Playing with Ibis in the forest and searching for ghost leaves had given Wraen an idea that she wished to test. If the living beings had a ethereal presence after death, what if the same applied to plants? Maybe not all of them, but the big ones. Like trees? This prompted her return to The Sentinels, where among the Donnelaith wolves she had first opened her eyes in this world. She had been very young, when they had left, during the famine, and later on, when she had returned to this area, she thought she remembered seeing tall, tall trees. But then it could also be her mind creating new memories out of facts and stories she had been told. 

At the first glance the charred remains of this once grand place had not changed much over the years. The undergrowth had grown thicker, the grass was taller and more tree trunks had given up in the face of the elements. It was a sad place, when you dwelled only on, what it had been once. Yet on the second glance you noticed that the forest continued to thrive. Wolves had left this inhospitable place, but now various critters had found a safe haven here. She could hear them, she could see the paths - big and small - crisscrossing the vast area. She would not find the ghosts of the tall trees that had once stood, because the forest was not dead after all. It simply had changed. Which meant that her theory had been wrong.

She leaned down, focusing her ghostly gaze on a seedling sprouting from, where the roots of the old tree stood firm and the moss covered tree trunk offered a shelter from the winds. Which meant that one day she would change and begin to grow anew again. 

If Wraen had been able to hear Vercingetorix's thoughts, she would have learned that ghosts shared a quality with their living relatives - the perspective on life was heavily influenced by one's experiences and expectations. So much that even, when staring at the same scenery, each would tell a different story. However, when the young man her age approached her, she could sense the quiet clash and buzz of the two worldviews coming close. And for a moment there she was given a chance to catch a glimpse of his reality. The ghost-forest, the one, who continued to mourn, who did not want to go, who had not accepted their demise and who did not want anyone to see that the life was - in fact returning. 

"Hello," Wraen's green gaze met the ice-water blue one of the handsome stranger. In life she would have felt a tad bit intimidated by him. For a moment there - because all black wolves look alike at a first glance - she had hoped to see Arthur. Yet the sense of his presence was so different that she quickly knew her mistake. "What has brought you here? Memories? Tragedies? Unrequited love stories?" she asked, smiling and sitting down. "Perhaps, you are one of the former Donnelaith wolves, who perished here during the fire?" she asked. If this theory was true, she felt very sorry for him. Burning alive was the worst kind of death possible. 

"Or are you looking for someone - most ghosts I have met so far, have been searching," she told him. "I am afraid though that all this time I have spent here, I have not met a single soul. And I am probably not the one you could be looking for, because I know not your name, nor I remember us meeting in life."

"Oh... I am very much dead indeed," Wraen agreed, laughing merrily at his statement. "I am Old Dear Lady Wraenbourine," she introduced herself in a very official tone and bowed as one would do, when stating their identity to royalty. "Wraen for short. And your dark-clad Ghostly Excellence may be?" she asked, tilting her head to the side and giving him a charming smile. To be honest, doing this - a very awkward attempt at flirting - made her feel more alive than, where she had been before. Living beyond the veil had not been a bad experience, but it was your favourite soup without salt. It was not bad, but you just knew that in order to enjoy it 100% you needed that flavour. 

"This is a place, where my parents lived and where I was born. It looked a lot different then than it does now. The trees were tall and regal, the area had not been taken over by the bushes and small trees that are here now. Fire destroyed it," she shared the brief history of Donnelaith. "My family left this place before it happened and, when I came back, I first came here. I had heard so many great stories about Donnelaith. But there was nothing left save for wreckage and no one knew or could tell, where Lasher - the leader and good friend of my parents - and his family had gone," she told. "Where was your home originally? Somewhere along the coast, I assume? Or were you a born in the forests, but had the great vast waters singing in your veins since childhood?" she asked and paused, giving the man time to explain.

Blame it on the gods, fate or a bad memory (or all three in different proportions), Wraen had met Vercingetorix before. Twice. And on the second occasion and the third one now, she had not recognized him and had had to do all the introductions again. Now, however, the longer she looked at him, the more she felt inclined to blink. "Blinka!" she exclaimed, catching a fleeting memory by its tail and getting a glimpse of a moment, where this very same man was telling her that her eyes were beautiful. 

"Old Lord Vercingetorix, who, according to his own words, is better with arts in the physical form. Fighting, feasting and f*cking, was it in that order? Still good at those in your Valhalla or, wherever it is that Drageda wolves go?" she laughed, as the memory inside her mind opened up like book and let her read of that first time they had met each other in the wilds in details. "And you claimed to have wooed and survived the gals of the old great man of the Underworld too, didn't you?" there had been more witty and - dare she say - flirtatious exchanges during that conversations. 

The next memory of him came to her in a form of dark rain-cloud, thunder rumbling and a promise of a storm. She had been out looking for someone and Colt had just died because of Kiwi's attack. And he too was out looking for a person, who had kidnapped and tortured his dearly beloved son. She did not dare to ask, if the boy was ever fine again, not wanting to make him go back to that dark place, in case he - like Ibis - had forgotten about some aspects of his life here. 

"I vaguely recall us making plans to meet us again," she went on with a more cheerful topic. "Not that you promised to marry me and I died of sorrow, looking out in the ocean to wait for your dazzling arrival," she laughed. "But I have to admire your dedication to keep your word after your own death. Even marriage vows meet an expiry date at death," she finished. 

