Morgana is Tending Graves
A writing exercise I did.
It had been centuries since his Nana had died, and Toby was a terrible grandson for taking centuries to finally visit her grave. Or at least, he felt like one. He hadn't known it would take so long to come home. Earth wasn't the place he had remembered as home anymore. The only other person still alive that he could possibly call a friend was NotEnrique, although Toby knew the changeling blamed him.
Toby had known Jim for a week before the amulet had passed on. That version of Jim wasn't the same Jim who had left Arcadia to find a Heartstone in New Jersey, so Toby couldn't know the day when his friend had fully stopped being the boy he had grown up with.
Claire had been lost decades before, or at least that's what Jim had told him.
Everyone else lay in surprisingly well-kept graves. As in, the grave of a guy who had died in the same year as Darci was crumbling, but everyone that the three of them had known from their sophomore year had a pristine gravestone. Other graves were well-kept as well; the false headstones of his parents looked newer than they had the first time Toby had seen them.
Toby saw her kneeling over the grave of Enrique Nuñez and wondered if he had his answer. He was about to take out the amulet, but then he saw the odd mix of grief and confusion in her eyes.
"I don't know why I'm doing this," she admitted. Claire had loved Enrique, had wanted to go to the Darklands to find him. Toby could still remember feeling mad at her for convincing Jim to go to the Darklands during those two terrifying weeks. He had reminded himself that it wasn't her fault. The plan had been for all of them to go there together. It had been Jim's choice and his choice alone to go.
It would make sense, for Claire to tend to the grave of the brother who had died centuries ago. Claire was dead, though. Morgana had replaced her soul decades ago, and Toby had killed her body. Inadvertently, she lived on. She didn't do so in the same way, but one could argue that she was indirectly possessing Morgana. It was the knowing tilt to her head, the occasional Spanish that was far too modern (or at least, the modern that Toby had grown up with) for the witch to know.
Who was she before she became the Eldritch Queen? Morgan le Fay had been Merlin's apprentice, but even if Toby incanted "for the glory of Merlin" to put his armor on he didn't trust the wizard nor the supposed truths that surrounded him. Meanwhile, Morgana was still far to angered by the loss of her hand to actually try and have a civil conversation with her.
Had she been a person before she turned to dark magic? Or was she a nameless force from the Shadow Realm? Perhaps she was both, a young witch who tried to learn magic and became possessed instead. Perhaps she was collecting names and personas, both titles given to her as well as lives she had stolen from the inside. There was enough on using the Shadow Realm to possess people to write an entire entry on it in the Ga-Huel book. Or maybe Toby was wrong about all this. This could be a fluke, or a trap for him. Or, despite everything, Claire hadn't died in his arms. She hadn't died when he had put aside the fact that she was one of the few connections to the days when he was a human living in Arcadia Oaks instead of a half-alien prince who left his homeplanet to fight for a world he hadn't known he belonged to. She hadn't died when he had swallowed all of his morals and plunged what he still considered to be Jim's sword into her chest.
It was probably an empty wish. But no matter what, Claire Maria Nuñez was now one of the Pale Lady's many names. And in that way, she lived on.
Toby exited the ancient graveyard of the town he could no longer call home, knowing that the woman who tended the graves wouldn't try to kill him today.
