Villains Verse Key Shorts

This is just a project I've been working on to flesh out a bit of lore. Can be considered non-canon! :)

Musical Accompaniment: Library and Void, Soul and Song

## First Story: Library and Void

**For the first time in over two thousand years, the Nine Pillars had all gathered together.**

**The Supreme observed this with her sightless eyes, thousands of Verses and Worlds forever expanding in a great cosmic painting across her body, sprawled out on the glassy ground of the void.**

**She raised her right wrist where the Library of Truth rested like a cluster of stars and pressed it to her forehead. In less than a moment, she was there among them.**

**She could see-- no, feel --the moment the Pillars recognized her presence. Sharp minded Vaaka with her aura of darkness first, and Raatu, her other half a fraction of a second later. Harsh Ingrid third and rigid Zera fourth. They had always thought more than felt. Tyria with her gentle hatred and Morgan with his punishing love. Marisol Marisol, material to the last. Harmonia, who felt the strongest, but in the wrong way. Katia, dying.**

**(Somewhere deep within the reaches of the library, another presence reared its head. In another time, he would have rained death down upon his world, dooming entire planets to shudder on the end of the sword that was his broken mind. But that was in another time, another reality, one where he hadn’t been stopped by the light and exceeding ambitions. The Supreme turned a blind eye to lonely Number One.)**

**Vaaka dipped her head, “My lady.”**

**The other pillars followed suit.**

**The Supreme did not answer them, for she was not there in full, never was and never would be. Nevertheless, they understood.**

**She’d almost forgotten what this had felt like, this containing of her consciousness to one world. It was so peaceful without the clamor and clatter of knowing everything, seeing and hearing the lives of every creature one every planet in every universe. She felt as though she could be on fire, incinerated, turning to ashes and cosmic dust to be scattered throughout the Void on a phantom wind, but not know or care about the civilizations burning across her body so long as she remained peacefully enclosed here with her children.**

**Tyria was the first to speak, sharp and abrasive as ever. The Supreme thought sometimes that maybe Tyria was the most like her. After all, she was the mother of all life and she too had to live with the voices of every creature. But The Supreme was not the life mother, she was all life, and all worlds, and all skies, and all matter. And they were her. The only children she had were the nine.**

**“The truth of the matter is that Katia messed up and we’re all going to suffer for it.” Tyria said, “Every intelligent life form that exists or will exist is going to suffer because you let your guard down. You are a Pillar of Existence! How were mortals able to defeat you?”**

**Katia, sickly and weak, shrunk down in her seat around the nonagonal table. “I’m sorry that my weakness will cause suffering, but mortals are not to be underestimated. Their power is growing by the generation as they better learn how to harness this multiverse’s magic, and I was already vulnerable due to this being my eight hundred and eighty-eighth life. The children responsible for this merely accelerated the process of me losing my powers.”**

**“It is true, that mortals are not to be underestimated.” Ingrid chimed in, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table. “They are… well, for lack of a better word, they are evolving. Intelligent life as we know it is not the same as it was at the beginning of our lifetimes. Some mortal creatures are nearly on par with our subordinate gods.”**

**“Worrying indeed,” Zera agreed, “But this is a topic for another day. If I must remind you, we are gathered here to discuss what to do once Katia’s lifetimes draw to a close. Her successor won’t be born for at least a decade. Ingrid? Any thoughts?”**

**She shook her head, “I am the Pillar of Knowledge. I know all that is discovered and all that is fated to be, but there is no precedence for losing a Pillar. Life as we know it has never faced a threat so dire… or so blindly.”**

**The Supreme was troubled. She could perhaps find one of her kin in the Void, but the Multiversei were a solitary species and few and far between ever since the Great Wars had wiped out most of their population countless years ago. Perhaps she could find another of her kinsmen if she searched for a few millennia, but she didn’t have millennia, she had a year at most. Even if she could, she doubted any knowledge remained within her species of what to do when a Pillar is lost. It might not have even happened before.**

***We are all so little in the grand scheme of things,* The Supreme thought sadly. *Each of us living and dying with no true regard for how insignificant we truly are. I contain millions of universes, each of which contains millions of worlds, millions of planets and millions of intelligent creatures that live on them. And yet I am just one of a race that was once counted in thousands. Perhaps we are simply parts of a greater whole as well. How can people so small even live knowing they are such an insignificant speck of dust floating through some great emptiness?***

