dvsappear:
Stars burn brightly in the sky above them, seen only in scattered moments through clearings in the trees. Flickering endlessly in their place in the sky, burning just the same as the last time she’d glanced at them. The night sky remembered her just the same when she was alive. The taste of blood in her mouth, the dizziness of never sleeping right again. Memories long list, to a girl that never got to be. Memories, that even in the most eerie of nights, would paint the girl in sorrows.
Mouth stretching into a smile, something once so holy but long since settled in sin. She steps closer to the strange woman, the lack of fear in either of them unsettling even in the daylight. Something was off about her, the way these words left her lips, and the way her stare lingered too long on the diaphanous girl.
“You clearly don’t know the dangers, haven’t you heard the stories?” There’s a delight in her tone, buried in the way children tell campfire tales- huddled and hushed. Continuing to approach the other, a glide almost, where her feet don’t quite touch the ground. “Those creatures that turn to men- the tattered women they leave behind. Bloodshed and carnage. Under the light of the moon, you should never walk alone. Haven’t you heard what happened to the women of Coalyard in the sticks? The ones that were never found?”
The girl stepped closer, and Morag just watched her, unaffected. The stranger was moving with an ease that was unusual, and Morag’s gaze flickered down to see her shoes barely touching the ground. They were modern, unfamiliar, shoes, with wheels, and she was momentarily distracted by them. How odd. Why was a ghost wearing shoes with little wheels on them? She felt a vague, distant, wave of mild curiosity, and was about to ask, but the ghost girl spoke first.
Haven’t you heard the stories? she said, and Morag looked at her again. She could hear the eagerness in the girl’s voice, unfamiliar and foreign. As she spoke, Morag just stared blankly, waiting for her to finish. It seemed that even death didn’t stop humans from talking unnecessarily. The girl used twenty words where five would do. It was a habit of humans that clearly carried from life to death. When she finally stopped, Morag did not return her smile.
“No,” she said, airily. “I have not heard the stories. I have no one to tell me about them.” She had only learned the name of this place from the large sign at the town’s border when she had approached it. She’d heard no stories of this place. All she knew was that death frequented here, and there were odd creatures, like the boy with the iron ring, and the boy in the stream, and this ghost girl. There were scents similar to the smell she had spent the last century following -- the smell of death -- and others, enough to keep her here for now. That was what she knew.
She and the brood had heard the howls of dogs on the moors, and the older banshees had told her of humans who became beasts, but they had never feared them. She didn’t know enough of human cadence to recognise whether the ghost was warning her, but something told her that was not the case. “I assure you,” she said, her voice clear and colourless, “I can protect myself from whatever else lives in these woods, creatures or men. You have no need to be... concerned.” She paused before the final word, still unsure if that was the ghost girl’s motivation for the story.
