who we are and all that we're trying to be
Welcome to the club (more than gnashing teeth and war-torn bones, refugees built with hate and vehemence in their brains, soaked and absorbed with so much callousness and debauchery) with a broad smile and an encouraging whisper was likely all the beast needed, raising his head and easing a breath, casting off the anchors he’d weighted down along intangible lines. That was freedom and liberation too, more acceptance, more tolerance, something he’d always craved right down to his bones. “Thank you.” He didn’t expect the current though, suddenly impacting his mind, not his, not his, not his, but Remi’s, a distinct sea rising out of the depths and his heart pounded; it could’ve been like his childhood, like his birthplace, the Moonlit Tides’s shore and shoal, the sinking waves, the torrential power. He waited until he was composed again, striving to regain something out of nostalgia and some distant, reeling pain, the agony of not having, not grasping, not ever again, and he wondered if Remi had borne all that too. “Where was that from?” And he wished, somehow, someway, he could impart the notions back, rising mountains, glorious, stalwart, and strong, glacial expansion with snow and rime and monoliths at every turn, dominion and auroras, the blaze of brilliant, beatific hues. Maybe one day. Maybe one day he’d be better; more capable.
But they had to flicker and diminish back into the clarity of the hour – his curiosity intent on the piece of glass Remi had received from Safrin. It was better than nothing, which was about all they had at the moment. “If it comes to it,” he sighed there, a nail digging into the table in thought, “We can always have it available to try.” He didn’t know, none of them did, the ignorance still blinding even when they’d already experienced one cycle of Long Night’s revolution. The previous year had been a debacle, between the multitude of deaths, never knowing when to answer the door, never understanding which lines to cross or when it was appropriate to do anything; held at bay in their ineptitude and ineffectualness, and brandished it all over again at each knock of the door. If they were prepared, it might make life easier, less daunting, less intimidating – but the unknown beckoned and pushed and howled, and they could only go off of the last one they’d experienced: a jumbled inferno of trials and tribulations.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
