"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Gail is quiet when she watches him go. Her eyes are wet with tears but she doesn’t let them fall. She’s lost children before, lost lovers, even lost herself somewhere in the gaping jaws of time.
Her eyes are wet but she does not cry.
She touches Ramiel lightly, nose to his crest. He is solid and special and she doesn’t want him to go, either.
“Thank you,” she says, suddenly overwhelmed by such simple kindness, overwhelmed with loss – there’s been too many worlds, too many, and her shakes again.
To Graveling, she says: “Be good. I love you.”
And then, she lets them go.
***
She only knows what it’s like to be dead.
She knows death well. Not in a particularly macabre way, rather, it is the simple fact of her existence. She was not created as they were, rather, she was a soul and nothing else and thus existed in the queer perpetuity. Until something shifted, altered the universe just enough to solidify her – not completely, but some.
So when Ramiel takes her, when she feels them slip through the worlds, she goes into the great unknown with eyes open.
And then, everything changes.
The world around her is suddenly there, shockingly solid. The air is perfumed with scents – horses and other animals, the fecund smells of grass and rivers. Everything is loud and just so much, overwhelming.
She’s changed, too. Gone is the ghost-body, what’s replaced it is dead flesh placed haphazardly over delicate bones. The flesh might have been gold, once, but now it’s rotting.
She’s come into the world dead, a birth in reverse, and her flesh will regrow and heal, in time. But for now she seems to be a corpse walking in a world it has long observed but never dared to think it could exist in.
Ramiel is still there, solid now, just like her – though his flesh is unscathed, he looks the part of the living.
“It worked,” she says, a little dazed, “you’re magical.”
Perhaps physically it is. The cliffs, so solid and unyielding at first, soon melt at his touch. He hopes they will for Graveling, because this is the crux of the mission. If she cannot pass through here, Ramiel realizes he will stay until they can find a weak spot where she can. He will do anything, because disappointing Gail is a cross he cannot bear again. She does, though. He watches, stuck halfway in the granite (the rock an opaque curtain between them) as she makes her way in. He remembers the last time, the first time, when he’d been too shocked to really take in the details. Now, he scrutinizes every part of it with an almost scientific curiosity. It shouldn’t be possible; he shouldn’t be able to meld into rock, to go from dead to living (nor should Graveling for that matter) but he can and he does.
They cross easily into the meadow from there, but Ramiel leaves a piece of himself back on the sands. He knows he will return to it (return to her) but the loss pulls at him all over again. Something else pulls at him as he stands, blinking in the light of day. Some heaviness tugs on his legs as he moves, more than the guilt he’s accumulated over time. A sudden weariness overtakes him, and he turns slowly to Graveling. Is it because of her? Is this his punishment for breaking the rules, for plucking the dead from their eternal rest? As he watches the girl take in the world for the first time, he finds that he doesn’t mind in the least. If the price for her life comes at the cost of his discomfort, he will still pay every time.
But there’s something wrong with her, too. Like him, she shifts. But unlike him, she becomes less of a ghost and more like the undead corpse that she really is. It’s gruesome and terrible and completely unexpected. Has he brought her all the way back just to suffer? The smile he’d worn watching her watch the meadow falls from his face. “Graveling,” he steps closer, concern weighing his gaze. Her organs shine carrion-pink; her muscles race to cover them. The process is quick but incomplete. She’s no longer a ghost, but he thinks maybe she’s still not truly alive. “Are you all right?”
His mind is slow, so sluggish. What should be a grand moment of celebration is stunted by her grisly appearance. She seems relatively unfazed, though, and only this stays his feet from returning her promptly from whence she came. Not that anything can be hurried now, in his current state of exhaustion. He thinks he will sleep for a very long spell once he returns home. Graveling looks at him, almost as surprised as he is that it has worked. He shakes his head lightly at what she says. “No,” he says, unable to keep the wistfulness from his voice, “if I were magical, Gail would be standing there alongside you now.”
