Across strange aeons even death may die, it was writ, once, in a universe both like and unalike ours. And it is what she is, perhaps – a dead thing, a castaway soul, suddenly made flesh, an undoing of death in a way that nature must surely find abhorrent.
She looks dead, surely enough – her flesh is scant and tattered across her bones. She is a birth in reverse, a creature taken from the afterlife and reborn, but reborn dead, undying.
(Undying in the sense that this, all this, is a reversal. Someday, she will be whole, be flesh, but she does not know that, not yet.)
She is not bothered by her state, dead thing that she is. She walks alongside Ramiel with a spring in her step (there is a hole, gaping at her legs, where one can see the tendons and ligaments click alongside the bones, a horrific study in anatomy).
They come to the dale, green and rich and alive, and such a place is surely too vivid, too alive to welcome such as she.
But it does, the grass presses soft beneath her small hooves, and the trees rustle gently in the wind. The smell of it is overwhelming, the life of it (she is new to smells, to the fecund scent of grass and moss and dirt, it fascinates her). For the first time she feels nervous, eyes skating over them and seeing the wholeness of their bodies, aware that hers is not, she is a strange dead thing following the ghost king into a place she might call home.
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out