**Back in the library, the Pillars were still debating, but The Supreme was lost in thought. *If the death of one of my Pillars destabilized the multiverse and killed me, would it matter? Countless lives would be lost besides my own, every life within me would be extinguished if I were to perish, but would it matter? My kind was driven nearly to extinction, but for every one of my kinsmen that died, nine Pillars and countless gods and mortals died with them. Yet, the Great Wars are seen as a great loss of Multiversei life with no regard for the life contained inside each of us. Why is that? Are my children and their children so insignificant? Am I?***

**The Supreme’s consciousness left the library and she returned to awareness. Awareness of everything and nothing. She was everything, but only to herself and the lives within her. And those lives… they may have meant nothing, but they were worth fighting for. Even if she herself wasn’t, even if her race was doomed, the people and dreams she contained were worth fighting for.**

**And so The Supreme did something that none of the current Pillars had experienced in all their lifetimes. She did something that none of the previous Pillars had experienced, or the Pillars before them. She pulled herself to her feet, standing on the smooth glass that formed the floor of the Void. She took one step forward. Another. Another. And The Supreme *ran*.**

**She ran through the Void, along the twisting glass path through the darkness guided by the light of phantom stars above, spurred foreward by the phantom wind at her back. She ran along the path, slipping and pushing herself off the narrow walls when she stumbled, clambering back to her feet when she fell.**

**She ran for days in an hour, hours in a minute, past the twisted corpses of her fallen brethren, speckled skin gone dark and dull, over the hulking forms of the Leviathan beast ships the Others had used in the Great Wars when they’d slithered out of holes in the sky to destroy the Multiversei.**

**She ran past living members of her species, taking to time to wonder or marvel at the time or the misconception because they were there they were there they were *there* and she called out to them, telling them to follow in an ancient song tone she hadn’t heard or used in eons.**

**She ran until she couldn’t and then she crawled up up up the sloping glass until for the first time in memory a Multiversei left the Void and felt the soft black sand of the Desert That Wasn’t under it’s phantom sky with phantom stars and The Supreme *cried*, great heaving sobs because she was home, she was finally home.**

**Behind her more of her kin emerged from the Void, joyus voices calling out to each other in song and oh how The Supreme wished her children could see this, this beautiful plain of nonexistent foreverness.**

***The world is so much bigger than I ever remembered, or maybe I am so much smaller.* She thought. And suddenly she knew. She knew how those within her could go on, even without one essential ninth of their existence.**

**The Supreme raised her voice in song.**

**And somewhere deep inside her, Katia died.**

## Second Story: Soul and Song

Morgan left the library with a body.

Katia’s corpse was nearly weightless, pale as snow and hollow as a paper mache sculpture. Just a shell of what she once was, her vibrancy and life leached away and funneled… well, Morgan wasn’t exactly sure where her power had gone to. The next Pillar of Chaos didn’t exist yet.

Morgan had known this was going to happen, his predecessor had taught him that the death of a Pillar was far different than that of an ordinary soul. Spirits simply appeared in the Inbetween once they felt compelled to move on from the material plane, their souls still travelling inside their non corporeal bodies all the way to their afterlives, where still their souls stayed inside them.

Pillars were creatures of a different sort and died strangely as well. But Morgan hadn’t seen one die so colorlessly before. So quietly. She had been his world, and now she was dead in his arms.

Harmonia accompanied him back to his workshop at the very center of the Inbetween, Pidge perched on her shoulder. This was the part Morgan had been dreading for the past few centuries as he and his fellow Pillars grew closer to death.

The breaking.

He had only seen it done three times before. His predecessor had been the fourth of her fellows to die. The first had been Life, who she’d broken in her third to last lifetime. Then Creativity, who she’d broken towards the tail end of her second. By then Morgan had been her apprentice for a year or so, a simple boy of fifteen. She’d died and been reborn for the last time before the next of her generation of Pillars reached the end of his eight hundred and eighty-eighth lifetime. His master had been all of five years old in her last lifetime when the current Pillar of Chaos died in final. Morgan had held her over her friend’s corpse so she could perform the ceremony with her tiny child arms.

