiles lightly at the dead girl, turning towards the cliffs and the only door he knows of so far. He starts walking, leaving one of the only sets of hoofprints in the otherwise undisturbed sand as he goes. There are other sets, and if he didn’t have a responsibility to the girl, he would have followed them to their conclusions. But he is proud to take Graveling back to Beqanna (proud that Gail has entrusted him to do so) and he must follow the task through. Ramiel turns back once, his golden eyes shining with encouragement, to make sure she is following.
