Bonesplinter Ravine who thought she was a nightingale

✹☾❂

 

Eleuthera slunk along, feeling disgust towards the collage of dead things, but not the extreme revulsion that one might expect to feel. She chalked it up to the fact that, at times, she felt envious of the dead. They had paid the ultimate price, and found everlasting peace, while the rest of those left living were strung along the oftentimes painful vicissitudes of fate. Hers was a world of extremes, and theirs was a world of nothingness. How lovely that must be! 

Her foot overturned a rock which tumbled down a rocky slope, clinking hollowly against the smooth, rounded exterior of a cranium. Eleuthera followed it first with her gaze, then her entire being, and came up close to the skull, prodding it with a lilac paw until she was face to face with its half-rotted grimace. It was almost as if she could see the life that once danced inside; all the thoughts that had ever been thought by the brain that once inhabited this now-hollow place. Eleuthera looked and looked, then turned away and saw the brute in her periphery.

Certainly she had not expected to see another living thing here like she, except for the carrion birds which lined the rocky exterior like the audience at an amphitheater. She lifted her crown curiously, as if that might afford her a better look. He stood in the dark entrance of a crag in the rock, and his entire being was shadowed. Eleuthera took one step closer, then another, not bothering to wonder why another soul was in such a disparaged place. After all, she was here, and she meant no harm. Still, the distance between them was great so she felt she must call out —

“A ghost?” the woman questioned, half-seriously. “Which of these bodies was once yours?”