A Morning's Mourning

by **Keene Ward** on February 13th, 2015, 5:11 am

The fifty-fourth day of winter 514 AV

When he woke, it was with a rush of breath, like breaking through the surface of a pond just at the point of drowning. Keene shivered, the memories of his night terrors drawing forth the unwanted reaction before he was able to shove them down and out of the way. The residual panic settled down, allowing him to breathe normally as he wiped the sweat from his brow, wincing as he used the blistered back of his hand. Laying back on his mattress, Keene stared up into the darkness, the sound of his own breathing mixing in with that of crying. He blinked. The crying was not his own, and it had a familiar enough ring to it that he'd not thought anything of it when he'd first awoke. Turning his head, Keene squinted through the darkness, searching for the source of the sound. It drifted through the air, a wavering tremble of a child. He frowned, rising up and swinging his legs out of his bed, turning towards where he knew the exit to the main cavern was. As he stood, he held up a hand, releasing a small ball of res that he ignited into flame, the pale blue light casting an eerie glow about his chambers.

Leaving the fire to flicker where it hung in the air, Keene quickly dressed himself, slipping on his sandals and knee length breeches before pulling one of his tunics over his head. As he left the chamber, the fire darted before him with a flick of his wrist were it settled a few paces and to the right of him, drifting calmly in the air. He followed the sound of the sobs, keeping his steps soft against the smooth obsidian of the floor. The sound's volume increased as he moved out into the cavern, but there was no sign of Wilhemina, though her sobbing had grown to the point where it was quite certainly coming from outside. Turning to stare out into the darkness of the tunnel that led out into the wilds, Keene was surprised to see there was little light. It seemed he had woken while the sun still slumbered, and as he made his way down the tunnel, the flickering light illuminated the way. The closer he got, the more defined the sobs, there were words paired in with the shaking, tearful sounds, though what words exactly Keene wasn't able to determine.

When he finally stepped outside, the world was bathed in a silvery shadow, the moon obscured by the ever present clouds, filtering through their suspended particles in a way that made it seem like darkness with definition. Keene snuffed out his light, his target clearly defined by the unearthly glow of her body as she hovered above the ground, knees pulled up and buried. He did not approach her immediately, instead he stood silent in the mouth of the cave, watching her. Wilhemina was an unknown, and while she had seemed relatively ok with the fact that Keene had effectively served as her executioner, over the past few days she had been acting strangely. Whatever the cause, Keene wasn't about to rule himself out as one of them. She didn't seem to notice his presence, but her voice had begun to grown in intensity. "I don't want to be dead, I don't want to be dead, I don't want to be," They ran together in an ever increasing forte until they culminated into wailing crescendo as she screamed out the final word, "Dead!"

Keene knew little of ghosts, other than that they existed. In his live in Zeltiva, he had heard a whisper or two about them and read many a poem about the sombre and lonely unlives they led. When it came to the spectral child before him, however, he knew next to nothing. Whatever created ghosts in the first place was unclear to him. Boswell - the thought caught at his throat for a few ticks before he forced himself to swallow the rising pain, pushing the cracked face from his thoughts - had not returned, while the child had. For all he knew, it was a random lottery: some were made ghosts while others simply passed on. While it was possible, Keene preferred to lean more towards a set of requirements. Ghosts were hardly nonsensical: they followed their own set of rules. Wilhemina, in spite of her near human nature, was a spirit, and spirits were not human - at least, they were no longer. His mouth turned down in a frown as she continued to wail, her cries having grown to a point where he worried Atziri would take notice.

On the subject of Atziri, Keene wasn't sure whether she was aware there was a ghost haunting him or not. She had not spoken of it, nor did she seem curious about who he spoke to outside of the cave. She had also kept comment from the mark upon his back. Whatever her reasons, Keene doubted she was completely oblivious. Still, if Wilhemina became a problem, Keene wanted to deal with it himself. Atziri's job was to train him not clean up his messes. While the ghost had yet to become such, her wails were getting her closer and closer to one. While he doubted his timing to be very effective in dissolving whatever situation he was stepping into, Keene moved forward, a raise of his brow as his soft, cool voice sounded in stable opposition to the wobbling sobs of the child's shouts. "Crying won't solve your problem." There was no aggression in his tone, simply a matter of fact statement. Shedding tears was as productive and staring at a hole that had to be dug. It would only make you more inclined to not do something due to growing weary from doing the useless thing.

by **Keene Ward** on February 13th, 2015, 8:05 am

Her voice halted, caught on confusion and she turned her face towards him, eyes glistening in the darkness. She stared at him, silent as death, and he stared back. Strangely enough, Keene saw no recognition in her eyes, simply the wide-eyed stare of a child interrupted. When she did speak, it was in a hushed whisper that drifted through the stillness of the night, faint and weak. "H-he's coming for me." Her body shook, the mists withing it swirling in an angry whirl.

