one lives in hope of becoming a memory
There was a moment that I just stood there, blinking, probably looking stupid, trying to get my thoughts back to where they needed to be. What had I been doing? Hadn’t I been going somewhere? When it hits me, I gasp. The quest! We were supposed to be saving the world (how cliché)! I get the distinct feeling that we had failed somehow. I don’t know how, but we did. The world is still blanketed in shadow, but I know that we are not in the Afterlife. We are not where we were meant to be.
That is when I look around. It is not hard to see the dark shapes around me against the shockingly white Beach. Though something is wrong. Something is very wrong. They are all…ghosts. I look down, and I jump in shock to find that I am as well. Oh no! Oh no! Oh no, oh no, oh no! I think. Shock runs through me–or at least I think it does, because I don’t have a physical body anymore.
I look up to find where Lilliana and @[Cheri] had gone to hopefully find comfort in them somehow. I could see Cheri disappearing into the shadows, her vastly dulled glow useless against the distance that she puts between us. I feel like calling out to her, but I sense that she needs to lick her wounds, emotionally speaking. So I let her go. Instead, my eyes search for Lilliana. She is there, but there is another problem. She is there, but she isn’t. Only her body remained, cold and…lifeless.
It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, but I found myself standing there, shocked and unable to move, staring at the figure that had once been my grandmother.
And then suddenly, suddenly all I wanted was my family. “Cheri!” I shout, running after her. By now, however, she had put enough distance between us that she wouldn’t have heard me. Unaware of the others around me who are also getting their bearings, figuring out what happened (or as much of it as they could), and finding their ways home, I launch myself off the Beach, racing in a direction I hoped would take me home.
Had my legs been solid, I probably would have tripped a dozen times before I ran out of breath and had to slow my headlong rush for home (and I’m sorely disappointed that even in this incorporeal state, I still have to catch my breath and rest my legs). But when I stop, I can just barely sense the emotional residue of the filly who had been this way before me. This bolsters me slightly, and I continue on my way, walking and running as best as I could until I reached the Taigan woods.
Here, Cheri’s emotional residue is slightly stronger. I force my tired legs into a run again. When I find her, I am glad for the incorporeal state that we share, because if we had been solid, I would have run right into her. As it were, I run right through her before I manage to stop. Then I throw myself around, a panicked and frantic look on my ghostly features. “Cheri!” I gasp, “Gramma Lilli…” I have to pull in sharp breaths between my words, but this time I pause for a moment, the words stuck in my throat, like a very uncomfortable lump, before finally spitting them out. “She’s dead!”