"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
It is what he always feared in life, to lose the vibrancy and saturation of the earth and all its heady pleasures. To extinguish the spark that ignites first in the marrow and then sets the heart to beating. To make one incurious to what is around them, if only because everything is the same. Everything is fuzzy and not quite formed at the edges. Everything is dulled, hushed; even the sea that meets the land where he walks whispers when it laps the shore. When the sun rises, it is pale and sickly. He never looks forward to the sunrise, now. The world has greyed.
He has greyed.
Not quite alive anymore, but not quite dead, he simply is. His body (or the afterimage that looks like his body) has silvered, too. Pepper grey fills in spots of his once inky black coat, giving him a patchwork, morphing look. The silver at the end of his muzzle is the most pronounced, white hairs appearing and ticking off the time spent here. He looks older, though he is not. The Afterlife enveloped him in his prime, when immortality still possessed years of his life. It is only the exhaustion that weighs him down now. It shows in the anchors he wears around his feet, in the invisible foe that sits heavily on his back, pushing him down into the grey sand. He thinks maybe one day he’ll sink so far into it that he’ll disappear entirely. Maybe there will be another broken timeline for him to travel. Maybe he will be alone, forever, in a place he’s not meant to be.
Maybe it will be black next time.
He stares across the quiet water until the silence is deafening.
Sometimes, he yells at the horizon. Always, it is the names of his family and friends. He wonders if they can hear him back on the Other Side, or if almost-death doesn’t allow it, if it is so cruel. He never yells to hear himself or because he isn’t sure what is real or not anymore. Ramiel retains his sanity and surety – the Afterlife won’t take everything from him.
He’s doing it now. “Ea!” She is always the last name on his list because she is his ending. He hurls her name at the blurry horizon with all the weight he can muster. It is hard here; everything is like moving through mud. He even steps forward into the ocean this time, the water slipping over his skin like mercury. It feels as fake as everything else in this place. And then, because it is so silent that he is certain he can hear a muscle twitch, someone is behind him. He knows without turning that it will be her.
He hates that it is her.
Ramiel closes his molten eyes, still facing the sea. All he wanted was for her to live, to be his anchor to life that he so desperately remembered and longed for. When he screamed her name into the static air, he imagined her hearing him on the Other Side. Looking around the Dale, in the home they kept, surrounded by the family they built – she’d think of him. Now, she is here and it is unbearable. It is like finally being devoured by the mollusk he’d fought to save Gail. The jaws close around him and he is terribly trapped in this moment. He can’t move. He can’t look at her (and God, how many times has he traced her every line here, wanting to negate every possible space between them?)
Peace, she thinks.
It’s the first word that comes to her when she crosses over: peace, but not relief. The quiet of the afterlife is unsettling. Ea lived her entire life in turmoil, internal and external - always plotting, always thinking of what moves to make next to bring her closer to her ever-changing goals - but this life was slower.
Life is a strong word, perhaps; it’s not really living, here, or even existing. Her body is mostly the same as it was before: more silver than brown, now, scars healed smooth and silver, like lines of gentle remembering - but not quite whole.
The air is thickened, like a deep fog. The bodies surrounding her seem listless, faded - so close and yet, out of reach. She doesn’t mind. She’s always preferred to be untouchable.
She’s almost settled into the silence, until - “Ea!”
His voice is unmistakable, even after the lifetimes they’ve spent apart.
Her head whips around, and she sees him, finally, yelling into the sea. Ea moves towards him, legs heavier than she remembers. When she reaches him, standing at the shoreline, her voice eludes her as a thousand questions run through her mind.
He brings her back, as he always has. As she was never able to do for him.
“Ram,” she exhales, and the world becomes only theirs.
She wants to ask if this is real - if he is real - but she swallows the words instead, not sure that she wants to know the answer, and steps closer.
“I’m - I’m sorry,” she says, simply. There is so much to be sorry for.
02-17-2018, 08:24 PM (This post was last modified: 02-17-2018, 08:25 PM by Ramiel.)
There has been no peace for him.
