[open] my heart is thrilled by the still of your hand

[cancer]

---

cancer

He is still not used to being alive.
Death was easier - it was nothing, and isn’t nothing always easier? He had not fought to wake. There had been nothing to come back for. His list of lovers is long, but presumably they are as dead as he is was. Same for the children, no doubt, maybe even their children. He isn’t sure, exactly, how much time had passed between his death and his rough, awful awakening.

He still has not been able to wake his magic. He would have assumed it dead, but he can still feel it, sometimes, an itch under the skin. Perhaps it’s like a phantom limb, he thinks, itching but nonexistent.

He does move easier, now - more like a living thing than a dead one, which is a start. He cannot say the same for his mind, his thoughts still feel sluggish, but he knows he was never the brightest thing, and perhaps he has simply forgotten what stupidity feels like.
He moves into more familiar ground - he had known the meadow well, in his days. It has changed, some, but the feel of it is the same, and he likes that. He needs something that still hints at sameness, something familiar to cling to.

you ask me about love and I tell you about violence

Photo by Emily Goodhart

[Narya]

yes i know that love is like ghosts,
few have seen it but everybody talks —

He isn’t dead, but he draws her attention all the same.

There is something strange about him, even if it is only the fact that he doesn’t appear strange at all. When she first sees him she almost looks away, tucked back in her small grove of trees that clustered in a corner of the meadow, somehow thinking her bejeweled body might stay hidden in the mottled shadows. She hadn't been looking for company today; the ghosts had kept her awake as they tended to do, and the edges of her mind felt foggy from lack of sleep. The thought of having to pretend everything was normal and okay with a stranger felt like an insurmountable task, even more than it usually did.

But thesomething about him is undeniable, and it is so rare for her to feel a pull of any kind that she finds herself stepping into the winter sun, the cold light glinting off the faces of the stones and rubies scattered across her dark body as she steps closer to him. She cannot name what it is, this draw to him, but she knows that the only thing she has ever felt any kind of connection to is the dead.

“Do you hear them, too?” she asks, her soft voice nearly breathless with hope at the idea of finding some kind of kindred spirit — someone else that might know what it’s like to hear the constant murmuring of spirits, to always be haunted. “The ghosts,” she clarifies, her tongue feeling clumsy in her mouth as the idea that maybe she is wrong finally hits her.

Narya

— spirits follow everywhere i go,
they sing all day and they haunt me in the night

[cancer]

---

cancer

He sees her, a jewel-caught thing, and is stricken for a moment. He has been dead so long that the changes in magic in Beqanna – the parade of spectacular creatures, all colors, swathed in shadows or fire or plants, some barely recognizable as equine – still shock him. It makes him all the more aware of his own plainness – gray, like his father, though of course he lacks his father’s presence, and thus becomes so little, so easy to pass over.
He realizes he is staring, blinks hard and looks away, staring across the field as if there was something else that had caught his attention. His social skills feel as achy and tired as his body, but he glances back and she is closer now, and then speaking to him.

Do you hear them too, she asks, and his head cocks in confusion. He hears nothing but the meadow around them, the call of birds whose names he doesn’t know, the faint rustling of some animal in the grass, and, of course, his own breaths, which always sound labored, at least to his ears.
She clarifies, then - the ghosts - and though he still hears nothing, he feels a chill up his spine, because he is uncomfortably close to ghost-hood.
(He had not been a ghost. He remembers dying, and then the awful awakening, and nothing in between. Or perhaps he was a ghost, and the memories are gone, buried somewhere or dead altogether, much like his magic.)
“No,” he says, then, “but I was dead until very recently.”

you ask me about love and I tell you about violence

Photo by Emily Goodhart

[Narya]

yes i know that love is like ghosts,
few have seen it but everybody talks —

She sees the confusion that passes over his face, and that only further fuels the humiliation that settles like a knot in the pit of her chest. She is convinced that he is going to find her strange, as so many did. Even though this place is flooded with magic, she knew that what she could do was peculiar, and not one of those things others considered ‘pretty’ or ‘powerful’; she could not bend starlight or encourage flowers to bloom at her touch, she could not conjure fire or heal wounds.

All she could do is converse with the dead, and even to them she was largely useless. The thing that many of them wanted the most was to be alive again, and there was nothing she could do about that.

“Oh,” is all she says at first at his answer, a small frown shadowing her face. It had not occurred to her that it was possible to actually become living again after you’ve been dead. She doesn’t even know that both of her parents had once been dead, and that it was only by some strange happening that the gates to the Afterlife had been left open, allowing them passage back. She did not see her father often, and her mother did not speak much of her past, and Narya had learned from a young age to not pry — Anonya was the type that always seemed to be barely treading the water of her sadness, and Narya did not want to be the reason she was pulled under.

“How?” she finds herself asking, and though her voice maintains its usual softened tone and her face still reserved, there is a spark of curiosity that warms her dark eyes. “What I mean is, how are you alive now?”

