Ghost Lion Crag would you be the wind, blowing me home

inspired completely by this beautiful post by @Wraen. <3 lyrics from out loud by dispatch.

* * *
would you be the wind
blowing me home?
* * *

arcturus stepped from the lip of moonspear, and the world rose up to meet him. there was no time to reflect before his bones met stone and were scattered. his mind was set the moment he committed. he was gone long before the cold crept into his body, long before the carrion eaters set upon him and dispersed him in a million pieces as if his body had gone to seed.

he remembered none of it.

* * *
would you be a dream
on the wings of a poem?
* * *

arcturus' soul unraveled the moment his body did. he forgot it all. the coldness of the peaks. his family. his hardships and joys.

wraen.

* * *
and if we were walking through a crowd,
well you know i'd be proud
* * *

after his death he was many things. he learned time was not a river, but an infinite pool. each time he died, he was pulled from it anew.

he was a flower, a pale lily on a murky bank.

he was a butterfly on quaking aspen.

he was the wind, howling down toothsome valleys.

he saw a star born and a star die. he was a cataclysmic planet, birthed and folded in on itself. and for a time he was a hurling comet as it burned across the cosmos, searching.

* * *
and if i was gone from the land we know
would you be there darling, would your beauty still show?
* * *

in that infinite blackness of every life, he searched. he could not say for what. he was the hunter as he stole across an indigo sky, chasing stars that had fallen long ago.

there was always a piece missing. always something out of place. so he burned as he tore across a valley of shimmering stars. he crashed on distant planets. he sang with the water as it coursed through subterranean caves. he lurked with denizens of the deep as their quiet lives passed them by.

* * *
and if you were walking, with the cold night coming
would you call my name,
because you know i'd come running
* * *

i love you, arthur. he'd been somewhere in a galaxy of hissing gasses of copper-green and magenta swirls when that voice came to him.

find me.

arcturus -- star-clad son of moonspear -- came hurtling towards earth.

Just three weeks ago Wraen had visited Moonspear, feeling so calm and sure of herself. A ghost that had made its peace with life and the past and had only decided to take a short excursion in the world left behind. The journey had been interesting and eventful in the beginning. Reconnecting with an old friend. Paths crossing with other ghostly wanderers. Making new acquaintances. Walking down the memory lane in places that had witnessed Wraen grow and mature. Settling records straight with people that had once been close and then become distant. Playing with utter lack of knowledge and structure of her ethereal presence here. 

Her spirit on the other side of the veil had forgotten all about shadows of this world, the contrasts and pains, preferring a comfortable, peaceful existence. Forgetting that the darkness was, what made life in this world so full and so much worth living. The longer Wraen spent time here, the less sure she had grown of the afterlife she had created for her. It now seemed just like a faded dream. And the people she had seen there, had been simply reflections of, how she remembered them. She had left Maia and Brecheliant behind aware that her imagined paradise had been a house of mirrors, where nothing had been real. That she, who had been so sure about the life after death, did not know nothing at all. 

In the past few days she could no longer appreciate the beauty of the world she had once lived in. She no longer wished to find other old friends, because they would simply be another painful reminder that she there was no one waiting for her there. She was not even sure, what "there" even meant. She had believed in having a choice, but it all had been an illusion. A borrowed time, before something else that she did not know the name of. A ghost cannot die again, at least that Wraen was sure of, but not knowing, what was really out there or would it be another imagined thing, scared her. What was worse - there was no one she could ask. No one to turn to. 

The anguish and fear felt eternal. It consumed all the good Wraen had lived through, took over every fibre of her being and left her a crying mess. Her ghostly form was fading to nothingness and she was not yet ready to stop existing. She, who had claimed not to fear death and chaos, now would have given up all to have just a little more time. 

Time stops for the dead, but it seemed someone had heard her and added just a couple of sand grains to Wraen's long quiet hourglass. She felt a pull and all of a sudden there she was standing before him. "You heard," Wraen said through tears and closed the distance to bury herself in his embrace. "You came," she whispered against his fur through sobs. He felt real and for a moment his presence blocked out all the darkness that had taken over her.