Closed Beautiful Lies

[Erio]

82nd Summer 512 A.V.
Sunset.

What is life, if not a beautiful lie?

Golden eyes glowed as a child’s arms were spread wide, and mystery and mayhem dwelt in an adolescent smile. “Welcome to the Shrine to Those Who Have Passed,” Erio declared as the door swung open and shut.

It was near nighttime, and the candles had burned low as Leth rose slowly in the east. A haze filled the air, obscuring the twinkling gems and jewels that crowded their maker’s graves and made a queer sort of twilight within the chamber. In this half-light spirits danced; cavorting and twirling, whirling and whistling, and though their bodies were long gone their voices were not. And by Dira did they talk. The whispers came from nowhere, punctuated by staccato appearances of faded forms, and the sight was enough to frighten even the bravest of souls. And the Shine had indeed sent more than one soul fleeing in its time, and it was due to such queer events as this.
Erio, however, was sitting in the middle of this symphony of the dead, and he was content.

He sat alone. Where the keeper of the Shrine had gone, well, Erio couldn’t say. He was the only one keeping the ghosts company at the present.

They had appeared intermittently throughout the day. It seemed to Erio as that most of those who did were only curious to see who their new keeper, as temporary as he may be, was; they hadn’t been so free the last couple of times he had appeared. They donned physical form like forms, though whether they were real or not was a question Erio wasn’t willing to broach. The first had been an inarta like himself, older, yet with hair that shone like fire despite the dull fade that time and death had made upon his form.

“You’re not Whisper.” he had said, frowning.

“That is correct,” Erio had replied, “I’m not nearly pretty enough. But let’s talk about you, not me. What happened?”

“I fell,” the man sighed, “Was pushed, in fact. The man who did it – he fancied the same girl I did, or so I hear. Didn’t fancy competition, though. In any case – it don’t matter. I’ll get my revenge even if it turns out he just bumped me.”

The next had been a foreigner - human, and with maturity’s first stubble still on his lips. “All my life I heard about the wonders of Wind Reach,” the man had quipped, “And on the first day I wandered away during the winter and ended up freezing to death. Well, I’ll be petched if that stops me from living in the city of my dreams.”

The third and last was a woman, young and pretty and sad. “Death comes for all of us, my child.” she had murmured, ignoring Erio’s question altogether. “It came for me when I was but a girl, and it will come for you soon enough. Everyone believes themselves to be immortal, but the truth is that they are decidedly less so. Promise me you will remember this, child.” She had looked so sorrowful Erio was unable to do anything then nod and make this promise as well.

After this last visitor no more ghosts had appeared to him, and Erio had been left alone...until now.

“Welcome to the home of all things dead and decaying,” Erio quipped as a person, form yet unknown, slipped inside the Shrine. The words of the dead woman still rattled around inside his skull, and yet he managed to force a smile to his face. “How may I help you?”

[Eliza]

"Are you decaying?" The latest arrival made his inquiry with a lupine smile. The dead man's edges flickered before finding their form and all of his details felt lazy. His smile, still possessed of magnetism, was his preeminent feature. It managed to be sharp without blurring the line between a smile and a smirk and it left an impression of being disturbingly white. It showed by suggestion the sun bleached bones of whatever was left of him in this world. Of course, he was altogether too polite to horrify by an actual display of such in his materialization. He stood before Erio and peered down at him through crow feathers of hair. He could have been among the living at a glance, but a closer study made his death so obvious as to be insubstantial. Nolan Meluc was not a ghost who allowed himself to be wholly defined by the fact of his shroud. He was human or rather he had been. No fire kissed black hair to lend it false light and the blue sky, sun bright, and green grass hues of Inartan eyes did not belong to him. His eyes were as black as the night sprawling over the mountain, crawling out from the feet of trees made heavy with the weight of their summer boughs. An economy of motion lowered him inch by inch, the great Weather Stormvial seeming therefore to ascend behind him, casting water shadows over the places on the polished floor the dead man's own shade should have puddled. "Do they tell you wonderfully awful things?" He asked, voice cast to a whisper, every vowel thick with music of a place far from here. Humor gleamed in the continuous curve of his wolf's smile. "I get so damn sick of that. How did you die? Why are you still here? It's petching endless." And here he laughed at his own, poor joke, a black thing that was almost a cackle but was instead saved by a mellow, smoky hum as he mocked his compatriots.

[Erio]

“Perhaps,” came the response, quick as lightning, “Who am I to say what is whole and what is decayed?” A child’s laughter, wrong in this solemn place. “Perhaps we’re all dead, and we just don’t know it yet.”

When Erio caught sight of the man’s flickering edges he blinked in confusion. The yasi had thought his visitor human, or at the very least alive. Foolish, that had been, to assume such things. Whisper’s whispers (and oh how fitting that had been) came back in a tumble of words:

“It is the greatest trick of all: death imitating life. And if the ghost you face is malevolent – or worse, intelligent – than the greatest mistake you can make is assuming something.”

It was a lesson brought all too real.

“Sometimes,” Erio said, fighting to bring the smile back into his words. “Sometimes not. Adventurers and farmhands…I’ve met them both. I’ve heard both their stories – both the exciting and the dull.”

The joke was heard, considered. The smile was there, but it was the sickly saccharine smile of the poor liar, and there was something like caution in Erio’s eyes. This was a new sort of ghost, intelligent and lively and unpredictable. For once, the boy didn’t seem to know what to say.

And then, finally: “The ghosts here never seem to tire of my questions…though, I don’t think they get enough visitors, poor things. Perhaps they are just willing to humor me because they don’t have any one to talk to.”

“You, though…well, since you sicken of the same old questions, so why don’t I guess what happen, instead?” The smile became real, and the golden-eyed boy plowed on without waiting for an answer.

“You obviously weren’t born in Wind Reach, no…likewise you’re not an inarta, no sir, but you’re most definitely human, so…Alvad? Or perhaps, even…Syliran?” The tales of the knights in their shining armor had reached even Erio’s ears, but he didn’t see much of a knight in the specter who stood before him. “No…but definitely of that region. And how did you die?...”

The boy tilted his head to the side. “I got it. You were killed because of your disrespectful tongue.” Gods above knew Erio had been threatened with that enough times.

“Right on any of these counts?”

[Eliza]

The dead man’s smile sharpened toward a smirk and upped the intensity of his interest in the yasi. His was a heavy regard, crouched like a corbie as he was just outside of the boy’s reach as though a ghost had anything to fear from the touch of the living. He did, of course, but that was a greater hint at the intelligence Erio had been warned about than anything else so far – this was a man who had died and yet knew there still things for him to fear. “That isn’t a bad theory,” he allowed, musing. “And, I suppose, that after one fashion or another it could even be the truth. If you shaded it properly, I mean. I’m not certain Tyveth would want much to do with it, but he’s a god and has the wherewithal to be choosy.” He tilted his head, a bit bird like, and his regard wandered back to the boy. “Do you pity the dead, boy? Is that why you’re here?” A wicked curve tightened his mouth. “Or are you here to rape and raze them? You –“ “Leave him alone, Nolan,” a woman’s voice sighed with casual demand. The ghost looked up with narrowing eyes, but despite that implied threat the line of his mouth softened at the sight of the girl making her way toward them from the shrine door. She had a handful of years on the yasi, elevating her into the likely ranks of the chiet. Blood thick hair was caught in a single, heavy plait that curled over her shoulder and calm eyes were the color of a fading summer, a pretty but pallid gold.