From the moment he appeared on the grey shores, Ramiel fought it. Fought death, or whatever this flat existence was. He went to his grandparents again. He begged Adolpha and Erros to free him, to burn through to the Other Side like they had before. But they couldn’t. Whatever magic had sent the acolytes home the last time had fizzled up and dried out in the static light. He had tried to spirit himself back too many times to count. He concentrated and squeezed and pressed his mind until he had nearly passed out. But nothing ever happened. When he opened his eyes, it was always to find his feet still buried in the grainy sand. He was stuck fast. Simmering rage festered and spread like a cancer inside of him because he could not leave - and he certainly could not stay.
He imagined a million and one different ways to kill their dark god.
Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered anymore at all.
He eventually exhausted every effort, save for his calling out on the shoreline. There had still been that old spark of goodness buried in his scarred and weary heart. That deep desire to do what was right and just. He was sure that they heard him, somehow. Ea, Sela, Kha, Sabrael. Salt and Vael. His parents and siblings and friends and comrades. There was a list made blessedly long by a beautiful and fruitful life. Never did he ache for it more. Memories crashed upon him over and over again like the endless waves with each name he shouted. It was pain and pleasure both, hard and wonderful and terrible. It was all he had. It was all he had until she came to him, until she died.
Ram. His name in this place is like an insect landing on a spider’s web, witlessly stirring the stillness to its doom. Similarly, he feels suddenly trapped by her presence. He is caught between wanting and desperate avoidance. If she’s not here, she’s there. Alive. The stallion tenses. But then she says I’m sorry. And he is no longer held.
He spins to face her, to rush to her. “No,” he says, and it is a command that rumbles deep in his chest as he embraces her. “No.” Her mane is a kaleidoscope of colors that he could lose himself in, so he does. For long moments after, he is silent. He memorizes her all over again, because so much has changed. Death drains her of her vibrancy, just as it had him. She has scars, too. Marks that tell an ugly story but do not make her any less beautiful. He remembers, then, that he could hurt her further by all the secrets she does not know. Secrets that were made on the Other Side and followed him here. Secrets that Carnage had tried and failed to kill him for.
A choking pressure builds in his lifeless lungs. He has to spill one truth, because it has consumed him all this time. He has waited years, decades to tell her. “I love you,” Ramiel says, pulling back to look into her shifting eyes. There is time for more, later. He imagines they have an eternity (and oh, how wrong he is). For now, he has his Ea back. His silver muzzle traces a puckered scar and he eyes her with dark curiosity. That same rage is building low in his guts, stirring and brewing like an oncoming storm. He won’t ask her how she died, but it is obvious there was no peace for her, either. Not at the end. But maybe now they will share it. “Tell me, please.”Tell me everything you want me to know. Something. Anything. Everything.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell;
I would know him blind,
by the way his breaths came
and his feet struck the earth.
I would know him in death,
at the end of the world.
Is this the end of the world?
It seems like a beginning, in a way: a rebirth. She is reborn, returned to him, enveloped in his shadow and the faint smell of death. Here, in the afterlife, she is free - free from her responsibilities, from the pressures placed on her shoulders since she was a child. Pressures placed by her mother and herself. A constant voice telling her to scheme, to get ahead, to make her parents proud. She hopes she did.
She relaxes into his neck, his embrace. I love you, he says, and she knows he means it, but she can’t help but whisper, softly: “how?” and then, louder, after a pause, “I love you too. I’ve missed you.” She nestles herself into his neck, pressing against his side, terrified that he would leave her again.
Or was it she who left him behind?
She thinks they’re safe here, in the afterlife. Together, to the end of time. To the end of the world.
She doesn’t know what’s to come.
To him, she says: “I don’t even know where to start,” truthfully. Too much has happened without him - a lifetime she doesn’t want to relive. But she pulls away from him, looking into his eyes, curious and desperate, and decides he deserves to know.
