"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
She is not dead, but sometimes she wonders if she’d be better off. She doesn’t mean this out of any kind of suicidal ideology, simply that she functions better as a ghost. In that form – shimmering, pale, absent - things are easier. The worries that consume her normal form fade, made meaningless by her faux death. Indeed, she prefers haunting to this, as she is terribly present in the meadow, uncomfortable in her own skin. Like this, she bumps into solid things, every awkwardness amplified by her solidity. She was bred at a crossroads, this girl, of a woman who was dead too long and a king who wasn’t quite there. What resulted was a perfect mix, not quite dead and not quite alive. She has some of her mother’s beauty and some of her father’s kindness and both of their anxieties, mixed up in this world that isn’t theirs. So it goes. She sighs. She knows she can’t – well, shouldn’t hide as a ghost, that there’s a time in her life when she should do something, meet others. She keeps well enough company with her mother and the other dead things, but she can’t stay there before. And besides, there is something - a wanting that Salt lacks the words to describe, a certain ache in her bones. She can’t put words to it, but if she could, the word would be closest to loneliness. Salt is not dead, but she is strange, and lonely.
Keeper never thinks of death.
It is a fact of life that she has met with acceptance even when she sidesteps it’s evidence still on the ground in a state of decomposition that is foul smelling and gross to look at. But for all that it is gross and fetid, she is the kind to stick her nose in it just to suss out the bits of sinew that cling to the bones and the tatters of fur that still retain some softness and memory of what the pile of death once was - something more, but still just an animal. Like her.
The piles of bones and once-was that she comes across, are like cairns that make the precariousness of their time on this earth. She recognizes them as markers but thinks no more of them or her own short and frivolous mortality. Death comes for all, some day and one way or another. That fact has never bothered her as she lifts her head from the decaying bundle and snorts to clear her nostrils of the fetid smell. She’s long since lost the scent of the deer she was following, and though she knew of ghosts, this was as close to ghosts as Keeper was liable to ever get. Until now.
If it had not been for that little gust of something - that tiny little but oh so momentous sigh! - Keeper might not have stopped in her tracks and just kept on with her own business. Something in that sigh struck her as lonely and not quite right, thus it made Keeper come closer and she had to admit, she was curious. She has become quite the connoisseur as of late of those that are considered strange. Not quite an expert but someone that can appreciate their individual strangeness and who embraces it, because Keeper isn’t all that far from odd herself - just ordinary.
Because she is ordinary and not at all opposed to interrupting;
She quite simply says, “Hello."
She walks a strange line between the worlds. Every bit of her is an intermingling – her father the king of a mortal land, her mother a queen of the dead; they’d mated to produce…what? A princess of some in-between, not fitting in either spectrum.
This doesn’t matter her, exactly, but it makes her restless. She shifts often, more comfortable in her incorporeal form, but she doesn’t stay so forever – stay too long as a ghost, and you ache for the certain sensations of the flesh.
She sighs to herself (she hasn’t noticed the other girl, not yet). It’s a cyclical argument she has with herself quite often, and it never comes to any kind of conclusion.
But then the other girl makes herself known, coming out into Salt’s little piece of the meadow. Salt smiles at her, dips her head for a moment in greeting.
“Hello,” she says, “what’s your name?”
She realizes a beat later that this was slightly rude – demanding, even. To ask the girl’s name without offering her own.
“Sorry,” she says, “I’m Salt. What’s your name?”
Better, she thinks. Interactions are still strange to her, and she always feels a step behind. But she tries.
Keeper has never dreamt of being a ghost.
The wind maybe, or a swift river coursing through the land but nothing as insubstantial as a specter. Tales of haunts have been told to her but as cautionary tales, or lore of old, never as something that she had taken seriously or snatched at via her imagination. If anything, Keeper dreamt of changing her shape into that of an awkward but adorable little fawn or a graceful doe with large liquid eyes. But a ghost? No, never that. Not like the one that keeps sighing and attracting keeper to her almost intangible side. Because for a moment, she thinks she has imagined the other because she seems to come and go as though not quite tied to this mortal coil like Keeper is.
