"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
He comes back to the shoreline easily (the world of the living cannot hold him like it does the others, cannot keep the pulse in his veins and the warmth in his limbs). The veil is less of a membrane than an intangible doorway; when he crosses the line, he doesn’t even realize he has at first. He doesn’t feel when his heart stops. He doesn’t notice the way that his coat lightens to a more uniform grey. Coming here is becoming too simple. The world just beyond is becoming too easily accessible – he wonders if this is the way he will die, eventually. One day, he simply won’t leave.
Because now he knows he won’t stay, even if he wants to linger on the shores of the dead. Now, his grief beats at him like the milky-white waves against the sand. He watches the grains numbly, feeling the pain of each lashing. Somehow, it is a better kind of pain here. Here, he is alone with only his thoughts. Here, he cannot hear the sharp agony of his father’s cries, the crumpled, aged look he had begun to wear. Here, his mother cannot stare with empty eyes and a swollen stomach, her grief compounded by Tiberios’s loss. It’s better here with the taste of salt on his drying lips. He starts to not know where it comes from, though: the sea or his own drowning eyes.
Ramiel lets himself be haunted for a time. And for once, it’s not the face of Oorn or the mechanical clanks encroaching ever closer that sets his knees to shaking. It’s better, in a way, more real and grounded. He doesn’t have to question everything he’s ever known with his brother dead. He doesn’t have to wonder if he’s gone mad or if there is more to the world than meets the eye. There is no dark god condemning him, no curses or quests or questions. Perhaps he wouldn’t recover from another event like that. Maybe he’s meant to exist in limbo. After all, he’s come back so many times already. He’s found himself walking the same stretch of Other beach more times than he cares to admit, driven by more than simple curiosity.
His brother is here, somewhere. He could find him and know for sure what had happened to take him away from life. And as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks his family would appreciate the gesture like a starving man appreciates a scrap of food, he can’t bring himself to go. Instead, he lets the water lull him into some semblance of sleep. Surrounded by the dead, he’s never felt more comfortable. They do not haunt him like his thoughts. They shift around him, silent specters and permanent residents of the sandy stretch of beach he has become so familiar with. While he dozes, the rigid lines of his body relax in ways they are unaccustomed to being. It’s better, he thinks though he doesn’t know why, before sleep pulls him completely under.
The dead watch the out-of-place ghost with glassy eyes that are far from empty. And if he’d clung to consciousness only a while longer, Ramiel would have realized why it was better. He’d understand that the real ghosts did as well, that they could still see they were cared about (grieved for, wept for) long after they left their breathing bodies behind.
They come and go in waves, the ghosts.
Not every spirit of Beqanna haunts the strange stretch of beach – indeed, not even all of them are spirits.
She knows, because she looks for them, calls their names.
She finds her children, but they are transient and do not want to stay long. Even Shiv, who had stood so loyal at her side in life, wants little to do with her.
(But then, she can’t blame him. She sinned with her own son, and his father after that, created a nameless child born under a caul. She never knew whose it was. Never knew if it lived. She calls herself a good mother, a loving mother, but she also turned her back to motherhood to follow her foolish heart to the end of the world.)
She looks for Myrddin, too – in part because she loved (loves?) him, in part because she knows it would spite Carnage, to know who she was here with.
He doesn’t answer her calls. She wonders if her dark god has blocked him from being here, a petty and jealous move he was entirely capable of.
She misses Graveling. Misses children. The ones who are here are sad, because in them lurks untimely ends – they are the children stillborn, the ones who met death too soon. They hurt to look at.
She is surrounded by ghosts and she is alone.
She moves, restless. It feels good to move – she had spent decades standing still – so she paces the beach. It is not a large stretch of land, but it shifts, sometimes. She can’t explain it. The place is made of a magic she doesn’t comprehend, doesn’t care to.
As long as it lets her live, as long as she moves, it’s okay.
It’s okay.
She sees him and tells herself she wasn’t looking for him even if it’s a bit of a lie. She tries not to hope, because there’s been enough of that in her life.
Still.
She cannot help but smile as she moves closer.
