Open A dark and stormy night

[Phaedra]

3rd day of fall 513

It was that time of the evening. The rays of the dying sun lanced through a light mist, washing the city in a glowing haze of blood, turning the landscape surreal for a few moments before the cool blue of night rose from every crack and shadow to choke the world in smothering darkness. Such was life, really; a brilliant haze followed by the black curtain.

Phaedra has been floating on the icy winds for some unknowable time before her substance-that-was-not-substance ran into the cold stone of Windreach. The sights and sounds of life roused her, grating along Phaedra’s sensibilities like a knife of ice, and instinctively she moved along the dark tunnels away from the sounds, unable yet to cope with them. Sometimes she took refuge in the living stone, other times she moved through the darkened air. Once she reached out and touched the neck of a small boy, causing him to shiver with a sudden chill.

Phaedra’s mind was a cloud of rage, with nothing resembling complete thoughts passing through the insubstantial mist of her substance. Her current state, new despite the passing of two years, required friction in order to grow, some stimulus to cut new furrows in the unplowed fields of her ghostly mentality. Now there was only hatred, envy of the living who had mastered the dangers of life and came out laughing. Nothing she had yet encountered since the grave required more.

At last Phaedra settled into a dark room that seemed to be unoccupied, at least for the moment, where she settled into a huddled lump on the floor, blue eyes glaring about her.

[Syveris]

Syveris yawned, tired. The Avora had worked on a vase the whole day, Virat insisting that she should try and make it as perfect as she could, seeing that vases were her specialty. Not that she didn't always try to make her work as good as she could, but this time, her mentor had really weary her down. Now, the only thing she wanted was to lay down on bed and sleep until the morning.

The Avora walked through the Inner Warrens, dragging her feet on the stone floor. When she finally reached her room, she smiled. Rest, at least. She deserved it after her day.

However, when Syveris entered the room, it wasn't the normal and warm atmosphere that greeted her. Instead, it was cold, a cold that did not feel very natural to her. Frowning, she looked around, trying to find if something was wrong.

Then she saw her. A woman, or what looked like a woman, in the corner. Her skin was extremely white, with wavy brown hair. Syveris would have thought her pretty and inoffensive if not for a single detail. An extremely important detail.

The woman was translucent. Her edges were blurry, as if she was an illusion, someone who wasn't supposed to be there. Syveris stopped breathing, trying not to make a sound. Why was a ghost in her room? But more importantly, was this ghost hostile? She wasn't sure, and she felt a shiver run on her spine.

Maybe she could walk away without being noticed. But then, it was the first time she saw a ghost, and the Avora couldn't just walk away. Maybe the ghost wasn't even harmful.

"Hey!" she called, trying to get the ghost attention. Her voice came out as a whisper, so she grunted, and tried again. "Hey, who are you?"

x
x

x Abstract

[Phaedra]

The ghost reacted only slowly to Syveris' words, her head slowly raising and eyes turning to focus on her. Phaedra's eyes shone a piercing blue while the rest of her seemed to fade into the merest wisp of fog. The room became colder, or felt so.

What passed for thoughts in Phaedra's ghostly mind whirled and collected, coalescing around a single observation. Red hair. This new woman had red hair, and so had the people she had flittered past, all but invisible in the dark of the tunnels. These were Inarta, the people of her husband. "Dek," he had called her, when he beat and used her, a word learned in his youth before he had been turned out.

Slowly Phaedra rose from the floor as if lifted by cord attached to her shoulders. Her face twisted in untranslatable emotions, and as she stared, the skin of her throat pulled open and a torrent of red spilled out, washing her front in dark crimson. Rage surfaced on her face like the dark back of a whale surfacing. Her voice came in a ragged whisper.

"I am slain by your people, I will have justice."

And at that the woman disappeared, appearing an instant later, her face now inches from Syveris'. Her mad eyes blazed a savage blue, and her hands reached out to grip her temples with fingers of ice. Syveris could feel the ghosts will beating against hers, battering to get in.

[Syveris]

The ghost responded to her calling, but Syveris wasn't sure she liked it. The Avora could see the piercing blue eyes, shining with strong emotions. Strong emotions... Syveris knew them well. But the eyes of the woman were dangerous, and as her body seemed to become fog, the Inarta knew that the ghost was angered. For some reason.

The Avora could sense the air becoming colder and colder, until she was shivering from it. And then the ghost got up, and Syveris saw her throat open, and the blood spill out. She watched with wide eyes, not exactly afraid, but in a trance from the scene unfolding before her. Her mind was running, trying to understand the scene, trying to remember what she had learned about ghosts, if they really bled like that. But she found nothing.

"What?" she asked, after the ghost spoke, Syveris confusion just grew. Slain? By her people? What she was talking about? "What are you...?" before she could finish her phrase, though, the ghost disappeared. However, there wasn't even enough time for feeling relieved before the ghost reappeared again, her angry face right in front of the Avora.

