SPECTRES AND OTHER ODDITIES Part 1: A Beginning, A Ghost, A Lantern in the Dark
She remembers living, once. It’s a strange thing to think of that now, when the memories are so far removed from her that she can barely grasp at them. It feels like clutching silt in a fast-moving river, where the water carries it away, away.
She thinks she was alive, and it’s this that awakens her. Because she was living once, and she is not living now, and yet she wakes up with the ground beneath her and the feel of the wind against her feathers.
Slowly, Draga sits up.
She’s somewhere new. But is it new? She knows that the feel of grass under her feet is familiar to her, but she cannot tell if it’s this grass, if it was in these woods. Here, the sun doesn’t penetrate the treetops. She is in a world of shadow and darkness, and yet it feels altogether welcoming.
When Draga looks around, it’s to find that these woods are not all dark. She sees, at first, a mushroom. It glows joyously, a stubborn blue light in the blanket of night. Beside it grows another, and another, and when Draga finally peers between the trees she sees that these mushrooms make up a constellation beneath the treetops, an ever-glowing spattering of light to guide a dragon along.
Carefully, Draga picks her way through these woods. There is a light, small and naked in the darkness, that she follows and chases. It draws away from her with each step she takes, but knows she will catch it eventually. The source belongs to her, she can tell.
The woods seem endless around her, a maze with no end or beginning, nor walls. Just the way forward, the way back, and the whispers that tempt you off the linear line you’ve paved. Draga sometimes peers into the woods and sees those creatures looking right back, but she is no longer part of those living things. They cannot touch her.
Draga catches up with the light nearly a mile from where she’d started. Here, the woods had begun to peter out. Now ruins, greying and cracked, appear before her. It is within one barely standing shelter that she meets the source of the light.
The light belonged to a dragon. Or, rather, to the lanterns that swayed ominously at his side. It was those lanterns that lit the area now, and lit the Skydancer’s face as he shoved Draga against the stone of the wall and pressed his blade to her throat. Immediately, Draga bared her teeth.
“Why are you following me?” the Skydancer asked, feathered crest flattening to his head. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
Draga ignored the pain of her wings being pressed against the rough stone wall. “Yes,” she snapped back, answering honestly. She frowned at the Skydancer, unmoving, until he slowly released her.
“Leave me alone, Wildclaw. I have a place to be.” He sheathed his sword back into its hilt and gave Draga one last decisive frown before turning to make his way once more through the ruins.
Draga hesitated to follow him, but was once more drawn forward. She shoved herself off of the stone wall and after the Skydancer, using her hands to lift her over the ruined wall after him.
“Wait!” she called, scrabbling to catch up. “I think I know you!”
This caused the Skydancer to slow to a halt, and he turned to regard her with narrowed eyes. “No,” he replied, “I don’t think you do.”
Draga pursed her lips. “I think I do,” she repeated. “But I admit, I don’t know how.” She considered the only thing she did know, and wondered if she should tell him. She would, anyway. “You see, I’m dead.”
The Skydancer stared at her blankly for a moment, and then his frown deepened. “Are you trying to make a fool out of me?” he asked, voice hard.
Draga clenched her teeth together, and then forced herself to relax. “No,” she said, sounding more than a little exasperated. “I speak the truth. I don’t remember much from…before, but I do know that I’m just-” She hesitated, then shrugged. “Just a ghost.”
“That sound ridiculous.”
“Maybe so,” Draga agreed, “but there is nothing in these woods that could touch me or do me harm. Except you, apparently.”
The Skydancer looked affronted. “Are you suggesting that- that I am no longer living, either?” He looked at her imperiously, looking more offended with everything Draga said.
She hesitated. “Yes?”
Without another word, the Skydancer shook his head and continued along the ruins. Draga got the sense that he wouldn’t hesitate to use that sword again if she followed after him, so instead she watched him leave with a furrowed brow. She had the feeling that she would meet him again, and again, and as many times as it took until he recognized that their paths were always going to be alongside one another.