The Cravings of Wraiths

Ghost implies two things about a being. One, that the being was once alive. Two, that now it is dead.

Sea ghosts are a touch more transient. Once they were alive, now they are dead, but oh how they want that life back.

They want it so bad that every snatch of sentience and perception, like morsels of who they were scattered into their minds like breadcrumbs, is tantalizing. They hunger for it. When something nearby has it, they reach out and take it .

But snacking doesn't relieve pain. It intensifies it. Still… hurting is better than numbness. Cheth passes through minds tempted and tantalized by memories barely remembered and soothes what souls he can. He lives the lives the ghosts wish they could still have, puppeting them about in whatever role the shape suits.

Another might call it cruel, to offer them something they can never have for more than a few minutes at a time, but Cheth has been the god of death for some time and has weighed the question enough times that it no longer matters.

He’s not so much better than the sea ghosts, after all. He hungers as well.

Lani was alive once and then she became dead, and now she is not quite either. Weird! Now she leans over the ballister of the ship, gazing out at the ice floes drifting past their beached ship. They move aimlessly through the waves and Lani can’t help but feel a little jealous.

They might not be going anywhere, but at least they are going.

“Miss Leina! You seem thoughtful this morning.”

Lani hums as Cal steps up to lean beside her. He’s very unobtrusive and doesn’t seem to mind if she continues on in companionable silence or takes his conversational bait. But Lani has always been more of an out loud thinker so she takes the opening he offers.

“I miss punching things,” she complains. “It’s not the same. When you’re not fleshy anymore. I want that solid THWACK, you know?” She mimes the familiar movement, jabbing a fist out at an invisible punching bag. The motion is reassuring but it lacks weight. Lacks purpose. It’s familiar but not the same.

“Hmm, yes I believe I understand.” Cal nods sagely. “I miss my daily habits as well. Not just the things i enjoyed themselves… But the experience off doing the,. The mundanity almost. I’ve done the same task for decades now, tending to the castle gardens! I feel rather lost without the usual to dos.” He sighs. “I try to think positively. If one pretends… this is all something like a vacation!” He chuckles lightly. “Becoming a ghost is one way to take some weight off one’s feet I suppose… But it’s not the stress of our circumstances that bother me so much as the lack of my routines. The things that made up my life before. I lack them utterly here.”

Lani nods ferociously. It’s exactly like that! Like, she can do her warm up routine, but it’s not right. And she can talk to the others, but it’s not about the things she’d usually talk about. The Mantaluna is familiar and comforting to her now but it’s not…

“I think we might be home sick,” Lani says and Cal nods. “I miss my mom. And my room. I miss sparring and sneaking snacks out of the kitchens and planning to visit the monks at Shield Fort. I miss having a body and being able to go anywhere I’d like!” “I miss trimmning hedges,” Cal adds. “And giving tours about the grounds. I miss the satisfaction of getting a truly bizarre request and finding a way to fulfill it. I miss seeing my family…” He reaches up to stroke at the ghostly fur of a mouse that had scampered up onto his shoulder while he idled near the railing. “I miss being able to pet my animal friends!”

“Do you think…” Lani hesitates. “Do you think we’ll get it all back?”

It feels so close, like if she just punches hard enough then flesh and skin will materialize about her arm and give her back the body she’s used to. LIke if she just closes her eyes and concentrates, she could be back on the harbor walls looking out to see, instead of out at sea trying to peer over the harbor walls.

But despite appearances, it’s a far and distant possibility. It’s a sliver of a chance away from impossible. It’s three sets of snake eyes. It’s a five leaf clover.

“I don’t think wondering is very useful for our purposes,” Cal muses. “Tempting as it may be… until we have no hope left I think it’s best that we carry on missing it. And hoping to have it back some day soon. Perhaps, with a little more hope, Miss Philemon would feel a tad less… ragged.”

Lani perks up, seizing upon the idea at once. She’s never been one for quiet thinking and contemplation, nor for wishing on a star to get what she wants.

“You’re right! I should go try and talk to her again. I bet she misses things too! Maybe she’s just missing them too much to think about how we can get them back!”

Lani vaults over the railing of the Mantaluna and plummets down to the ocean. It dips as she drops onto it, but the surface tension holds, allowing her to skate across the surface without sinking below the horizon line.

“Good luck, Miss Leina!” Cal calls.

Enough with luck! Lani thinks, excitedly. Time to remind Phae that even though they don’t feel like themselves just now… they grew up thinking they could do anything and they aren’t dead yet!

Phaedra is hungry.

She’d known, of course, that she would be if she ever became a sea ghost. But she didn’t think she would feel it. Didn’t think it would gnaw at her, like some separate entity, parasitic, entering her body and hollowing it out. She thought she’d be gone. Too distant to feel how Cheth puppeted her into an unthinking, ravenous beast.

But Cheth hasn’t touched her since he cheated her on their deal. And Phaedra is not a sea ghost, not really, not yet, and still she is so so hungry.

What surprises her is what her appetite is for. At first, maybe, she was hungry as a human is. She craved pastries. Lemonades and teas. Roasted meat. A crisp salad. Not anymore. When her stomach clenches it is for lack of her favorite chair in the castle, where she spent many evenings her whole life reading and eating snacks. When her tongue waters it is for the words she might say to her mother or her aunt or her grandmother if any of them were here, or if she could possibly speak to them.

Her hunger is for the life her soul is used to living. She understands why sea ghosts will bite down on any living thing that comes into range. She salivates at the thought of even a taste of what she once had. Even if it means tearing it off the bones of something else in the middle of living it.

She’s starving for the simple routines she’d lived through, day after day. She’s craving the motions she’d made often without thinking about them and the way her face feels when creased into expressions. She misses her closet and picking out her outfits. She hungers for the feeling of sweat on her skin after a good sparring session.

There is no sweat as a sea ghost. There is no sun burn. No tension headache from smiling too hard and no satisfying sensation of a favorite shirt sliding over her head and fitting just so. Being a sea ghost is like living in sensory deprivation, where you can imagine everything you once had, but only well enough to notice its absence.

With the hunger pangs gnawing at her, with the ghostly skin on her bones growing thin and fading away, with her clothes and hair growing more ragged as her memories of life grow dimmer and dimmer… she wonders if all sea ghosts feel like this. All the time. Or if it’s a special sort of torture for her and her crew, caught between two states of being as they are.

She hopes she’ll be able to feel like herself again, someday. Hopes the hunger will disappear, even for just a moment, and leave Phaedra behind to be herself, unburdneed.

BUt she knows better to expect it and fights for whatever pieces of herself she can maintain.

Love for her friends.

Despair and guilt at their circumstances.

And a deep, broiling hatred for the god that had put her in this position.

Irving knows numbness. The Spirefort had it in spades. Numb from the cold. Numb from the isolation. Numb from the hard training and lazer focus cutting out everything else. Numb responses from his father. Hollow ones that rang sour notes. Irving knows how to be numb. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t feel it so bad. The way Phae is, lost in it. The way Lani and Cal wander around like there’s a solution to be found.

Irving sits in. Catalogs the sensation of his body and mind being whittled down, like one of his wood carvings, reshaped into something that was always inside him but that he’s not ready to become.

He’s spent a lot of time fortifying his mind and his soul the way many others train and prepare their body. Irving sits with the numbness, with the hunger, with the hollow recollections of the things that used to matter to him, and pretends he remembers why they were so important, back then.

He doesn’t actually need to know, after all, why he loved his boyfriend. Just that he did, and it mattered, and if he has any strength left at all, in his body, in his soul, in his trigger finger, then it will again.