Ankyra Sound Judah sees a ghost

He is not surprised at the strangeness of this place. He had viewed it from a distance, how everything is cluttered and grows tall and broad, the trees and the hills and the beasts who roam here.  In Sweetharbor he had known where each thing stood. The mainland was a world eternally vast. It seemed to him a place of immense loneliness. And dark- one long shadow, hiding the road to light.

But the sky is the same. Through the part in the clouds the stars are glistening.

And somewhere nearby God is lurking.

Like a lost lamb, she had followed Mae’s scent. Past the willows, out here past the tangle even, where the scent that had clouded around Miette solidified past the sea.

The sea. Glittering, glistening, horribly angry and horribly alluring. Saltwater, crashing against the shore.

Saltwater, on her cheeks.

The world was horrible, it was cruel. It was beautiful but cold and distant. Everything hurt, everyone hurt.

Blossom hurt.

Gilded in scattered moonlight, she sees a spectre, but pays it no mind. She watches the sea. Gilded creature of broken porcelain, silver spectre ghosting by.

Another manifests on the beach, a flickering gold drift, small like him, and in the tracing seconds he believes he sees Dinah. He struggles up only for the three legs to revolt against a rise and return him to the surface in a plume of dust.

It is not her, but even in the dark, he senses the familiar in a lost soul, perhaps another orphan whose pieces had been scattered and now they too are driven through the dark to find them.

He does not use his voice for them. He does not think he can. He watches, and listens for what God has to show him.

The spectre watches with eyes at war with each other, the sun’s desperate light and the moon’s quiet aura.

She turns to him, the deep blue of a cave’s water at war with the sharp magenta of a dianthus. Tears mat her fur, her face a mask of wry desperation. Blossom inhales like the specter of death itself.

Why do people have to hurt? She croaks into the night air, sea breezes ripping at the fur of her cheeks

They are a pained mainlander, but not unheard.

What has hurt her heart?

The boy lifts and attempts a lurch. There might be a second fall, but he must patiently learn to trust this odd balance, the way a bird must before they can fly.

He moves to be a silent partner to her sorrow. He’d been torn by conflict, mocked by fear. He’d reached the end and given himself up to it. But he'd found something there.

You don’t really find God until you’ve seen the darkness.

When he looks at her, she shines in the night! Herself, a candle keeping vigil, an apparition of the first word: light! And she would not glow so starkly against any other shade. Light and dark; they exist together.

He wishes to tell her this. When he tries, a dry sound scrapes flat against his throat.

Blossom’s heart, soft as a rabbit and just as easily harmed, crawls from its burrow as the boy joins her. The dry croak of a throat wrenched with salt and sorrow, a mirror of her own.

Why do we hurt each other? She whispers to the wind. The spectre is her silent wall, a mirror she can speak to and listen for an answer she thinks will never come.

Why does anyone become mean? Why is the world cruel? The sea, tossing both of their furs.

Why is it so beautiful, but so cruel?

The last image of his father is conjured by the sting of her question. He shakes his head slowly: I don’t know.

Why had his family left? Even dad had given up, too.

It had awakened something, a place where pain could enter. It tethers him to this girl’s suffering. But he is also bound by endless love. Somewhere in these wilds is his father. He will find him, and together they will return to their island, to rebuild Sweetharbor into a place of healing. A refuge for those who cannot yet see their own brilliance through the darkness; a place for those like Caracal, and maybe for those like this girl, too.

All the boy's doing is by gesture; a tender touch to her shoulder with his own, eyes that look intently into her face, communicating wordlessly that he is here.

He thanks God silently. He had showed him there was great work to be done, and that it would not be done alone.

Her ghost- when had she begun to think of him as hers?- touched her shoulder with a soft caress. Blossom’s teary eyes lifted from the distant sea, the swell of it captivating and terrifying her all in a single blow.

My daddy is gone. She whispers the deepest of her fears to the ghost, unsure of why, only knowing this is not something she can say to her momma, to Boone, to Mae. They all are hurt, and Blossom needs to be steady. For them. Her hurts are not so big when she looks at them and theirs.

I don’t think he’s gonna come back. If Lestan could, he would have, wouldn’t he? Even if momma didn’t love him anymore? Even if she had Boone, because Lestan had loved Blossom, right?

She sniffled, and leaned against the ghost.

I wish I could take away all the hurts. M-Make everyone happy. Blossom didn’t want to hurt, she wished it never hurt again and she just lived her days in a rosey pink haze. Like before.

