She laughs as he fades to ghostliness, leaves swirling around him. She does not see the morbidity in it, having been raised dead, she is more comfortable around ghosts than around living flesh, anyways. She finds comfort in transparency, and an ache of homesickness, for that realm that is and isn’t, the tenuous afterlife where a black queen reigns, anchored.
“See?” she says to the girl – Lirren – and smiles, burying whatever homesickness lurks. She is not dead, now. She is alive, like them, never mind the way skin peels from her, the way bones peek through fetid flesh – despite all this, she is alive.
“Yes,” she affirms, eyes on the girl’s coat, “like you walked in the sky.”
She likes the vibrancy of it, the colors adorning her at points. The girl returns the compliment, which is odd but keeps her smiling. Her own mix of colors is strange, a promise of palomino flesh placed against rot, with a gleam of bone shining through. In the end, she will be gold. For now, she rots, as her body scrambles to adapt to living.
“Who is Ely?” she asks, curious. There are already so many names – she knows Ramiel, and now Lirren, and she hears other names whispered, hundreds of them. Some of the names she knows from the afterlife, and she wonders how they are, her friends, her ghosts.
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out