She speaks his name – “Ramiel!” – before she realizes he’s dozing amongst the dead, and the name slows in her throat.
It’s enough to shatter the silence he had ensconced himself in, to tear away the cloak of grief he had wrapped so tightly around himself. He’d know that voice anywhere. Even here amongst the dead (especially here, he thinks) it has the power to resurrect, to pull, to guide. She is his black light at the end of the world. He’d fought monsters in the name of the greatest monster of all. He’d watched his sister disappear into the ether (he’d thought she was dead, and for a long time after wondered if that would have been a kinder fate). He’d sacrificed his last vestiges of childhood to bring back together a dark god and his lady. At first, it had all been for nothing. He was simply another colt on a quest to cure his own boredom. He hadn’t realized how high the stakes were, couldn’t have known that the two syllables he uttered on a whim - okay - would change his life forever. But the effects had been immediate. As soon as he stepped into the blackness of space, Ramiel knew in his bones that it meant so much more. Carnage’s cross became his to bear; he took up arms and bled and pleaded and survived for her.
He will always answer her call.
But this time, he is slow to do so. This time, his eyelids are like sails on tired masts, soaked by a thousand storms at sea – they rise, but slowly. When he turns to her, he sees that she is smiling. Here, in the soft glow bouncing off the waves, it seems all right for her to do so. Despite the death all around them, her smile feels life-affirming. He struggles to return it, but it is just as weak and watery as his golden gaze. He’s still sleepy, too, but this is much easier to shake off. Unlike his grief. Unlike the knowledge that Tiberios will never again walk the rugged hillsides of home. That, like Gail, he is condemned to a wisp of an existence on alien shores.
His face is like a wound that he cannot and will not hide from the black woman. He’s shown her wounds before, and for a moment, he’s taken aback by this realization. Maybe he’d been a hero, then. His puckered, red-raw skin had been a badge of honor, had helped Gail understand what they had all survived in order to rescue her. But now he thinks that his bravery had run parallel to his youthful naivety; he thinks both had died in the sand alongside his brother.
“Gail,” he says quietly, reverently into the salt air. Upon first glance, Ramiel cannot find any of the woman’s pain in her eyes. He continues to look anyway, searches for anything to distract him from his own. How has she fared since Graveling returned to Beqanna? He wants to ask, but the question stalls in his throat. Why ask, when he knows the answer? It’s far better to give her something instead - some seed of the life that blossoms beyond the grave. “Graveling. She’s well. She’s coming into her own every day, I think.” His voice is not as clear as it usually is – not as clear as she will have remembered it to be. He wonders if it is temporary (grief-driven like a barb on his tongue) or if it is the accumulation of his years on the throne. The stallion blinks at the thought, shakes his head. “I wish I could show you, somehow.” His eyes find the water again. The churning waves sound like the langoliers, but he doesn’t remember them for once. Quietly, more to himself than anything, he mutters, “there’s a lot I wish I could do.”
She stills bears their weight heavy on his shoulders.
She had never wanted it, never asked for it. She wanted to go back, yes, but not at the cost – the six had been what was left, the others frozen, shattered, torn apart by monsters. He told her he kept them all alive. She wonders. Even if they survived, what ghosts haunt them still?
(Figuratively, and literally.)
She asked him to undo it, once. To wind the clock back, undo the quest, undo all of it. He refused, lips in her hair, said, I would destroy so much more for you.
He almost loves her. She almost hates him.
They are inevitable, indefinable, and she has never had much of a choice – even as children, when he touched her and told her the things he imagined, the terrible things he wanted, she had loved him.
It is too much, to be the thing he wants – he tries to make her a goddess, to match him, but she refuses. She has no wont for magic, and besides, he couldn’t give it to her.
(He tried, once. She felt it, something prickling at her skin. But it didn’t take.)
All this, and nothing changes, she is left alone at the beach in her strange capsule, surrounded by ghosts.
Smiling, glad – too glad – to see him.
(He is different from the rest of them. In ways she doesn’t articulate for fear of what she might say.)
But the smile fades from her face as she sees the sorrow and grief that shape his own. She wonders what has happened. Even through it, he shares word of Graveling before she even has to ask.
