3rd Spring 518 AV
8th Bell
"Speech"
8th Bell
"Speech"
Like a gasp, like a sigh, she left the graveyard behind her. She drifted along the ground, having no weight to pull her feet down to the ground like a person should. She was not visible either, although any living being in the area would feel her as she came past. Hers was an icy, frigid aura of discontentment, and she shivered uncontrollably without feeling a thing. Slinky fear trickled down her spine and coiled around her ankles. It was almost a physical thing for the ghostly woman, who imagined she could feel chains clinking and pulling her back to the grave. Conflicted thoughts rang like clamorous bells in her head, some telling her to stay where she was safe and others begging her to move.
Meriann moaned, protesting against the torment in her soul. Each jerking, tiny, blinking movement away from the grave felt like an emotional wound, but she gritted her teeth and fought, even though she was already beginning to forget why she felt she had to move.
The sea was present and close. She could hear it now that she looked at it, and she knew she wanted to be there. Or did she? Meriann stopped and shook her head from side to side as she looked out at the sea. There had been an insistence to her movements away from the graveyard and into the city, but she was turning her back on the sea that was within her reach. There had to be a reason... But the ghostly woman could not remember what it was.
In a sudden fit, she blinked into visibility, startling an elderly woman who clutched a small child close to her and hurried away looking back fearfully, without saying a word. "Why!" The word was hurled from her and in her childish anger she collapsed to the ground, to beat the earth and pebbles with her bare fists. She was so angry that she couldn't breathe. Not that she needed to breathe any more. Her soulmist scrunched, like a clenched fist, inside her core, and she screamed.
It was a pitiful sound, barely loud enough to stir the street. But, shouldn't they notice her? Was she just nothing? What kind of existence was that?
There would be many times that Meriann would think of giving up in the coming struggles of her existence, but there on the street in the outskirts of Sunberth was her first experience with the seductive idea of quitting. She knew virtually nothing about what it meant to be a ghost, and wasn't aware of their unnatural self-removal from the cycle of souls. Meriann knew she had something to do, and it was this vague sense of importance that kept her from moving on, but as her surety waxed and waned she became less and less sure of her place and her reason for being.
She beat the ground with her fists, although even the earth didn't recognise her and she disturbed nothing but herself. [color]"Why?"[/color] The second utterance was quiet and whispered. She was crouched on the ground of the street, lying on dirt and gravel. To a casual observer, she looked human and real enough, until you got closer. Then her ethereal form would become apparent in the way that you could still just about see the ground through her curled-over body, and she was crying and shaking, without ever drawing fresh breath.
Internally, she struggled to keep herself as herself. There was something very important that she needed to do and achieve before she could go. That thought was important, and she hit her head on the ground to accent that. Her forehead shimmered, but the cold ground did nothing to affect her. Where was the pain? Suddenly, she was desperate. She needed to feel something, whether it was pain or the wind on her skin or the salt sea stinging her eyes, she needed to feel as a human did. It would help her to remain in Sunberth until she had found what she had to do, she was sure of it.
She sought to materialise, as she had done in the graveyard. She struggled and battered her soul, trying to squeeze a little life into her shivering body, but nothing happened. She danced on the spot, she concentrated as hard as she could, she even tore at her hair in an attempt to gain any sense of that feeling she'd experienced before, but nothing happened. In utter frustration, she raised her head to the sky and let out a short howl. As she did so, she saw a figure out of the corner of her eye. An insane idea filled her, and she blinked over to them and forced her soul past the cracks in their teeth and into the pores in their skin and past the sheen over their eyes.
OOC :
