they all come into the light [round 4]

[Leilan]

I’m not the only one to choose this path, I notice. We’re a collection of gold, black, and red (and a vague touch of blue). There’s a fragile looking girl among us, but I doubt she is as breakable as she looks. Even if she is, does it matter? The state we are in is tangible but not by much, and I feel like we’re already done for. What is dead can’t die again, and this goes as much for me as for the ones around me. The ones on top of the cliffs, as well.

When I reach the deafening river, every sort of greeting that is not visible is lost to me. Thus, I just nod some sort of greeting; however, it is not long after the fourth arrives that the shadows start to move. In a land of grey, shadow, mist and water, we are completely surrounded - and I hadn’t even noticed.

I grimace, but it’s replaced with determination and (honestly nobody from back home being here is a lucky coincidence because I’m) satisfied. I get what I came for, after all - a chance for some sort of revenge, a chance to bite and scratch and finally take away that itch, the urge to fight the monsters.

Shifting, I find, is not all the same in the land of the dead - change is a magic of the living. I brought it with me, but I lack the amount of magic that it’d need to make the full shift. Instead, I focus on what I deem most important - tooth, claw, and tail.

I am a monster, and now I look like one.

I forget everything around me; forget that these monsters were once souls, because an ice cold dragon has little compassion at all when he’s hunting. I forget most of the others, though I am aware that they’re roughly on my side of this battle, if one could call this skirmish a battle at all. I know there’s cliffs on one side and a river at my back, and I know there’s no way to avoid a fate of suffering and death.

I am a monster, and I’ll take as many of them with me as I can.

I was never the rescuing type, never the martyr that some seem to think I am. Of course I’ll die heroically - for those who weren’t there. The ones who are, know the ugly truth. I am not a good man. Never have been; I’ve been haunting girls, annoying leaders, and stepped on every toe that ever stuck out in some way. I’ve challenged dragon and king alike, and I became one myself. I am a walking example of irony and hypocrisy.

I am a monster, and I want my territory back.

I like to think I bring down more of them than the rest, but honestly I haven’t kept track. I like to think it takes the monsters long enough to drive us back for someone to sneak by, if they want to - that we’re a good enough distraction. I have no way of knowing, however; I only snarl and drag and rip and slash. When the river is first at my lizard-like tail and then at my hocks, I dig hoof and claw (the shifting after all, isn’t perfect) into the mud, and toss as many monsters over my head into the dark water.

That is all I can do. My scales do not protect me from them, because they’re in their element. Icy blasts are not enough to stop the monsters when the world they come from is cold on a wholly different level. I can rip apart one monster, but their separate parts seem to still live, to fuse into something new every time I do.

I go down like the rest of them, and together we sink deeper and deeper, until I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t feel. The pain is endless, forever, and then lost.

I am a monster, but I’m no different from the rest.

Or am I? Are we? Pain returns first, then sight; the world is grey again and then light; and then the feeling of falling ends with standing in a different place. I’ve arrived… somewhere. It seems to be the heart of everything, and where before there was noise and violence and everything that called out the worst in me, now there is nothing. There is calm and if I didn’t know any better - if the others hadn’t arrived with me, if there wasn’t a fairy coming to meet us, if I didn’t remember why I was here - if I hadn’t known any better I’d say this is what death feels like.

The dread I feel, makes me realize that I’m not dead. Yet.

I feel naked in the presence of the fairy’s magic. Perhaps Beqanna’s magic negates all of my own, because it was all hers, just given to me, lent to me, in the first place. Now when she speaks I can hardly hear her, but it is my mind that hurts a little when she does. I wonder if this is how I sound in other’s heads, but when she tells us the entities are lost, I feel her sadness about this fact, as well as the hope.

She needs something from us, this time. I do not know what, just that whatever it is will probably be a lot, in some sense. But hasn’t Beqanna already given me all that I am, and isn’t all that I care to preserve a part of the world that we left behind?

It is not a choice, not for me. I don’t think it ever was. I just hope that the one thought I am able to send back up to the Afterlife we left behind, makes it to its blue-eyed recipient. Go home. Now. One last request. Or command.

It makes my answer easier. ”Whatever you need.”