Maizie looks up at the reaper and gives her a curt nod “Aye. If it means I can stay and remind them-” she points at the Royals “-about the truth, then I’ll become a ghost that wails in their sleep until they can tell lies no longer.”
The Royals addressed the crowds below them. Now trying to tell a new lie that what they’d done was for the good of the people, when it was actually for the good of their greed. The crowd seems a little shaky to believe them though. She hopes her words reached at least a few of them.
“You can allow that, can’t you? I’m still dead either way.”
She knows she should be sad. Most kids would cry about being dead, wouldn’t they? But her last moments were not filled with sadness. They were filled with anger and fear, an anger and fear that followed her into the next life, and would persist until someone spoke the truth.
Red might be immortalized now as the greatest kill a hunter ever made, but the beast deserved to go out better than that. She deserved to die of old age in the ocean she loved, at peace, far away from the violence their kind had come to know from the humans.
“I can allow you to say it’s what you want, yes,” Daniella answers, “although it’s not a desire I can grant right away. Most people who die suddenly or tragically or unfairly beg to stay behind with their loved ones after death or to avenge what killed them, so there’s a - waiting period, if you will. It’s because you can’t really change your mind once you’ve become a ghost unless someone finds the very specific thing that will allow your ghost to come back to the afterlife. So, our patron deity has us bring spirits who want to be ghosts to a place where we can see if it’s what they really want or if their rage or mourning just needed time to fizzle out.”
“I don’t think yours will die, though. And I can’t say I blame you.”
She reaches up and touches the hide of the fallen sea beast. “After all, I empathize with these creatures. They know what it’s like to be hunted and feared by humans simply because of what you are. I wish I could have met her.”
(A different branch of reapers dealt with animals, and that coworker had come and gone already, leaving Daniella to work with the child. In truth, she hated collecting the souls of children, but her maternal instincts and the fact that she “had the face for it” made them one of her more common assignments. C’est la mort, she thinks, wearily, before turning back to the girl.)
“If you’ll come with me, then?”