Wraen looked amused, while she listened to Vercingetorix go down the memory lane and add some spice to the memories. He was a funny guy and - if she was given a chance to go back in the past and live her life again, she would make sure that she would go on a few dates with this man. He was far from, what her ideals had been then, he was definitely not a marriage material. But he had a sense of humor - rough and unfiltered - but still. With him being so different from her in upbringing and manners, he held the allure of the unknown and exciting. He probably had been a man to run from even a whiff of boredom. 

However, she said none of this - he had enough of ego himself for her to stroke it a bit more. "Don't you grow tired?" she teased him with a smile, because the point of the afterlife was that you no longer needed to work or do anything to sustain your life. It was over. But then - did all those "F"s could be considered taxing activities? "Have you ever considered that a person may have more than just one name? And all of them are the right ones, if I respond to them," she pointed out. "I have not thought about it that way. Losing implies that you have something to begin with. I don't own anything and I cannot claim ownership of anything either. So... It is me here as I stand and - actually - you make a really good point! I mean, who have heard of a ghost that has died?" this was a train of thought she had touched upon time from time during her stay here. But not too seriously. 

"You sure did not. Are those ghosts that you are eff-entertaining in heavenly Drageda also the girls you promised another date?" she asked. "And if so - didn't they get upset, when they found you eventually and there was already a queue?" He then asked, how she had kicked the bucket. "That is not a polite question to ask, just as the age of a lady. But, if you have to know - good old failing of the body. One day it just stopped working," she explained. "What about you? I hope you did not die amidst a personal moment with a girl, cause this is exactly, how my friends' father moved into the afterlife. Can't say that was a bad way to go though, he was having time of his life," she said. 

Wraen's narrator may have written a poetic version of Wraen's passing, when in reality (in the background) dying a slow death from heart failure was far from easy or peaceful. Drowning in your own fluid that is accumulating in your lungs, fighting for your every breath, organs shutting down one by one, you gradually losing control of your body - first bowels, then you can no longer get up and are forced to lie and wait for death that is still not coming. You alternate between utter panic and delirium, because oxygen is not getting to your brain. You are constantly hungry and yet you cannot eat anything, because you have to make a choice between eating and breathing. Far from the worried gazes of others Wraen had withered and wasted for days and there had been no one to relieve her from the suffering. She had been cursed to die a natural death. 

She wanted to tell all of this to Vercingetorix to make him understand that she did not consider herself lucky, because of this. Dying was not a competition with a prize. All ways of passing were equally bad, especially, if you had wanted to live for much longer than the time you had been allotted. Yet Wraen found it difficult to return to the earlier teasing playfulness of their conversation, because he had stirred a memory of her actual death - the real one, which she had overwritten with a story that was not as painful to take with her in afterlife. She felt, how the horror of those last days came back vividly and she winced and cringed away from it. She did not wish to go there ever again and yet it was there like a dark cloud, hovering above her and refusing to leave. Why, why, why had he said this? Had made her remember. She turned her head to look at him with a hurt expression, but did not bring herself to tell him this in person. 

Instead she let out a sigh and simply said: "Yeah, dying is not fun." 

Vercingetorix had picked up the change in the vibe of their conversation, but still he failed to understand, what "natural death" implied. Wraen painfully latched on the "even if it was..." as if this way of dying was still inferior of him being murdered. Or - what else an ideal setting for dying could be? In a battle? While protecting your loved ones? Who was to say that his death had also not been natural? After all as wolves they had killed so many deer and rodents and lagomorphs over their lifetimes - weren't that the natural way of them departing this world?

She did not protest, when he touched her, but found it hard to let the insult go. It should not have been this way, she should not have been hurting about it, as if the bad ending was the only thing that truly mattered. Her last horrible days hung like a dark cloud over all the good years she had had and the wholesome moments she had had now. The memory of suffering took away colors and the emotions. Everything now viewed through this darkened lens, seemed silly and irrelevant. 

She looked past the man at the ghost forest behind them. Did the trees, who lived many generations of wolf lives, thought only of the fire that had killed them? Relived that day over and over? Or had they made peace with it? They did not speak to her, but she thought that maybe being a life made of a different material also meant that they viewed the world differently. Maybe, what worried and upset her here and now, did not appear as important to them. 

"Do you think there is a place, where trees go after they die?" she changed the subject of their conversation. "Or do they stay, where they were born, and just become a building block to the young tree?"

"Maybe we can only see, what our mind remembers. Nothing more, nothing less," Wraen suggested, looking around herself and seeing the ghost trees as grand and tall as they had appeared to her, when she had been a wee puppy. To anyone else seeing the same she did now, it would stand out, how disproportionally giant the trees were compared to the wolves. But then we have to remember that, when we are small, the world appears a lot bigger. 

"Energy - that's such a fancy way of talking," she remarked, smiling. When it came to living, all the talk about energies and sensing the invisible worlds and claims to being able to see the future and whatnot, was very amusing. The lengths people would take to make themselves more distinguished and important in the world than they actually were. But then - up until now she still had not figured out by, what laws the ghost-hood (-ship?) worked, so it was not entirely unbelievable that Vercingetorix truly felt that energy. 

"I never planned on being able to come here again. Therefore I have not the slightest idea, when will all of this be taken away from me," she shrugged. "Therefore I will use the time given to me well. Try to," though she knew that once this was over and she was to return, her ghostly self would not have any regrets. The contrasts, paradoxes and the art of abstract would fade away and she would enter the state of being permanently content. "What about you? Seal some unfinished businesses? Haunt some nasty people? Profess love to anyone you did not manage as a living person?" she asked. Plans were for mortals.