i'm meaner than my demons, and bigger than these bones; any

[Ghoul]

Her world is the ocean. She is slowly bobbing along with waterlogged lungs, and a strange weightlessness. The stars above them glisten like fragmented moonbeams caught within unsettled waves. Ghoul floats along beside the mare, snow pluming up from her steps like the sand from the ocean floor. The distant mountain is like the edge of a continent, plummeting down into the depths, too far away for them to reach. There is a longing in her eyes as she gazes upon it, the way a hungry shark yearns for meat after having traveled through every abyss to get here.  Anhedonia speaks, meek, and gentle. Ghoul is lured back to consciousness, like a small morsel into the mouth of the angler fish.  “No.” She says, and there is a sadness as she stops to blink at the mountain peak. She sighs, a mass of warm fog curling up into the cold. “I mean, I don’t remember.” She says, her voice ragged, and melodic at once. “I don’t remember anything, but here.” Her face furrows, and she looks to the snow.  She has seen magic, she has seen shadowy mystics, she has met dark gods. She had birthed a child somewhere in the shadows of the trees, but that had been years ago. Akhlys was gone now, or, at least, gone from her mother.  Ghoul looks to the stranger with sad, dark eyes.   ____________________ g h o u l oceanus x mordgeld