She doesn’t quite realize that her body is strange and unsettling (especially when her form in the other realm had been colored and far more complete). She is far too caught up in the newness of existence, of being there. Her body acts on instinct, draws breath, and she marvels at the way her lungs feel as they expand.
Inside her, a heart lurches to life, begins to drum out beats, and for a moment she is shocked, almost comically so, before she realizes what is happening.
(She’d watches them for years but she’d never felt it, no, never felt a heartbeat or known the wonder of such things.)
Other processes begin as well; blood begins to form and stir through her veins, a strange sensation, for the blood starts out cool and gradually warms as she becomes alive.
“Yes,” she says, and her rotting lips break into a smile, “yes, I feel wonderful.”
But the smile fades as he speaks of Gail, her mother (in heart if not by blood). She misses her already, misses her calm, the quiet peace she’d always had, like the still surface of water and inscrutable depths underneath.
What now, he asks, as good a question as any. She doesn’t know. She is in a new world, she is old but she is in a newborn body, she is alive but she is rotting.
“I don’t know,” she says. She knows she is child of the desert’s once-queen, but she also doubts they’d even know Craft’s name if she spoke it – it was very long ago, after all.
“I’ll come with you,” she says, then, touches him insistently (he feels solid now, no longer a queer ghost, and she likes it), “and you are magical.”
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out