The next breaking Morgan partook in was his master’s. And then the five other Pillars of that generation. After the ninth death of the previous generation of Pillars there had been a lull of thousands of years, but now it had started again. The cycle of tragedy.

Morgan could sense his apprentice and her growing presence in the world she had not yet been born into. Seventeen years. He had seventeen years until she was born. He could keep Katia’s shell intact until she was of age, but spending thirty-two years with the corpse of his best friend would be torturous for both of them. Already he could hear Katia’s soul rattling around trying to break free. He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t.

Sorry Bianca, he thought, a wordless apology to his future apprentice, But you’ll have to learn the breaking on a different Pillar. This one is far too precious for me to use as an example for you.

Morgan laid Katia’s body on the long table at the center of the office reserved for the breakings, Harmonia fluttering behind his shoulder like an anxious butterfly. Pidge, back in human form, grabbed her hand gently in his.

“Morgan,” she said, clear bell voice shaking, “If it’s any consolation, I believe I’ll be the one to die next. I’m on my eight hundred and eighty-seventh life, and Zera is as well. If you wish for my breaking to be the one you show your apprentice, then I’ll be glad to be of service.”

It wasn’t any consolation, because he didn’t want to break another one of his loved ones, much less in front of a stranger. Selfishly, he hoped Zera would die first. Zera would love being someone’s learning experience, even for something so morbid as a post-death ritual.

“Thank you, Harmonia,” he whispered, pulling her into an embrace, “For offering. And for being here.” He opened his eyes to look at Pidge, the only non-Pillar among them, “Thank you both. I don’t know if I could do this without the two of you by my side.

“Of course,” Pidge said quietly.

“We love you.” Harmonia finished. She didn’t specify if the you was plural or singular, but she didn’t need to. However often they fought, Morgan knew she loved Katia as much as him.

The breaking was as terrible as Morgan remembered it from his days as a fledgeling Pillar. His fist tore through cracking flesh, curling and blackening like paper scraps on fire, rib cage cracking and snapping like twigs, wet clay insides clinging to his fingers. He forced himself to push his hand deeper into Katia’s chest cavity until he felt that hollow place inside where her soul floated suspended in the nothingness that filled the inside of her being.

He was up to his shoulder when he finally felt the ends of his fingers reach her soul floating in the middle of the void that by all means shouldn’t exist within the confines of a material body. Truly, the hollow nothingness within her terrified him.

His fingered closed around her soul and he pulled it out of her body with a repulsive squelching noise

In his hand he held a mason jar, simple glass, plugged with a cork and tied with a ribbon. Something simple, sweet. It looked like the kind of thing one would take to a picnic, filled with jam. Instead it was full of stars. They floated arong the inside of the jar like fireflies, casting warm gold and pink light on to the field of tiny sunflowers that grew from the base of the jar. Sitting down in the middle of the field, perched on the ruins of some fallen monument, a tiny Katia waved up at them.

Harmonia waved back and Pidge looked on in awe. Morgan smiled. Katia’s soul was so vibrant and bright. All the Pillars had strange souls, very unlike the glowing orbs of mortals and gods. Ingrid’s was a fiery book, a little her in ink running across the pages. Zera’s was an hourglass, his form fluttering around the top half and watching the sand drain. Harmonia’s was a music box, Marisol’s a canvas, Tyria’s a planet, Vaaka’s a rolling dark ocean, and Raatu’s an ever changing sky, each one contained within a jar. Morgan wasn’t sure why Katia’s was a fallen monument, and he wasn’t sure what his soul would look like, but he wasn’t sure he was bothered by the not knowing.

Morgan twisted off the cork and tipped the bottle so the tiny Katia could climb out on to his palm. She tumbled out, and clambered to her feet, offering him a sunflower she’d picked. It was as tall as she was, all two inches of it.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her in between the tips of his thumb and pointer finger. He tucked the tiny flower behind his ear and set Katia down on the breaking table. She stepped off his hand a bit dizzily. He supposed everything must be overwhelming at that size.

“So, what happens now?” Pidge asked tentatively.

Morgan turned his attention to the tiny Katia. “Are you ready?”

She nodded and turned to her papery corpse. Her feet were so little, they barely made any tapping sound at all as she walked across the table.

