Crossing the threshold of death is easy, he finds.
Before, time and gravity had pulled at his bones, compelling him along routes forcefully. He’d had no say in where he would end up. Once the edges of his hooves touched the wormholes, they propelled his body onwards to whatever fate (or their dark god) had in store. But even as he feels the hot remnants of his grandfather’s fire behind him – even as he fills the burned-out gap the man had created – he knows all has changed.
He melts his way back home.
Or at least he thinks he has. He thinks the flames had reached him at first as he watches his skin grey then go translucent. He ponders the irony for a moment – to get so far only to be accidentally crisped by his own dead grandfather – before he begins to understand. The cliff rock closes behind him, and for a moment, he is trapped within a tight, granite coffin. The striations on the walls will be the last thing he sees. But just as the panic sets in, the walls all around him become as transparent as his skin. Ramiel tests the boundaries of his quickly changing surroundings, gingerly nosing the walls and finding them surprisingly fluid. As fluid as he is, himself.
He is becoming a ghost, yes, but he isn’t trapped with the rest of them.
With a deep breath, the boy steps through the veil.
It tingles his skin to pass through the cliffs, but he emerges otherwise unscathed. He looks back one more time. The cliffs rise dizzyingly high but they are back to solid stone. Ramiel’s gold-flecked gaze travels down them and then to where his feet are half buried in the course sand. He’s shocked to find that he still looks like a ghost; he can see the individual grains of sand through his legs and feet. He thinks about trying to pass back into the Other Beach, to ask Erros and Adolpha if something was now wrong with him, if he belongs to the afterlife now, but he decides against it. Gail, he suddenly remembers, maybe she passed through somewhere else.
....
He tries the meadow first, then all the places around it. He retraces his steps to the beach, climbs new dunes and circles outward and away from it. But the black woman is an elusive creature. Unable to find her, for now, he heads home.
Possibly, he should have done so in the first place. As he sets off, the journey ahead seems almost insurmountable. Impossible, as exhausted as he is – but then, hasn’t he faced the impossible already? What is a few more miles when you’ve journeyed all the way to the end of the world? He thinks of his parents at the end of it (his own guiding light as Gail had been for Carnage). He wonders what he will tell them of what he’s been through – if he will tell them, yet. Everything around him has changed, but at his core, he feels the same.
Ramiel learns to control his shifting better as he runs (and at one point, he learns that he can run through things, such as the tree he hadn’t seen until it would have been too late). The going is tough, though, and the young stallion is forced to stop more than usual in order to rest. Eventually, he crests a hill and sees it: the rising peaks of his home in the near distance. The sun rises over them in the eastern sky, spilling warm, golden light down their jagged faces, softening them. He feels a desperate pride stirring in his chest at the sight, homesickness that he had tried to ignore during his faraway quest.
He passes across the border soon after, solid and real. The air is already humid despite the early hour as it presses against his skin, and combined with his total exhaustion, doesn’t allow Ramiel to make it very far into the Dale. He leans against an old oak tree and closes his eyes. At one point (a dark point in the journey, when a vicious monster held him in its jaws) he hadn’t thought he’d ever see the place of his birth again. Relief now washes over him, grounds him. Home. I’ve made it.
r a m i e l
what a day to begin again
ooc: first half is recycled just for context!