62nd of Winter, 511
The moon threw a strip of cold light across the bed. The girl was illuminated there, and she looked the way a ghost was supposed to look, willowy and orchid-white, her hair coiling across a mattress she seemed to skim over instead of sink into. Briefly Mirko wondered if she might be like him, some vellum-thin shell struggling to remember sleep—he wouldn't blame her for it—but he could still see her breath cloud in the chill air, billowing over the surface of her pillow. No, he'd never remember to make himself breathe that way, and he doubted that other ghosts would care to. When someone like Mirko laid down, their chest never rose or fell.
He looked away. The mist churning inside him rose to his surface, filling out his form with broad, haphazard brush strokes. He walked to her bedside to turn his newly opaque hands in the light and it refracted against his skin, softening the old ink and bruising and soot—just like it would if he were alive. As Mirko stared at the way it filtered through the fox-red hair, beads, feathers and dented bells chiming at his temples, he was almost reminded of home. All these ethereal trinkets, they caught the moonlight and threw it at irregular angles, glittering red and blue and yellow against the wall... Yeah, the floors in Wind Reach were always lit up by the sun coming in through stained windows, and when I used to watch Velki shape those little globs of dyed glass I'd look at the colored shadows they cast on the walls, wow, I really don't want to be thinking about Velki, that was all horribly embarrassing, I feel a little ill now, I wonder what's happening out there, I wonder if I can just go back now, I wonder if that Endal's neck veins got punched in and filled his insides up with blood when I hit him with that rock, what are those neck veins called anyway, can you even get killed that way? I still feel sick, I wish I hadn't thought about Velki's studio, ohhh I'm stupid, what happens when people get old and there's just too much jammed up in their minds to deal with, I guess they're going to die anyway, that takes care of that and all, what'll happen to me now that I've got forever and I don't get old...
Mirko burned through half of the Midnight Rest looming over that poor melanin-challenged girl. His own color had long since fallen out, and he'd begun to hover a few inches from the floor—blood trickled from his nose, over the curve of his chin, down his neck. The beads in his hair weren't reflecting light anymore. ...and I bet everyone will be dead once I come back, so that's good in the sense that they'll forget about the whole biting people thing, I— Mirko's eyes refocused. He blinked, once, twice, and touched back to the ground. —I was here for something.
It had taken him a bell to notice, but there it was in plain sight: The pearl, sitting beatifically on the nightstand. He'd seen a man, the girl's father he assumed, palm it to her in the Lhavitian marketplace earlier that day. Although he'd barely been able to make it out at the time, Mirko knew that smooth, luminescent texture from years of turning it over in his hands, thumbing it until its luster faded and it dimmed from warm cream to gray. And oh, that pearl had grown ugly, but it never was to him. Nothing Mirko found beautiful ever, ever grew ugly to him.
He reached out, willing his meager, cloudy life force to compress at his fingertips. He just wanted to turn it over to see if it was his, if those little symbols were carved onto either side of the pearl's surface, those same symbols that he'd poked into his own face. The image of his finger brushed against the pearl, and he pushed—only for his hand to phase right through. Petch, he was tired, he'd spent so much time staring at himself in that moonbeam as if he wasn't going to watch the way light wrapped around his body for seasons and seasons and seasons to come, oh gods...
Mirko pushed again, and it rolled serenely off the side of the nightstand.
Onto the floor.
Under the bed.
"...Petch."