Odd, he thought to himself, for he remembered the footsteps of the previous pillars had echoed around the emptiness of the workshop like gunshots, but now of course the workshop was not empty at all and he was no longer alone. If he strained his hearing it was almost as if he could hear the faintest traces of a song. He had never been able to hear Harmonia’s soul before, but perhaps he’d never listened for it.

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft sound, not unlike paper tearing. Tiny Katia had her hand on the side of her hollow corpse and as he watched it cracked and broke into confetti scraps, each one a memory. A few of the scraps floated towards him and disappeared into his chest with a flash of golden light. Similarly, scraps of the memory paper flew to Harmonia and Pidge’s souls, and out of the workshop to find the other people precious to her.

Morgan smiled and turned to Katia. She was no longer tiny, returned now to her usual size and no longer opaque as she had been in life. She was truly a spirit now.

“They’re singing,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“They’re singing.” she repeated, “Well, someone is. It’s odd you know, your workshop’s always been silent before.”

“I was expecting an ‘I love you,’ you know.” he said, amused.

Katia laughed, “You should’ve known better, you silly goose! I never do anything even remotely conventional! I do love you though, rest assured. I love all of you, and I missed you every moment I was dead, even if it was only for a few minutes. But now I’m curious as to where this music is coming from!”

Morgan glanced at Harmonia, who shrugged, “Don’t look at me, obviously it’s not a soul thing if Cats can hear it.”

Speak of the devil, Katia had managed to produce a magnifying glass from under one of the many piles of paper on Morgan’s desk and was rooting through his things, peering at each one quizzically before throwing it over her shoulder and moving on.

Pidge winced as a snowglobe crashed into the wall next to his head and shattered against it, spraying him with water, glitter, and shattered glass, “Well, its nice to see death hasn’t changed you, Cats.” he said.

“Thanks!” she responded, crawling up the wall to peer through an air vent.

“Okay I think we’re done trashing my office!” Morgan said, rushing to pull her down.

Surprisingly, she didn’t struggle in his grip like he’d expected as he pulled her off the stacked stone wall. She had her thinking face on, nose scrunched up and mouth twisted to the side. “Morgan, what’s above us.”

“I… I’m not sure. The Inbetween is built on the underside of an overhanging cliff, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone to whatever sort of landscape is above us. Pidge? You’ve done deliveries, right?”

Pidge scratched the back of his head sheepishly, “I have but… I’m not sure why but I can’t remember what’s up there.”

“How strange,” Harmonia bit her lip, “The entirety of the Inbetween is a pocket dimension that serve as a collection of gateways to another dimension - that would be the Afterlife - but in order for a pocket dimension to exist it’d need to be out of either dimension it has gates to. So that still leaves the original question. Where are we?”

Morgan blinked, “I forgot how smart you are. So you think that the Inbetween is built outside of the Supreme?”

She nodded, “That’s the only sensible explanation.”

“Cool!” Katia exclaimed, “Let’s go check it out!”

And so off they went, down the labyrinth of twisting corridors, up walls and across ceilings, past endless doors and wandering souls. Morgan occasionally stopped to point a particularly confused looking spirit in the right direction, or open or lock a door seemingly at random, but they made good time.

“If I remember correctly,” Morgan murmured, pushing through the crowd of newly arriving souls on the very top floor, “There should be a hatch or something right about… here!”

The trapdoor on the ceiling opened downwards and a rope ladder swung down. Sand black as pitch spilled out of the hole, revealing a starry purple sky awaited them beyond the opening. With a word to the new spirits warning them not to follow, the four of them ascended and crawled out on to the cool desert sands.

“Where are we?” Kaitia asked, spinning in a slow circle as if to take it all in.

“I don’t know…” Harmonia murmured. “Is this real? Can a place like this truly exist?”

Pidge turned around to face the trapdoor, “In order to figure out where we are, at least within this… place, we need to figure out where the Inbetween is.”

“And then we can find the singing!” Katia cheered.

“Well finding the Inbetween should be fairly easy,” Morgan said dryly, “It’s under us. But the top floor is massive. We’re likely standing on the cliff right now.”

“Holy crap, really?” Katia asked, “This cliff is huge!”

“Indeed,” Morgan agreed. “Shall we check it out?”

