Graveling spent years – decades? – as something in the ether, an existence that has begun to fade in her memory as she becomes more and more real. She remembers watching so many of them, watching her bloodline (a golden queen, an orange-eyed king, both dead now; a brother, dark and tumultuous and broken, dead as well), wondering what it might have been like if she had been born.
So she knows too well the insubstantiality of things, as she was once a ghost – and then the afterlife island had come into being through whatever queer magic was shared by the land and a dark god, and suddenly there had been a form. Then, a ghost king, and Graveling had become real, something tangible.
It’s strange to think about and sometimes makes her dizzy, she’s scared of the memories she’s losing but ever excited for the things she’s coming to gain.
Before she can answer Lirren’s request for encouragement she is surrounding by stars and for a moment, one terrible moment, she thinks she is being taken away, sucked back into the netherworld.
But then logic presides and she realizes it is Lirren’s doing, her magic bringing the starlight down to swirl around her, make her own set of wings. It feels like nothing on her back but she imagines it, the light linking into her bones.
“Yes,” she breathes, though she doesn’t know if it can work, but she’s flown through worlds on other’s magic before, so surely the sky wouldn’t be so difficult.
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
nooo it's wonderful