It makes her wonder what it must be like to shed one’s skin and become well, whatever spirits are made of. Must be air, memories, and little else and she has a thought to ask because she’s not quite sure if the girl is real or not. Then there is a smile and an elegant little dip of the head that assures Keeper that the girl is real enough now, and she gives a small bright bark of laughter. “I almost thought I had imagined you!” she admits, because it has never bothered her to reveal how odd she is, and she is rather honest - more so than is perhaps necessary to be, but Keeper refuses to keep things back from others.
Both of them are conversational misfits, as the girl blathers on about Keeper’s name and offers up her own. Not once is she thought of as rude or demanding, just beautiful and brash but in a much understated way that is almost ethereal and not at all like unkempt Keeper with her mane full of knots and sticks, and fur that is thicker in preparation for winter. “Oh,” she offers with a smile. “I’m Keeper and it’s nice to meet you Salt.” she’s not much for introductions and small talk either, but she really just wanted to roll the girl’s name off her tongue. “What brings you to the Meadow?” Keeper is curious, but she really wants to ask why the girl kept sighing, why she seemed so lonesome.
She lacks a love of tangible things, this girl. She tries, but they don’t keep her interest, she finds herself shifting back. She senses, somewhere deep inside her, that this is probably wrong – that there is a consequence to living like this, one she can’t articulate – but this doesn’t stop her.
The girl laughs – a solid sound, sweet on the breeze – and says I thought I imagined you and oh, Salt can’t help it, she shifts, just for a moment – from girl to ghost and back again.
“I like being imaginary,” she says, as if that explains things. A grin creeps onto her lips, now that she’s solid again.
“Nice to meet you too, Keeper.” Keeper, she repeats to herself. A nice name. Salt keeps so little.
“I came here…” she trails off. Her reasons are either too boring or too strange. She goes with both.
“I came here because I was bored,” she says, “and because I am trying to be better at living.”
(“You’re not meant to be a ghost,” her mother sighs, “please, Salt, go.”
“I don’t want to,” she says.
“I know,” Gail sighs, “but if you don’t go, I will banish you. Go live, Salt.”)
Go live.
“What about you?” she asks, “what brings you here?”
Grandmother warned her about gods and ghosts.
Told her tales, some of which might have only been just that - tales to frighten and educate, but Keeper suspects that some were also experiences altered to seem less fantastical and more believable. She knows they can walk in the guise of other animals, horses like herself (and she’d say this one before her but there’s something not quite tangible about her, more like intangible - like starlight and death), and be something as ridiculous as a berry on a bush that can all of a sudden talk and send you on a quest!
Then, right before Keeper’s astonished eyes, the girl seems to become watery and willowy and wispy. All those beautiful “w” things to describe what is happening right in front of her face. She loses flesh and bone and just becomes air and mist that seems to float but then she is substantiated again by those very things she’d momentarily shed - bone, blood, flesh, and Keeper is stunned. Not horrified - just shocked to have been privy to something as magical as that! Her jaw has dropped open in mute shock and it takes her more than moment to recover from what she’s just born witness to. Her brain almost cannot handle it, tries to find reasons to reject what Keeper’s own black eyes have just seen but her heart tells her brain to shut up and just accept it. In some instances, the heart is just wiser than that mass of gray matter taking up space inside their skulls.
The grin is met with a tentative smile; Keeper is not easily thrown off from the scent of something she thinks she might like. She tracks it, hunts it down, and sticks close to this new and exciting creature that she has never before had the pleasure of meeting until now. “I can only imagine how you would like being imaginary if you can do that all of the time!” she blurts out, not one to hold back her thoughts behind a cautious trap of teeth. It doesn’t occur to her that it might be a bit of a lonely and troubling existence, to go from dead to living and back again. She just doesn’t think of things like that, but instead of how it must be to pass through life and death without a single care.