And off they went again, for the second time that day. Well, Morgan thought of it as day but in truth the Inbetween didn’t really have a timekeeping system and it was very clearly night here (at least it was if this place had any sort of regular night cycles), but he was awake and untired so therefore to him it was day.

Eventually they reached the edge of the cliff and found a sher drop off into pitch black nothingness.

“Well that’s disappointing,” Katia pouted, “It’s just an empty void.”

“No,” Morgan said quietly, “No it’s not.” He gestured with his left hand and the grey mist obscuring the canyon floor dissipated, revealing what appeared to be a twisted black worm covered in armored plating. “Don’t worry, it’s dead.”

“It’s not the only thing that’s dead.” Pidge said gravely, and pointed to an all too familiar blue body lying lifeless half under the beast.

Harmonia gasped, “It can’t be… it looks just like the Supreme!”

Morgan’s eyes widened. Each Pillar had one memory provided to them on the day they turned fifteen of what the Supreme looked like. While dull indigo the body on the glassy floor of the chasm was definitely similar, it wasn’t her.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on,” came a voice from behind the quartet.

Katia, catlike even in death, spun to face the newcomer. “Who are yo- oh! My lady!” she gasped, “But how…?”

The Supreme smiled warmly, “My darling children, how clever you were to find us here. Walk with me and I shall tell you the story of my people.”

Exchanging mildly confused looks (or utterly lost ones in Pidge’s case), the three Pillars and their beloved bird followed the Supreme along the edge of the void.

“Long ago,” she began, “Long before any of you existed, before even your predecessors’ predecessors existed, my people knew peace. This desert was once rich farmland that my people, the Multiversei, tended to with the same care we tend to the verses and life within us. We were a peaceful people, content to remain as farmers and caretakers, but that dream remains nothing more than a fantasy now.

“The Others were a similarly peaceful race that lived in the hollow spaces within the Phantom Stars that light up this Desert. But their king, the Great Other, was a lonely being and that lonliness made him cruel. The song of my people, that same song that drew you out of the Inbetween, him of a lost love and he could not bear to hear it. It seems like fantasy, that he could love so much that he would destroy an entire race in order to forget what losing that love felt like, but love truly is the most powerful force there is.

“And so he set the might of his army upon us in the Great Wars. The beastly worm you saw in the Void is but one of the thousands of Leviathans he set upon us to burn our land and kill my people. After years of slaughter, when thousands of Multiversei had perished and countless verses and worlds within them had been lost, our queen sent the last of her people into the Void to hide from the wrath of the Great other. And yet even there we were not safe.

“Others themselves came to the desert and hunted down my people for sport. Our queen was killed alongside half of what Multiversei remained. But the Others too were wiped out… In a sense.”

“In a sense?” Katia asked.

“Yes.” the Supreme nodded, “The Others live inside of the dead, shadows that prey on the innocent life within our bodies. I managed to contain mine to but a single verse, others were not so lucky. That is why the verses you see glowing on the skin of the dead are so dull and lifeless, they are being consumed one by one. Now the others live only within me and the corpses of their victims, the Great Other remains in his hollow throne room even more lonely than before, and my people have been reduced to less than a hundred.”

“Stars,” Harmonia whispered, “All this time we’ve been tending to the multiverse inside you, while you hid in the void from the Others.”

“It’s tragic, isn’t it?” the Supreme said sadly, “That we are all, in the end, smaller then we could’ve ever imagined. Even the Inbetween which serves as a gateway to the Afterlife is only one of many suspended over the void. Even the Afterlife itself is but one plane of existence, so very easily destroyed. Even you, who are responsible for so much, are just parts of me. Even I am just one voice in the endless song of a dying race.”

“But… where do you go then? When you die?” Morgan asked, “Do you make it somehow to the Afterlife you’re connected to?”

“That’s the thing,” she said, “Not one of us knows. I suspect when I die the Afterlife I am connected to will perish with me, but no one can be sure. Now tell me, children, have you learned anything today?”

“Yes,” they all murmured in unison.

“Good. I hope that you’ll use your knowledge of the world outside of the multiverse to better it. And keep a careful eye on the Other, if it broke loose again the verse in which it’s trapped wouldn’t be all that suffers.”

And with that the four of them were returned to Morgan’s office, each one shaken by what they knew.

