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.”
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out