"Who is coming for you?" He kept his voice quiet, matching the volume of her own. Keene had been trying - and failing - to get Wilhemina to speak of the man she had spoke of when they'd met, the wizard who he sought. Who the, Keene had assumed, both sought.

The shaking increased, and Wilhemina shook her head, pressing her hands against her head and shutting her eyes. "I-I'm scared... Where's mommy? M-Mommy!" The last word was shouted once more, echoing across the valley. She feel back into incoherent sobbing, pressing her face back into her knees as her small body was wracked with the force of her emotions.

Keene approached further, his frown set upon his face. The child knew who her captor was, and in her current state he had a better chance of finding it out than at any point before. He wasn't certain whether it was wise to push her or not, but she wasn't the only one who was finding their interactions disappointing. "Who, Wilhemina." His words were much more emphatic, though his tone remained distant and soft. Keene kept his eyes fixed on her as he spoke, unsure what the best approach was to drawing out the desired information.

She didn't respond, her sobbing quieting some as he approached, and Keene simply stood over her for a few chimes, waiting. There was a small sound, like ice breaking, before Wilhemina shot towards him, a bloodcurdling scream exploding fourth from her as she charged. Taken off guard, Keene stumbled backward, his hands extended before him and extruding res, but too slow to transmute it into anything before she collided with him, a freezing chill spreading through his entire body. He flailed his arms about, trying to hold them steady but finding it nearly impossible. Another force acted upon him, countering his own commands with its own. He could feel her chill inside of him, wrapping herself through his person, tinging his djed with the icy touch of her own. Keene fought back against the intrusion, but he could feel her fingers about him, gripping onto his body as if she were forcing her hand into a slightly smaller glove. In a few ticks, he was standing still, his breathe coming in heavy gasps as tears started to stream down his face.

"You!" He heard his own voice laced with the slightly higher tone of Wilhemina's. His fist balled, slamming into his jaw with a surprising amount of force and sending a sharp pain across his face. "You killed me!" No longer did Wilhemina sound when the words flowed from his lips. They were his own, yet they possessed so much hatred, anger and passion, they hardly sounded like him. His hands joined together, fingers lacing and closing into a conjoined fist that was smashed into his stomach, knocking some of the wind from him to the point where he felt his knees buckle, but he did not fall. "It's all your fault!" Res sloughed off of his skin in pale waves, the action not his own and the color a murky grey. He could feel it draining from his own djed even as he gasped for air from the successive blows to his body. The res twisted and writhed buffeting him with small but bruise worthy impacts. "All your fault!"

His mind raced to determine what exactly was happening to him. Wilhemina had taken over his body, that much he was certain. He could hear her screaming in his mind, clouding his thoughts but not obstructing them. She was far too busy with physically attacking him with his own limbs to keep him from thinking. There was a point of contact between their djed, something he could feel quite distinctly each time she forced him to create res. Though he had no sway over his physical self, the ethereal Keene moved into action. His will, the tool he had honed almost exclusively in his short life, pressed against Wilhemina's. When his arm moved, Keene moved not to stop it, but to stop Wilhemina herself. He grabbed onto her, twisting and pulling, wresting control from the limb by attacking her directly. The event was strange from the perspective of the skys: a boy twitching, choking, spluttering out desperate words only to fall into silence for a few ticks before starting up again. Keene fought against her, cutting off her advances over his body, prying her grip from his soul. He had been taken off guard, certainly, but he was no so weak of mind as to allow a child of all things to dictate how he conducted himself.

He could feel her pain, her anguish, rushing through him, but it was nothing he had not already experienced. He was not numb to it, it cut deep into him, into scars that were hardly more than wounds, but he did not let that stop him. He pushed past them, shoving them out of the way with all the grandeur of swatting a fly. He had lived with those emotions longer than the child had been alive. Loneliness? She knew nothing of it. Fear? The pathetic rending of her heart was only an echo of his own. He used her emotions against her, snatching them away from her, augmenting them, then shoving them back tenfold. He could hear her screaming, and he screamed back. His body was not her plaything. It was not some suit she could wear to exert her short-sighted idea of "justice" - for that was what she considered it. Little by little, Keene unwound her from him, forcing her farther and farther away from the points where she had dug herself into him until, with a gasp that was finally his own, the fell from him, drifting to the ground with a heavy, wailing sob.