Keeper has a hundred questions.
Maybe a thousand.
Made worse and multiplied by Salt’s statements of boredom and trying to be better at living. It is this, the latter that intrigues Keeper the most. There is no way to be better at living, unless the ghost-girl means just being fleshy and drawing breath. But why would you want to when you can haunt all corners of the earth as air and mist and something that starlight shines right through?! Again, comes the bluntness that Keeper never notices as it tumbles out of her mouth in questions meant to be curious that are sometimes far too probing: “How are you supposed to get better at living?”
Salt asks her why she has come.
Why has she come?
“I was bored too. Probably a bit lonely because I get lonely at times and crave companionship. I was always around family and now…” she trails off, actually looks away for a bit before her eyes come back to Salt. Keeper offers no further explanation - she was raised by a morose father, a half-brother who doted on her, and a half-sister who sometimes bullied her but loved her all the same, and a grandmother she saw as a mythic figure who told her stories and told her it was okay that she was different, because she was in the most original way (she still doesn’t know about the bear that lurks in her, that’s new and still being discovered though sometimes, she feels something clawing at her insides that wants out and it creates a burning itch beneath her fur).
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
ooc: sorry Cassi, you just got word vomit. Keeper is in a rambling mood today. <3
Things were easier, in the afterlife – where she walked among ghosts and spoke with them. She learned of lives lived fully, and ones squandered, and every kind in-between. They were lovely stories, the things the ghosts shared, but she thought of them as only that – as stories. Not something that could happen to her – that she, Salt, could walk Beqanna! Could meet girls and boys and fall in love, have children, have her heart broken, live and laugh and cry. The ideas had seemed too fantastical.
They still do, really – she’s solid, but she doesn’t really know anyone here (she has a twin, a girl who isn’t a ghost, but who glows and heals and survives without eating or drink, but that girls has been gone for quite awhile and Salt isn’t quite sure what had become of her). She’s certainly never fallen in love (she’s old enough, but the idea still seems so silly, so foreign).
Still, though, she looks to bleed the lines of fiction and her reality. Make them mix and mingle.
How are you supposed to get better at living, asks Keeper. An easy question, at least.
“Same as you do anything else,” Salt says, “you practice. I’m practicing.”
Solid body, solid bones, solid smile. Practice.
“What happened to your family? Did they leave?” she asks. It might be a tactless question – history is hinted at in the mare’s words, and Salt is not clever enough to interpret it. But, practice. Practicing.
“You practice. I’m practicing.”
Of course! Practice is practical and Keeper can see the sense in this, seeing as Salt is less ghost and more girl now. Or she thinks she is, because Keeper hasn’t brushed her nose against Salt’s shoulder to confirm this. She has to trust what her eyes are seeing and the girl looks solid enough, smiles solidly enough to dispel any further thought of being incorporeal. Who would ever believe she was talking to a ghost? Granted, this place was full of magic and this was but an offshoot of said magic that allowed a girl to be a ghost and not a ghost from one instant to the next.
Still, no one would believe her. Keeper is not all that concerned with being believed or not. She knows that she has conversed with a ghost that became a girl and could go back to being a ghost again. It is not a life that she envies, there seems to be a tragic element to not knowing which one you were supposed to be - alive or dead, how could you choose? But Salt is not expounding on her adventures in the afterlife. She is asking about Keeper’s family and if they left her all alone in Beqanna’s wilds to fend for herself against all this magic and mayhem.
“To be honest, I don’t know if they actually left. Some of them are still here, I catch their scents from time to time on the air but always hours’ old as if I’ve just missed them.” Her head tilts to the side and there is a little frown that finds her lips. Moments become minutes and minutes become hours until hours are days and night that have passed her by and she has still not seen hide nor hair of them. Grandmother is easy to find but she grows fat now from a foal in her belly and spends her time grazing and napping, and less time telling stories to Keeper now that she’s all grown up.
