TM #166: Do you believe in ghosts?
Feb. 18th, 2007 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
birthrightgreenIf you had asked me this a hundred years ago, I would have said no. Demon-dead, perhaps. Guardians, possibly. But not ghosts. The dead who are strong enough make the transition to demon dead. Those who are not fade back into the eternal night. The concept of being caught between the two was too terrifying to contemplate.
It still is, but now I feel I must believe, because I have seen them.
Everything grew misty, farther away. I felt the world spin and the air crackle, and then there they were.
The first was a girl, hanging by her neck in a tree over a patch of witchblood. Her leg brushed over me, and but for Jaenelle's presence, I would have screamed. There were others. Girls missing their hands. One missing a leg. A leg the men who raped and killed her served for dinner. Misty shapes unable to move on, unable to leave Briarwood, unable to leave their bodies. They had been so very strong, surviving so much, but in the end, they were too damaged, too broken by the things done to them to make the transition to cidru dyathe.
I didn't want to believe, but how could I not, after that? I have not seen a ghost since that night, never seen those girls again, never been back to Briarwood after I fled with Jaenelle.
But I will never forget.
It still is, but now I feel I must believe, because I have seen them.
Everything grew misty, farther away. I felt the world spin and the air crackle, and then there they were.
The first was a girl, hanging by her neck in a tree over a patch of witchblood. Her leg brushed over me, and but for Jaenelle's presence, I would have screamed. There were others. Girls missing their hands. One missing a leg. A leg the men who raped and killed her served for dinner. Misty shapes unable to move on, unable to leave Briarwood, unable to leave their bodies. They had been so very strong, surviving so much, but in the end, they were too damaged, too broken by the things done to them to make the transition to cidru dyathe.
I didn't want to believe, but how could I not, after that? I have not seen a ghost since that night, never seen those girls again, never been back to Briarwood after I fled with Jaenelle.
But I will never forget.