“Well,” Katia said, “That was horrifying. Let’s get pizza.”

## The Wanderer

After she dies, Nira finds herself in a hallway full of doors. She’s unsure why she’s here as she’s pretty sure she’s not alive anymore, but her head’s too foggy to ponder much of anything.

She wanders the halls aimlessly, directionless for once. The doors burn her fingers if she tries to open them and she can’t find Wyvern and Darius.

She feels like she should be looking for something, everyone else here seems to be, but she can’t think of what it is.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

“You could reincarnate you know.” says the girl with red hair who she knows she should remember.

“I’m fine where I am.”

“You don’t remember me do you?”

“I don’t remember anything anymore. I don’t even know how long I’ve been here.”

“Why not reincarnate then?”

“I’m supposed to be looking for something.”

“You won’t find it, Nira. You’re a Wraith.”

“I’m not looking for a door.” she said.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

She finds what she’s looking for at the bottom of the structure, which to the best of her knowledge is shaped like an icicle, but its hard to tell when the inside is scrambled like eggs. There’s a gaping hole and below it a vast abyssal canyon. She could have gone out the other exit, the one at the top, but this one feels more right somehow. Her feet disturb the fine dust on the stairs as she makes her way down to the hole and jumps out.

The girl with red hair watches distrustfully, invisible in the shadows. The last time someone had walked this path they’d become a Pillar. She hopes the Library is better hidden this time.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

Nira breaks every bone in her body when she collides with the glassy black floor of the canyon. She can’t feel it though since she’s made of nothingness and dust. It’s all dust in the end.

She lies there, unable to move, until she sinks into the glass like it’s water.

The dead eyes of a star speckled body judge her on her way down.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

She finds two things in the library, the one she’s not supposed to go to. The little girl with the skeleton face had asked her not to go as she floated aimlessly through the bloodstream. Nira had never liked children.

There’s a man in the library, and something that wears the stitched up skin of a woman but is something else entirely.

“What are we?” she asks it.

“Wraiths,” it answers truthfully, for it does not lie if you want knowledge. “However I am more powerful than you are for when I arrived here I was made a Pillar.”

“Make me a Pillar?” she tries.

“I have someone else in mind.” it replies. “Though it’s good to see you haven’t changed.”

“I don’t know who I am.” she admits truthfully. Were she alive she’d lie, but the Greater Wraith does not like liars and she has forgotten herself anyway. She doesn’t know her name anymore.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

“Do you think we could have been friends in another life?” she asks the man with black hair. He wears a helmet and she can’t see his face, but she knows what he looks like. She knows she should remember him, should remember all of them. She doesn’t though, and that’s fine.

“I hope so.” he says, even though he doesn’t remember her either.

“I don’t think we could,” she lies because she remembers herself when she’s with him. The Greater Wraith let's her lie to him. It always had.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

The Greater Wraith dies and is carried off by the girl with the skeleton face, now a young woman.

The other girl who’d tended to the books and been apprenticed to the Greater Wraith takes over the library. She pays no mind to the book god and his wanderer.

The wanderer takes this time to explore the library. She finds herself again among the pages of a blue book bound in tears and shelves it again. She finds herself in it, but she does not recognize who she was. She is just a wanderer now.

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Sometimes the book god asks her things. She answers when she feels like it, but not often.

“Do you know who I am?”

“I should.”

“Ingrid knew. She told me whenever I asked, but I can’t remember her answers.”

“Who’s Ingrid?”

“The Lady of the Library.”

“The Lady of the Library is named Aeris.”

“No, the one before her. The one with the long brown hair.”

“Oh.” the wanderer puzzles over this, “It wasn’t a lady. It just wore that disguise. It was like me really, a wraith.”

“A wraith?”

“A spirit, someone rejected by the afterlife.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It’s not. I have you.”

He’s silent until, “Are we friends in this life?”

The wanderer considers this. “I think so,” she decides finally. The Greater Wraith nods from where it is tending to the plants. It had returned as a spirit some time ago, not rejected as it had once been, simply wanting to return here.

The three of them are quiet, and this is fine.

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

Esofar kills Aeris and so kills the book god.

The Greater Wraith holds him as he turns to dust, forgotten memory dissolving into nothing.

The wanderer reaches out to touch his face, but all she can feel is gray ash.