Her grief braids with his own and he braces into her lean despite how his own balance falters. He didn’t understand much about pain. The terrible void in it makes him feel small. There had been a time on the second island when he was so deep inside it that he could not see the path forward, or that anything lay beyond it all.

That’s how the hurt feels: like being stuck inside a massive rock. Encased; alone.

My dad’s missing too, he thinks to tell her, but I know he will be back. Maybe your’s will, also.

Instead of the stone he feels God pressing down all around him. They are never alone- not truly. Because God knows them by their loneliness, and He sees through their eyes.

The boy gestures again for the girl, this time in a soft invitation with the bow of his head and the closing of his eyes, to join him, if she might wish, to pray.

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Her ghost bows his head.

Blossom has met few religious wolves, but she recognizes the gesture. The touch of chin to sternum, eyes closed in reverence.

She wishes she believed in anything so strongly. But an invitation is an invitation. So, she drops her chin, and cries to anything out there in the dark.

Please, she begs, take the pain, take the hurt, just take it! I don’t want it!

It doesn’t abate, and Blossom grieves, because while the ghost has his god or gods, she is alone in the universe.

His eyes remain closed. He does not need them to feel the surge of something like a great, grounding peace in this moment; the hurt within her answering his own. In spite of exhaustion and grief, and the vast thirsting of his throat, the boy feels strong.

He thinks he feels strength in this girl too, even if she cannot imagine right now how strong she will become.

He remains quiet, pious.

Blossom watches him. Seconds tick into minutes, and she watches him the entire time. From the scars of his missing paw (that she was desperately trying not to stare at), to his sculpted face. Her ghost, saltwater Adonis, she watches him for a time.

I’m Blossom. She says moments later, voice murmuring to try and keep the stillness of evening despite the crash of waves.

I don’t think I told you.

A touch: an understanding, and a name she has to bestow: Blossom. Ripe, bright, it speaks life into his mouth with the curl of a smile and a little joy that leaps in his irregular eyes, which look into the features of her face, still softened by childhood.

The boy has a name, too, though he cannot speak it, and if he could he would not call himself “praised”, but as the one doing the praising.

An ineffable quiver of his nose is given, a gesture that would not strain his weakened condition, but that communicated, if only in a small way, his pleasure to meet Blossom!

He offers no name in return, but a quiver of a nose brings the smallest of smiles to her mouth. Not enough to simple her cheeks, but enough to return some brightness to Blossom.

Its nice to meet you too. She gives a quick guess as to the quaver’s meaning. Even if that wasn’t it, it was still polite.

Blossom is nothing if not polite.

She twists her head to look at the distant mountains, the willows she imagines she can see from here. She imagines never returning. She imagines running away with her ghost.

She swats the temptation away. Her momma would be very worried.

I live over there. Are you from here? He didn’t smell like Miette, but he smelled of the brine so strongly she thought he must have been formed of it.

A steely tail ripples the sand. Blossom doesn’t know, but she is the first friend he’s ever made! Following the trail she lays with a sweep of nose, he is directed past the seacliffs to a distant jagged ridgeline.

He’d never seen a mountain like that before, one so high and sharp. What a strange, land-locked place to make a home on. Where did she swim? How did she fall asleep at night without the lull of waves?

His head shakes, causing the maimed leg to dangle from him awkwardly. It was a hairless collection of scar tissue that concluded in an abrupt, twisting edge. He almost used it to point, but thought better of it.

Instead, he motioned with his muzzle to where the moon hung over the waves. Somewhere out there was Sweetharbor. The boy doesn’t know where, but he is not worried.

His dad knows the way.

Of course, her ghost lived among the waves.

Blossom had grown up beside the sea, listening to it crash against the shore. Before everything fell apart. Before her life became something else. Before the world broke her across its knee and laughed when she cried.

Her smile wobbled, then dropped away entirely.

My momma was gonna take us there, I think. A long time ago, to see my uncle. She didn’t really remember the man too well, but he was there in her thoughts.

Then we got taken by a big bird. Everything’s a little fuzzy.

His eyes spring again with hope- if Blossom’s mother knew of Sweetharbor then she must also know his family! Perhaps she even knew where his dad was! The revelation trickles through channels through his tail, vibrating heavily now!

But he stills when he hears the pain in Blossom’s story and feels that there is an emptiness to her voice. She hurts.

He knows then has to get back to Sweetharbor. He has to return to his island and make it a safe home, not just for himself and his family, but for Blossom.

The sea lapped the shore as she sat in silence. Then, she looked to the young man beside her, eyes stinging from the motion. The moon is high.

She’s sure she can only have this for a little while longer, before someone noticed.

Thank you. She whispered.

For listening.