“I think they’ve scattered themselves to the wind, the way ashes do from an untended fire. Grandmother is one of the few that remains, and a cousin or two. What about you, where is your family or do ghosts not have families once they pass beyond the veil?” Keeper is curious again, as Salt practices conversation and being a real girl and Keeper indulges her. Truth be told, she is happy to do so.
Keeper answers the question, tells of a family scattered here and there, and then it’s turned back to Salt, who takes a moment.
“I have a twin sister, but I don’t entirely know where she is,” she says. Vael was not born half-ghost, as Salt was, and she had left the afterlife well before Salt had. She doesn’t know if this was a choice on Vael’s part, or if it was something forced upon her. She thinks of her often, how her sister could heal things, and how she glowed, soft, like fairy lights in the forest. Beautiful in a way Salt would never be (her own beauty is a more haunting thing, girl and ghost, there but flippant).
“My mother’s in the afterlife. She’s not dead, but she’s not…not alive, either. My dad’s with her, sometimes, but he’s not dead either. He’s like me – part ghost.”
When she says it like that, it sounds strange. So many things dead, and not-dead.
“There’s others, but they’re distant, and I don’t know anything about them.”
She had pressed, but Gail had never divulged further information on Salt’s relatives, the inevitable half-siblings that spring up in most piecemeal families. She’d overheard Gail talking of other children, but from the way sadness had drifted into her tone, Salt gets the sense they are dead. The kind of dead where they stay gone.
“I grew up with mother in the afterlife,” she says. This is not part of her family – but then, it is. Mother was her family. “But eventually she said I needed to come here, that I couldn’t waste my youth on so many dead things.”
When she had lived in the afterlife, things had not felt dead. But now, being here, she realizes how those horses had lacked - a certain indefinable thing gone from them. She wonders what it will feel like when she returns – if it will feel like home, or just like another haunted place.
A twin!
How exciting! There are one or two sets of such in the bloodline but none that she is close to or familiar with. Her brain spins with possibilities of what being a twin must be like, and the bond that the two of them must share. Keeper cannot stop herself from blurting out - “What is she like? Is she like you or different?” Because how could she not ask those questions after learning such a tidbit about Salt as that? Twins! It tickles her heart to think of it, given that Salt’s face gives nothing away. Keeper guesses that that might have something to do with so much time spent in the afterlife as a ghost and less time as a corporeal horse on this side of the spirit realm.
Salt divulges about her mother and then her father. Shares how the father is like her, part ghost but mentions that the mother is not dead. Curious, Keeper cannot take her eyes off of Salt. “What is your mother than if neither dead nor a ghost?” That sounds like more magic is involved and none of which Keeper is familiar with. Or perhaps Salt’s mother is a god of some sort. That would be appropriate, somehow but somehow not since the girl-ghost in front of her seems more down to earth or more of the earth than of some momentous celestial joining that pulled her up and out of the spirit realm to inhabit both worlds of living and dead.
There is the mention of others, but it was said in the same way that Keeper had said it. To the point that neither of them knew about those that had come before, either because the telling was too sad to tell or the knowing was just not worth knowing. So she keeps her interest on Salt who goes on to say that she grew up in the afterlife but that her mother insisted she come here and know what it was like to be alive. (Keeper thinks that Salt was perhaps as much alive as a ghost in her element as she is now in this meadow and in much more solid flesh.)
“Do you think it was wasted?” There is somewhat of a conspiratorial tone to Keeper’s voice, as if she thinks that mothers and grandmothers don’t always know what’s best for children. Granted, Keeper couldn’t quite argue with the logic of some not-quite-dead mare that said her ghost of a daughter needed to have a taste of what life was like but Keeper also thought that Salt could learn a lot from the dead. “I think you’d learn just as much there as you could here.”
