who we are and all that we're trying to be
The last time Deimos had been at the Festival of Lights, he’d arrived with naught but ignorance and curiosity, a pestilence on the horizon, amongst the crowd who’d been volleyed and tossed into the vast unknown.
But now – now he understood exactly what the lanterns represented, why they paid tribute, and at what cost. Death held no prejudice; corresponding to everyone and everything, a fact of life, a turn of nature, but leaving the living behind to deal with its blows, with its throngs, with its upheaval, and hollowed void.
He had three this time, carefully, meticulously, designed and molded from his machinations. The first in his hands was for Emmett, the lost lad in the underground, whose bravery had not gone unseen or unnoticed – lantern hastened in a darker shade, almost like the earth, hastened and honed with a donkey on each side, the little emblems and banners he’d noticed on the blanket covering him as he and Roana lifted his form back up to familiar grounds. The Sword suspected more would follow in his wake, but he could start the notion, the predilections, tying it off, ensuring the fire was burning bright before moving down the columns and lines.
The others were for his parents (the girl in the rain had her burial shrouds, but he’d never had a moment to grieve for those who’d given him life). One was crimson, a deep, vibrant red, yielding naught but fire, the edges etched in flickering embers, a promised conflagration given the right chance, the right moment, to catch and become an inferno – a representation of his father, seething coals and blistering ambitions, cut apart too soon. The other was blue, vivid and stark in its cold, ethereal composure, like ice, like water, like marble, like rocks and boulders, borders curling like a wave, a current, on unchanging tides – his mother’s elements, taken from the plains of her power with abrupt precision. He hung them together, watched how they swayed, maneuvered, as a singular force, and stepped back, hovering, eyes catching upon others beginning to take shape, placed in the darkness.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