“I’m glad,” she says softly, an ache in her voice, but it is not a lie – she is glad the girl has a chance, that she is not (yet) condemned to these misty beaches.
“Ramiel,” she says softly, touches him lightly – she relishes the solidity, a rare thing in this world, “what happened?”
Like Gail, the weight of it all becomes a comfortable load for him to bear.
It settles somewhere between his shoulder blades, nestles and grows roots deep down into his spine. It controls his impulses: steers him, drives him, and doesn’t let go. It promises to stay a long time – possibly forever – and he becomes accustomed to its presence.
He doesn’t have a name for it. He cannot invoke the exact word that pushes him down and down, further into the ground with its heft. He only knows that it is there, guiding him every day. And for all that he’s gone through, for all the miles of hell he’s walked, he is glad to have it. Because maybe he would go off the deep end without it. Maybe (and he thinks about it often enough to believe it) he is actually the monster. Maybe he is barely reined in, barely contained with the responsibility that sits astride him.
It makes sense.
Because who agrees to the whims of a dark god? Who signs a blank check for a ticket to the end of the world and all the universes before it? What kind of man (he’d been a boy, of course, but it was only a preview to the man he’d become) sells his innocence for adventure?
Ramiel blinks against the blackness of his thoughts, warding them off as best he can. It’s easier, he thinks, it’s so much easier with her. And perhaps that’s why he’s come back. Gail is the easy answer but also the most effective. She guides him – unwittingly and unknowingly, perhaps – as she’s always done. It’s easy to look for her in his darkest hours now because it’s what he’d been told to do before.
A smile dawns slowly and low on his face when she accepts Graveling’s current status. That part of his last visit had been the very best of all his trips to the afterlife. Giving life to the lifeless and a home to the homeless girl had been a gentle weight added to him. He only hopes he is doing right by her, that he hasn’t failed to live up to Gail’s expectations. But she doesn’t comment further, and he takes it as her desire to move on. Unfortunately, there is little to move on to besides his wash of grief.
Even if he wanted her counsel and compassion (the open wound he leaves for her to wash), it is hard to say as much in the secret, salty air of the dead. The grey ghost struggles to find the words for a moment. But then she touches him, and all the right ones come pouring forth, the weight finally pressing them out. “My brother was murdered. My family is in shock. I don’t think my father can cope with the loss, he’s guarded, distant. And my mother – “ He pauses, breathes in the spray of the water. There aren’t words to describe her, none that can properly convey her grief. And all the while, he worries more for them then himself. It is just another weight to add on. He doesn’t think it will be the one to finally tip the scales. The part of himself that is a monster thinks nothing will. Ramiel leans into Gail’s touch, warmth radiating from the point of contact. “Of all people, death shouldn’t frighten me.” He finds her gaze then. He is quiet, sad in his revelation. Fearful, too, because he doesn’t want anyone else but her to hear. “But it does.
She’d thought she’d had plenty to bear, when she was a queen with a kingdom to rule and children to care for. It had felt so busy, the kingdom, and lands had been simpler then – when the names were different, when no entities walked.
(Carnage had only been a king, then, and what is a king to a god?)
She hadn’t known, then. What he was (or, would be). That she was intrinsically linked, immortal in her own queer way.
That a kingdom so much larger would someday be hers – a kingdom of the dead, and she, its queen.
(Not that it’s made explicit. Or that she’s any kind of ruler. But this place exists because of her. Magic’s compromise. Does that mean it’s hers?)
He finally speaks and in the body beneath her muzzle she feels all the tension like a miasma in the air. She wants to fix it, aid it. Though things have hardened her, scarred her, she is kind above all else.
(And there is something about him. He reminds her of people past and of no one all at once. There has been no one like him.)
“Ramiel,” she says, soft, because there are no words that can soothe his tragedies, so she can only speak his name, “I’m so sorry.”
She wonders if they’re here. Not all the dead are. She’s not sure why. She wonders if they have a choice. She doesn’t ask.
She stays in silence for a moment, listening to him breathe.
“It frightens me, too,” she says, and laughs a little despite herself, “even though I think I already am dead.”
(She’s never really been sure.)