Their dark god hadn’t tried enough, hadn’t had the same stamina for the task Ramiel does. He’s thought about it so often that he’s confident in these thoughts – he’s marinated himself in the belief that Carnage simply doesn’t care like he does. The ghost-man wouldn’t give up; he’d find a way. But he focuses on the corpse girl for now. His limbs quake a little as he accesses her. “What now Graveling?” He smiles at his charge, leaning his weight heavily on one side. It’s likely all so overwhelming, but he wants to be her guardian, not her controller. “I have a home where you’re welcome to live, at least until you get your bearings on Beqanna.” She’s hardly old enough to be on her own – he can’t imagine leaving her behind. “This world is a wonder, but it can be very unforgiving as well.”
She doesn’t quite realize that her body is strange and unsettling (especially when her form in the other realm had been colored and far more complete). She is far too caught up in the newness of existence, of being there. Her body acts on instinct, draws breath, and she marvels at the way her lungs feel as they expand.
Inside her, a heart lurches to life, begins to drum out beats, and for a moment she is shocked, almost comically so, before she realizes what is happening.
(She’d watches them for years but she’d never felt it, no, never felt a heartbeat or known the wonder of such things.)
Other processes begin as well; blood begins to form and stir through her veins, a strange sensation, for the blood starts out cool and gradually warms as she becomes alive.
“Yes,” she says, and her rotting lips break into a smile, “yes, I feel wonderful.”
But the smile fades as he speaks of Gail, her mother (in heart if not by blood). She misses her already, misses her calm, the quiet peace she’d always had, like the still surface of water and inscrutable depths underneath.
What now, he asks, as good a question as any. She doesn’t know. She is in a new world, she is old but she is in a newborn body, she is alive but she is rotting.
“I don’t know,” she says. She knows she is child of the desert’s once-queen, but she also doubts they’d even know Craft’s name if she spoke it – it was very long ago, after all.
“I’ll come with you,” she says, then, touches him insistently (he feels solid now, no longer a queer ghost, and she likes it), “and you are magical.”
He doesn’t mention why the world is so unforgiving, only that it is. He doesn’t explain that the sight of her, whereas it inspires hope and purpose in Ramiel, likely will inspire fear and revulsion in others. He doesn’t tell her that their world thinks little of that amount of difference, that they will sooner cast stones than kind words towards someone like her. It’s not fair; it’s not right. It’s the hard way of things, though.
He fears that it’s a lesson she’ll learn soon enough without his input, anyway.
For now, at least, he can shelter her. As the grey stallion watches the change from death to life (or rather most of the change) draw startled happiness upon her face, it erases some of the worry from his own. What must it feel like to take that first breath in new lungs? What does the air taste like here, recycled and shared as it is between the living – not the stale vacuum of the afterlife? That heart must be a wonder, too. He’d glimpsed it for a second before the tissue pulled over it like a blanket, as raw and angry and fragile as anything he’s seen before. Does the pulse of it make her frantic? Does each beat sound to her like a step closer to the afterlife she’s just come from? An alarm set for an unknown time – a driving force that sustains for only so long.
Graveling says she is wonderful, and it is enough to pull his lips into another smile. For her sake, though, he hopes the growth will continue. He hopes she’ll grow like all children do, that she’ll grow and live and be happy for as long as she can. He wants her to know life, real life, despite her late start amongst those who breathe. He wants it for her - not because she deserves it (because who is he to judge her soul) – because he’d made a promise he means to keep. "I'll take you to her whenever you want," he says quietly, knowing she'll understand. He can't imagine what it must be like for her, can't imagine the loss of his own mother just at the starting line of it all. Whatever he can do, Ramiel will.
The once-dead girl agrees to go with him, touching him with her mottled, rotting flesh. It’s soft and light against his skin; he can feel the warmth already emanating from her. This close, Ramiel swears he can see the threads of muscles slowly knitting together along her shoulder. “If you say so,” he grins easily when she insists on his magical abilities. He brushes the top of her neck gently with his muzzle, feeling the rough edges of barely-concealed vertebrae. He finds himself already used to her grisly appearance, already absorbed in his newfound role as a guardian. “My kingdom awaits, Graveling.” The stallion gestures towards a path into the woods. The sooner they can leave, the less chance that prying and disapproving eyes will find them.