“I had your mother and father and Sabrael with me. We created a new home, an island. I named her Ischia; led her and loved her like she was the Dale, but I never stopped looking for you.” She doesn’t mention Allure and Grimdark or their devil magician father who tricked her into believing he was Ramiel - the only secret she has taken beyond the grave. “I couldn’t find Sela or Kha. They must’ve been lost in the reckoning,” she says, quietly mourning all the children she has lost. “During my last rule of Ischia, I was kidnapped, and then -,” he doesn’t need the details of her torture and she doesn’t need to remember. It’s too soon, too raw.
“And you?” She says, looking into his gold eyes. Then, quieter: “What happened to you?”
In his mind, he’s spent an immeasurable amount of time locked in this exact moment.
He’s imagined being at her side again, feeling the curve of each rib pressed against him, counting each one and recounting every grain of time they let slip away between them. He’s played their reunion over and over again even though it hadn’t happened yet. He’s thought of all the things he wants to tell her, all the love he wants to show her over and over again. But all the afterlife gives him is grey; never does his wife appear, dipped in silver and with a tongue to match. There are only grey waves, grey sand, grey sky. Until she comes to him.
And this is not what he’s ever wanted.
This is not how he’s meant for it to go at all.
They should be on the Other Side, together nestled between the jagged mountains of home. They should be surrounded by their children: their light, Sela, their mystery, Kha, and their fire, Sabrael. She should be ruling the Dale, their granite queen, and he should be there to help her in whatever way she needs.
They shouldn’t be here – they don’t deserve to be here.
“I love you,” he says, and he hears her first response whisper-soft against him, but he lets it go into the grey. He’s let so much go during his time in this wretched place. Ea says it back, and it is the sweetest sound he’s ever heard. Like a lifeline tossed into turbulent waters towards a man who’s been adrift far too long, he clings to her affirmation. It’s all he’s ever needed. She’s all he’s ever needed. And now they can both be at peace (until he can get them home). They can ride out the storm together.
So he asks her, and she tells him. I don’t know where to start, she says, and he presses his lips to her brow in reassurance. Then comes the tale, then comes the truth that is not as sweet as what she’d said before. He watches her speak with his molten eyes burning, all the emotions that he’s let go rushing back to him at once. Missing children, lands torn apart, kidnap, and all the rest he can hardly bear. It is too much, too painful. He hadn’t been there for her or the rest of their family and it is all his fault.
She doesn’t even know –
And then she asks him.
Ramiel looks towards the false ocean, watches as one grey wave crashes back into the smooth shallows. Somewhere nearby, his black light lingers on the shoreline, just out of his reach. Another cruelty of their dark god, to keep he and Gail so close but impossibly far away at the same time. He misses her, but not in the same way he misses Ea. Missed Ea. Their tether is different in every way, stronger and weaker all at once. He’s never meant to cross the lines between the three of them, never meant for things to tangle. But nothing in his life has ever gone to plan.
Why should it be any different after life?
“You are the strongest soul I’ve ever known, I’m sure you did everything to the brink of your abilities.” He lets the sorrow form a hard lump in his throat. “I only wish I’d been there to see it, to see you.” The lump seems to grow bigger as he considers what to say next. There’s no other way but through. He chokes out, “I happened. I helped make my own prison.” And it’s true, in more ways than one. “There’s a woman here, a woman Carnage sent to the end of the universe. Remember when I told you about my quest as a child? She is the reason we went, she is the reason this place exists.” He blinks, slowly, the memories still as vibrant as the day they happened (how quickly they will fade in the time to come). “I was so sure we could get her home, could get her back to the Other Side. The guilt followed me everywhere I went. She cannot leave, so over the years I came to her.”
They are nearing the crux of it, and he sighs.
“I grew obsessed with my failure, but more importantly, I began to care for her deeply.” And there it is, the one secret he’s kept from her from life into death. Now, it spills out of him like mercury, slippery and toxic. He feels like he’s poisoning what’s only just started to rebloom. It is all his fault. “Just before I disappeared, she was brought back to life temporarily. We had twins.” He holds his breath, even though he doesn’t need to. Not here. Never here. “Carnage found us and tried to kill me, and I ended up trapped here. I’m sorry, Ea. I've never wanted to hurt you.”
Ea