He sees her, a jewel-caught thing, and is stricken for a moment. He has been dead so long that the changes in magic in Beqanna – the parade of spectacular creatures, all colors, swathed in shadows or fire or plants, some barely recognizable as equine – still shock him. It makes him all the more aware of his own plainness – gray, like his father, though of course he lacks his father’s presence, and thus becomes so little, so easy to pass over.
He realizes he is staring, blinks hard and looks away, staring across the field as if there was something else that had caught his attention. His social skills feel as achy and tired as his body, but he glances back and she is closer now, and then speaking to him.
Do you hear them too, she asks, and his head cocks in confusion. He hears nothing but the meadow around them, the call of birds whose names he doesn’t know, the faint rustling of some animal in the grass, and, of course, his own breaths, which always sound labored, at least to his ears.
She clarifies, then - the ghosts - and though he still hears nothing, he feels a chill up his spine, because he is uncomfortably close to ghost-hood.
(He had not been a ghost. He remembers dying, and then the awful awakening, and nothing in between. Or perhaps he was a ghost, and the memories are gone, buried somewhere or dead altogether, much like his magic.)
“No,” he says, then, “but I was dead until very recently.”
you ask me about love and I tell you about violence