Close like this, the blue eyes seemed even more aggressive, even more dangerous. Syveris tried to take a few steps back, uncomfortable with the proximity. However, the girl pressed her fingers at the Avora's skin, and Syveris could feel the ghost touching her mind, a feeling more uncomfortable than any other she had felt. She was surprised and uncomfortable, too much so she could not resist for long.

And then she felt the presence in her mind, too real, too strange. It wasn't a welcomed feeling, and Syveris didn't knew what had really happened. The only thing she knew was the feeling, the presence of the other girl in her mind.

x
x

x Abstract

[Phaedra]

A chill wind seemed to blow into Syveris' being, entering at every pore. The room seemed to recede, become distant and lost in the darkness. Something cold and strong pressed at her mind, and a series of images worked themselves across the edges of her consciousness. She saw a man of Inarta heritage but foreign dress approach her, anger writ large on his face and a kitchen knife in his hand. He seemed to slash at her, but the image was distant and unreal and then all faded to red.

Syveris became aware of a voice speaking, harsh and overwrought with emotion, and after a moment she realized that it was her own.

"...and on that night Berlin Cloudsong cut my throat, and I am consigned to the cold dark clay while he yet breathes. There will be an accounting for this crime that you sent against me."

The name was perhaps familiar to Syveris; Berlin Cloudsong had left the Inarta five years previously. He was known to wield an abusive hand with the dek, and had left under suspicious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a young girl, but nothing had ever been proved against him.

The coldness that had taken possession of Syveris lessened, grew weaker, and then at once began to drain out of her as if she were a rain barrel and someone had opened a spigot in her toe. Light pierced the darkness, and she found that she was now standing on a table in the common room of her living quarters, surrounded by a dozen or so of her neighbors, their faces all wearing some measure of astonishment.

[Syveris]

The chill was intense. It was very different from the chill one would feel from an outside wind. No, this one ran deeper. It seemed like it was part of her, it felt like the cold was entering her body, freezing her inside. Syveris wanted to scream, to order the ghost to stop. She turned, fast, her hand reaching for the door.

However, before she could reach it, darkness reached her. The Avora saw the room get distant, as if she was loosing conscience. But Syveris knew she was well awake. She still felt the cold, she was still aware. She just couldn't see at all. It was disturbing, something the Avora had never experienced before. She knew what fainting was, and she knew what it was like to have a clouded mind, but this was neither of those.

Then, she could see a room, one that she had never seen before. It was like a memory of a dream, or a dream itself. Somehow, the images felt real, but deep in her mind, she knew they weren't.

Syveris saw a man, an Inarta, with clothes she had only seen outsiders wear. The images became blurry, as the man approached her, raising a knife. The Avora felt fear, but a fear that was also not her own. She knew the man couldn't hurt her, that he was nothing but an image in her mind. Then, it all faded, and she could hear a voice, distant, saying something she could not understand. Little by little, the voice became clear, and with it came the realization that the voice was hers. She was speaking.

When the cold started to leave her body, Syveris became aware of her surroundings once more. She looked around, her eyes widening when she noticed she was standing on a table. In the middle of a room full of people. Syveris frowned when she felt her face wet. Raising a hand, she pressed it against her cheek. Her face grew hotter when she noticed she had been crying, and the Avora skipped to the floor.

"I'm sorry." she mumbled. "I think I was drunk." how she could say 'I think I was possessed' without the Inartans becoming even more astonished? The Avora made her way to the door, trying to hold the little dignity she still had. She heard someone say "I think you were drugged." but she didn't stop. If they wanted to think that, well, good for them.

When Syveris closed the door behind her, she sprinted to her room, mind running wild.

Berlin... The name did sound familiar, although she wasn't sure about how and when she had heard it. If he was the Inarta from the memory (at least she thought it had been a memory from the ghost), then Syveris should have remembered him. But she didn't. Right now, however, she had more urgent matters to think about.

The Avora forced her sore body to run faster, and when she reached her room, she opened the door, almost violently. Syveris wasn't sure why she thought the ghost would have returned to her room. It was only a hint, a faint hope. The memory had been terrible, and so sad. The poor woman must have been terrified, must have felt so betrayed... Syveris almost cried again when she thought about how the ghost must have felt when she was killed.

Syveris was sure that it still tormented her soul. The words had given it away. The Avora wanted to help. She wasn't sure how, but the ghost was in pain, and she needed someone. Panting, she began to survey the room, seeing if she would find the woman there.

They needed to talk about that damn Inarta. But first, and even more important in Syveris' mind, the ghost needed to hear a thing or two about entering other's bodies without permission.

x
x

x Abstract

[Phaedra]

Phaedra raged, haranguing the few denizens of the common room, but all too soon her strength began to ebb. The woman who's body she had taken battered against her with her will, and Phaedra was too inexperienced a ghost to hold out for long. Her soulmist depleting, Phaedra at last relinquished control, sinking downward out of the soles of Syveris' feet and through the table, running as a faint mist along the floor, lost in the darkness of the shadows.