by **Keene Ward** on February 13th, 2015, 10:44 am

Emotions running wild, Keene barked a sharp, "Shut up!" before he was able to reign himself back to, to regain control over both body and mind. The child obliged, whimpering into silence while Keene stared down at her. He drew a slow, deliberate breathe, letting it fill his lungs and drift out through his lips. He could feel the injuries he'd sustained, the djed that had been foolishly and needlessly wasted. A trickle of blood ran down from his nose, diverting its path over his lip to drip from the corner of his mouth onto the fabric of the tunic below. His gaze burned with a glacial frost as he regarded the creature before him, sniveling in silence at her revelations. He had made the mistake of underestimating her, of thinking her harmless, a child. There were those who had made the same of him, and they had paid a different price, but a price none the less. Lessons learned were often forgotten in the tangle of time, but they were quickly remembered when pertaining to one's own repetition of their failures. He drew another breathe, this one filled with intent, before he spoke, his voice frigid and sharp, cutting through the air like a needle through skin. "Do not think yourself unique, Wilhemina." He continued, his reprimand as biting as the Bonechiller's icy grip. "One doesn't have to be a ghost to be dead."

She flinched at his words, cringing away from him as if he were going to strike her, but she made no move to flee as she had done in past. Instead, she shivered beneath his stare, hiding away from him in vain and the dull glow of her own light illuminated her in the darkness of the overcast sky. He did not feel pity or remorse, those emotions had but cut from him the moment she had betrayed his misplaced trust. Instead, there was little more than distaste that showed in the pierce of his gaze. "Stand up." The command was as a cold as each of the words he had said hence. She obeyed, rising and keeping her face staring at the ground, obvious effort in her shaking arms and lips to keep herself from crying. "Look at me." She hesitated for a moment, and Keene repeated himself, slower and with greater, deliberate emphasis. "Look. At. Me." She turned wide, watery eyes at him, lips trembling to hold back the swirl of emotion that danced within the shimmering smoke of her body. Yet still she averted her gaze, avoiding contact by shifting her eyes to different points of his face. Keene was no longer in the mood to play games. She had pushed him, and she now had to deal with the recoil. "Wilhemina." The command was not to be ignored, and she met his gaze with her own.

In that moment, Keene let his eyes shimmer, the rush of memories and emotions that had been broiling within him, that he had used to force her from her control, swimming within his grey-green stare that held her own with a force far greater than the spoken word. The agony of loss, the desire of hatred, the emptiness of failure: all these things and more burned from his soul into her's, and while not all were intimately understood, they were observed and shared. She turned her face away from him, tears streaming down her face as she whimpered, soft and quiet. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so-"

"No." Keene's voice had softened some, though it was still as chilled as ever. "I don't want pity. I have no use for it." She stayed herself from the words, nodding as she sniffled. "Tell me who the man was, Wilhemina. His name."

She shook her head, her voice wobbling as she replied in a whisper. "I-I don't know, he never s-said."

While it was not infallible, Keene felt relatively safe in assuming what the ghost said in that moment was trustworthy enough. "Then what do you know?" Business had begun to replace the cold, emotion beginning to fade back towards austerity.

The child stared at the ground, tears falling from her face but never pattering onto the dust below, as she whispered a question to his question. He remained stationary, staring out into the burgeoning of grey upon the horizon, signaling the sunrise in the most drab of announcements. His body ached, more than from just the blows he'd delivered to himself. It was a weariness that had settled into his bones and had spread to his muscles. He did not imagine the question she asked to have been something she might say, though its relevance to his own question was depressingly dissociated. He blinked at her, his face turning down in a frown in realization that no information was going to be forthcoming, Keene asked her, "What did you say?"

Her voice was quiet, timid, but not without a hint of her curiosity from before. "W-who was he? T-The nice man w-who said things funny?" She turned her face up towards his, though she kept her eyes from meeting his stony stare. "You knew him, right?"

Boswell. Keene stared at her for several more ticks, saying nothing while she waited, her eyes moving over his face in search of any indication that an answer might come, almost desperately. When he did speak, there was a slight falter in his meter, his voice soft and distant. "He was my friend." He let the words settle into silence as light broke out across the clouds, bathing the world in the pallid grey scale of morning. Without saying anything else, Keene turned and staggered towards the cave, the fatigue having claimed more of his physical strength than he had first thought.

The child watched him leave, blinking back tears that had yet to cease. As he passed under the lip of the cavern's entrance's mouth, she called out, her words filled with something between empathy and desperation, a strange combination even to Keene's ears. "H-he way my friend too!" As if the simple statement was some sort of mending tool to fix the nearly tangible rift between the spirit and man before her.

Keene paused, leaning against the smooth obsidian as a bead of res drifted from between his lips to float some few paces inwards, igniting itself into the cool blue flame of his reimantic fire. He drew a deep, controlled breath, staring into the semi-darkness of the cavern that was only partially illuminated by his light. "I'm sure he was." And with those weary words, he shambled back towards his bed, spent too far past his limit to meet the day with any vigor. The ghost, however, remained, watching him disappear into the mouth of the mountain. She stood, a forlorn and abandoned figure, left with nothing. Slowly, she sank back down to her knees, and quietly, she let the tears run free.