Narya

— spirits follow everywhere i go,
they sing all day and they haunt me in the night

@cancer

[cancer]

---

cancer

He wants, desperately, for there to be meaning to his resurrection. He was a romantic, once, even if many of the romances were toxic or otherwise ill-advised – he had loved, and loved deeply. It would be the fitting story, then: that he came back for someone special, to save them, or to be with them.
But anyone he’s ever loved is dead.
(He assumes this – vainly ignores how fraught Beqanna is with immortality, and does not know that the gates of the Afterlife once swung open.)
And there is no reason behind the resurrection, none he can tell. He went to death willingly, had given what he could to save his daughter, and had dreamed of all their faces before passing. He remembers that, still – the warmth of her small body, the cold of the winter air, then nothing. Easy.
He wants a reason. He wants logic. He gets nothing.

She asks a similar question - how instead of why - but he is just as incapable of answering this one.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly, “I just woke up one day.”
A weak answer. But then, he is a weak man.
“I’m Cancer,” he adds then, and asks a question of his own, “do you hear ghosts often?”

you ask me about love and I tell you about violence

Photo by Emily Goodhart

@Narya

[Narya]

yes i know that love is like ghosts,
few have seen it but everybody talks —

If her face falls a little at his answer, she does her best to conceal it. Even if she had not acknowledged it outright there had been a small ember of hope at the thought that maybe he held the answer to her problem — or at least part of it. If she could send the ghosts in the right direction, give them the map that would take them from death back to life. Instead all she can do is ignore them, and the guilt of it all eats at her morning and night.

But he is honest, at least, and she gives a small nod of her head in understanding. “I guess you were just lucky,” she says, even if she does not entirely believe it. She isn’t so sure that being alive is lucky, but her experience with spirits tells her death is not always lucky, either. The unknown that everyone so fears is well known to her, and still she is afraid of death. She is afraid that she will not be one of those that welcomes it, that she will be like the spirits that have haunted her most of her life — clawing for a way back out, desperate for anyone that can hear her, frantically whispering into deaf ears.

“My name is Narya,” she tells him, trying to smile. She is not good at pretending to be happy, but she has learned that others find sadness unsettling, especially from a stranger. She tries to think of how best to answer his question without it coming across as though she is drowning in self-pity. “Nearly constantly. I can see them, too,” she begins, and though she keeps her tone light there is a shade of worry there, too. “If I could control it it wouldn’t be so bad, I think. There was only a brief period of time not long ago that I could. It felt like…it felt like magic.” It spills from her before she can stop it, the thing that she has never voiced out loud — how after she had done her part to help Baltia and Stratos she had felt so strong and controlled, and how it just as suddenly had been ripped away by a force she never saw the face of. “But I don’t think magic comes and goes like that, does it? I don’t know what it was. It’s gone now, whatever it was.”

Narya

— spirits follow everywhere i go,
they sing all day and they haunt me in the night

@cancer

[cancer]

---

cancer

He makes a noise when she calls him lucky, a choking sound that snags in his throat. A laugh, a cry, a scream – the beginning of all three, maybe, and swallowing it back down nearly makes his eyes well up. He hates it, the intensity of his emotions. Had they always been so strong? Or is this like a man who lived too long in darkness finally walking out into the sun, trying vainly to shield his eyes against the brightness of day?
“I don’t know,” he says, “being dead was easier.”
To his credit, he doesn’t say better. Because even with such rawness about his emotions, can he really say death was better? After all, he remembers none of it, only the frigid peace of dying, but not death itself. For all he knew, he’d been in hell or something like it, burned and tortured. There’d certainly been times when he’d felt he deserved such a fate.

She gives her name, tells him more of her power. He shudders a little at the idea of it – he is haunted enough with his own private ghosts, the idea of mobs of them is frankly horrifying.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “that’s terrible.”
He wonders if that’s rude, to reinforce to her how awful her torment is. His social skills had been dead for quite a while, too.
“I was magic,” he tells her, because he isn’t sure what else to say, “before I died. But now, nothing works. It might be dead, too.”
Maybe she can see the ghost of that, too – the magic he had used to save a lover, to create impossible children, to carry his own daughter. The magic he swears he can feel, somewhere deep inside him, but as soon as he goes looking the sensation is gone and he is left to wonder if it’s merely a phantom pain.
“Do you think a magician could fix you?” he asks, curious. He dreams of saving her from the torment – of breathing purpose into his resurrection. Never mind that he is functionally useless – he wants to dream. Just for a moment.

you ask me about love and I tell you about violence

Photo by Emily Goodhart

@Narya

[Narya]

yes i know that love is like ghosts,
few have seen it but everybody talks —

He says that death had been easier, but her experience with the dead has created a bias that is difficult for her to overcome. The only dead that she has encountered have been restless and desperate, haunting her mind and her visions, but now she finds herself wondering what kind of death he had experienced. “How so? The only dead that I meet seem so…unhappy.” But is that so different from living, she thinks? It is unlikely that anyone has ever crossed her path and left the encounter in lighter spirits. Perhaps she is just as much of an emotional weight to the living as the dead are to her.

