khier
i was dead, then alive, weeping, then laughing
I have always believed in ghosts.
There are too many war-ton soldiers who dream of their dead friends, I think. Carthage taught me that. When he quit drinking, Oma sent me to take care of him. I was meant to fetch him water and give him food, but instead I mostly listened. I listened to his screaming. I listened to the way the room was full of ghosts of men who died. I began my belief as a boy, in our cottage on the cliffside with a garden full of dead things. My mother’s family could never afford funeral pyres and so they were buried in the most ignoble of ways; in that garden full of unmvnicured, unkempt rose bushes, a garden gone berserk with time and lack of care. At night, when my mother did not come home, I would lay awake and listen to the groaning of the wood. I would swear I heard footsteps, or voices entangled in a conversation where the words were indistinct.
I have always believed in ghosts. But Chara taught me how real they are; how they are waiting to be noticed. When I first found her, she told me she was killed by gods angry at her mother for being in love. Gods who made men and women from marble to fight their wars. Gods who were selfish, and cruel, and still so, so magical. Chara taught me ghosts are a bit of magic; and that our souls, too, are magic.
The Viride is magic; it is magic in the way of things older than gods, older than thought. In the quiet woods, there is an aura of life and death and something magnificent, something larger than self. Perhaps it is the way they overshadow me. The way they obscure even the sky. Perhaps it is the way in which I see the girl through the trees.
At first, I believe I imagined her. The glimpse is as flitting as a bird in flight; as brief as a shooting star. I am wandering aimlessly, wondering how deep the forest goes—and I see her like a ghost. I believe her to be a ghost.
Until I see her again, through another series of boughs. Again and again. It is only when True stiffens beside me that I take greater note. It is only when his hackles rise and he glances at me with wide-eyed fear that I realize perhaps this is not a ghost and walk toward her.
(I have always thought it is polite to leave the dead alone; a sort of necessity. Chara taught me otherwise. Chara taught me the dead are waiting to speak, to those who will listen). And it is Chara who says to me, Be careful, Khier and the closer I get I recognize why. There is a scream; high-pitched to the point of being nearly inaudible. I flinch, but remain undeterred. She does not turn at first. And then she does; and when she does, my approach feels too loud, too boisterous, the forest breaking underfoot and True’s stiffness becoming a growl.
There is the strangest thing I have ever seen at her feet. I do not look. I purposefully, do not look.
God-magic, Chara whispers. Life and death magic. Or is it fantasy magic?
Maybe it is ghost magic.
“I saw you through the trees,” I confess. “You looked like a ghost.”
This close, I am still not sure she isn’t. The emerald stone is beat, beat, beating against my chest. I ask, in a voice for church, a voice for prayer: "What do you know of this forest?"
Speech | @Danaë