Her energy gone, Phaedra gave herself over to melancholia, and the dictates of this emotion required that she return to a location she knew, lacking as she was the inclination to make new arrangements.

A moment later the door burst open as Syveris entered. The room seemed empty, as it always was, but then she noticed something. The faint outline of a woman's hand stuck out from under the bed, the paleness of the substance catching the light of candles. The hand lay palm up, and as she watched the fingers curled to a minute degree, as if fighting for strength against an oppressive enervation.

[Syveris]

Syveris found her, or, more precisely, her hand. The ghost was under the bed, and she almost missed the hand, and also almost missed the soft movement the fingers made. The Avora approached the bed, laying on the ground besides it. She could barely see the ghost, on the dark. But she could, at least a little, see the blurring the woman made in the air around her.

"Hey, you!" she called, yet again. There was reprimand on her voice. The ghost seemed tired, maybe even more than Syveris was, but the Avora wouldn't let her get away too easily. "I just called you, and you went and... And what? Possessed me? You can't go around doing that to people, without permission. It's very intrusive, and very uncomfortable. If you wanted to talk, you could have just said so. I'd have listened to whatever it was. If you wanted to just sit there in my room, I could have allowed that too. But you didn't even tell me your name, you just went and possessed me, and embarrassed me in front of my peers. That was incredible uncalled for. What if it was me embarrassing you? You wouldn't like it, would you?"

The rant went on and on, and Syveris unleashed her frustration on the woman. She could understand that the ghost was suffering, but possession was a bit too much, wasn't it? Her cheeks still felt hot for her embarrassment, and she wasn't willing to let the woman go without hearing what she had to say.

"So don't do that again, alright? At least, ask before you act!" finally, Syveris softened her voice. She was still mad, but she hoped the woman had understood her point. "So... Do you want to tell me your name, now?"

x
x

x Abstract

[Phaedra]

Phaedra lay still under the bed, unreactive as the Intarta's anger washed over her. Her mind was only still crystalizing under the new conditions of ghostliness, and now she found that the angry words created something of an anchor, of a reference point for her to come to grips with her new mode of thinking. So many hours she had spent being berated, it seemed so basic and elemental to her. And yet now it was all different. The years of never being good enough had fallen away, and now...

And now, she didn't care. Being good enough was a goal that others had for her, it had never brought her a moment of enjoyment.

Slowly her head turned to face the Syveris, the piercing blue of her eyes almost uncomfortable coming from the darkness under the bed.

"You know nothing of embarassment," Phaedra said at last. "That is the land I was raised in. You have only seen it darkly through a spyglass from the deck of a distant ship. I have no friends, only enemies, and my substance is reduced to rage and dispair. No longer can I be beaten for the entertainment of my screams. Know me as the shade of Phaedra, but the name shall do you no good. My earthly ties are gone and I can no longer be shamed."

She turned away then, rolling up into a fetal position. The soulmist returned to her but slowly, but time was now an aching void of savage eons before her, with no sweetness to miss.

[Syveris]

For a moment, Syveris was sure the ghost wouldn't answer. But then, she began to talk, and the words that came out of her mouth were not comforting, nor it seemed friendly. The Avora saw once more the piercing blue eyes, the only thing that seemed real under the bed. However, as unsettling as they might be, Syveris couldn't be shaken by it anymore. Those were eyes from someone who had suffered, and now, the Avora suspected that they were more sad than angry. Only when the woman turned away from her, Syveris spoke.

"You had no friends and you had many enemy. Didn't you say you're the shade of Phaedra? Well, you don't have to be. You can be a completely new Phaedra, with many friends and no enemies. Or at least fewer enemies." Syveris smiled at the ghost's back, even though she couldn't see it. "You're still here, Phaedra, and so you do have ties to this world. But that is not a bad thing." the Avora adjusted herself, taking her weight off her already sore arm. "It can be a wonderful thing. Life is much more than shame and embarrassment, and now that you were given a new chance, you should take it. I've, and I'm happy now."

Syveris rolled away from the bed, and got up. Sitting on the bed, she crossed her legs, and laid back on the wall.

"If you want, Phaedra, you may stay. As I said, if you want to talk, I'm here, if you want to stay, I'll let you." Syveris chuckled, before adding. "As long as you try not to possess me, of course." she was deadly serious. The experience had been unpleasant and unsettling, and as much as the Avora wanted to help the ghost, or at least give her somewhere to stay, she wouldn't accept being possessed without permission. If this happened again, Syveris was sure going to search a way to drive the woman away from her house.

x
x

x Abstract