Gail is quiet when she watches him go. Her eyes are wet with tears but she doesn’t let them fall. She’s lost children before, lost lovers, even lost herself somewhere in the gaping jaws of time.
Her eyes are wet but she does not cry.
She touches Ramiel lightly, nose to his crest. He is solid and special and she doesn’t want him to go, either.
“Thank you,” she says, suddenly overwhelmed by such simple kindness, overwhelmed with loss – there’s been too many worlds, too many, and her shakes again.
To Graveling, she says: “Be good. I love you.”
And then, she lets them go.
***
She only knows what it’s like to be dead.
She knows death well. Not in a particularly macabre way, rather, it is the simple fact of her existence. She was not created as they were, rather, she was a soul and nothing else and thus existed in the queer perpetuity. Until something shifted, altered the universe just enough to solidify her – not completely, but some.
So when Ramiel takes her, when she feels them slip through the worlds, she goes into the great unknown with eyes open.
And then, everything changes.
The world around her is suddenly there, shockingly solid. The air is perfumed with scents – horses and other animals, the fecund smells of grass and rivers. Everything is loud and just so much, overwhelming.
She’s changed, too. Gone is the ghost-body, what’s replaced it is dead flesh placed haphazardly over delicate bones. The flesh might have been gold, once, but now it’s rotting.
She’s come into the world dead, a birth in reverse, and her flesh will regrow and heal, in time. But for now she seems to be a corpse walking in a world it has long observed but never dared to think it could exist in.
Ramiel is still there, solid now, just like her – though his flesh is unscathed, he looks the part of the living.
“It worked,” she says, a little dazed, “you’re magical.”
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out