When he tells her that he once had magic, too, there is the smallest frown that shadows her face, her mind spinning. Maybe having magic and losing it is a more common occurrence than she realized. Before she can stop herself her mind has run off on her, trying to piece together how she could get it back, who she would need to speak to, and then quickly stopping when she realizes if he hadn’t reclaimed his magic then it was likely not possible. She doesn’t know him well but he seems wiser and far more competent than she is, and if he is still powerless then there is little hope for her.

And she realizes, too, that it isn’t even the magic itself she cares about.
She knows that to so many it is one of the most coveted, sought after powers; a kind of status symbol that not even a crown can replace.

But all she has ever wanted is quiet.

“Maybe,” she says, contemplating his question. She remembers years ago the man she had met in the forest — she never learned his name — had used his magic to quiet the voices. That had been the first time she had ever experienced peace, but he took that peace with him when he left. After that, everything somehow felt worse. The voices came back louder, more incessant, filling in the short-lived silence as if they knew someone had tried to keep them out. “Someone tried, once, but it didn’t last. But maybe his magic wasn’t strong enough. Or maybe it was only ever meant to be temporary.”

Or maybe it had been just another cruel trick, to show her the tranquility that she would never have.

“What was it like when you had magic?” she asks him, almost wistfully; she knows that he cannot fix her, but her dreamer-mind can’t help but wonder what it would be like if he could. “Was it the kind that could make ghosts go away?”

Narya

— spirits follow everywhere i go,
they sing all day and they haunt me in the night

@cancer

[cancer]

---

cancer

“It was quiet,” he says, when she asks of death.
He wishes he could give her more – tales of heaven and pearly gates, a bastion of loved ones – but those did not exist, for him. It had simply been quiet, nothingness – like sleep, he supposes, though death had been more in a way he cannot articulate.
“Perhaps the ones you met died before their time,” he says. It’s a meager suggestion. Besides, who is he to say he wasn’t actually unhappy in death? He cannot remember it, so he fills in the space with words like peaceful and quiet and slumber, but had that been it? He can recall none of it, after all, the way one cannot really recall sleep – though we can say we slept well, or poorly, but little else.
(A dreamless sleep, sure – but he’d often welcomed such sleep, in his living time. Dreams could wound.)
He had been willing to go. He had not fought it. Maybe fighting made them unhappy. He had been so ready to sleep.

He listens as she speaks of her own quiet, one created by a magician. He feels a strange parallel to her experience – a brief time of quiet, then back into the noise.
She has it worse, of course – she has ghosts to deal with. He only has to deal with the awful din of his own mind, the ache of feeling again. He wishes again that he could try to heal her.
“It was…useful,” he says, “I used it to save someone’s life, once. I used it to have children, where otherwise children couldn’t be had.”
He omits the fact that one of those particular children had been begat into a stallion whom he’d left, and he had never met the child.
“I don’t know if it could make ghosts go away,” he says, “I wasn’t particularly good at it. I don’t think I would have gotten sick if I was. But I didn’t try to make ghosts go away, either.”

you ask me about love and I tell you about violence

Photo by Emily Goodhart

@Narya

[Narya]

yes i know that love is like ghosts,
few have seen it but everybody talks —

“I hope when I die that it is quiet,” she tells him, and is almost surprised by her own somewhat morbid statement. She is finding that she does not wish for death, even though she does not particularly enjoy being alive. But if it is quiet, if it is finally where she finds some semblance of peace…then perhaps it won’t be so bad.

“Maybe I will go wherever it is that you went, instead of haunting the living.” She hadn’t realized until now that there were so many options when you died. She knew of the Afterlife, and the spirits that she sees (she is not sure if they come and go from the Afterlife, or if they are so distraught because they are not allowed in it), but she had not known until speaking to him that you could just…cease to exist.
Be nothing.
Become air, dirt, or stardust.

She listens with interest when he tells her of the magic he once had, and for the first time the sadness seems to fade from her eyes when she smiles. It seemed as though she did not often hear of magic being used for good; she mostly heard stories of it being used in power struggles or to draw blood, not to save lives or create children. “It sounds to me like you were good at it. Or that you used it for good, at least. I don’t think all magicians can say the same.” She doesn’t know if she could say the same for herself, either. After all, she only mourned the loss of hers because of how it had helped her.

“Do you miss being magic?” She asks him, trying to use him in a quest to decipher her own feelings about losing hers. She hadn’t even had magic long enough to warrant missing it, and she knows that. Missing it made her feel vain and superficial, but maybe hearing from someone that had every right to miss his will help her gain some perspective and move on.

Narya

— spirits follow everywhere i go,
they sing all day and they haunt me in the night

@cancer