Old Friend

The arrival was always signaled by the splatter of drips. This time, the slow uneven squelch of congealed mud, and blood. There was often blood. Swirling to mix with the muddy pools in the tattered mess of what had once been a pumpkin farm, but had recently been tarnished by the battlefield. The sword had drunk it’s fill this day. The victors had long left the field, any who wished to remain unconquered had fled earlier still. The visage stood looming over him, a darker smudge outlined against a bleak sky taller twice again than a man. The clouds were grim and oppressive as though the weather mourned also for the fallen. The figured was still, immobile, silent. Heedless of the carnage and muck about it, the hood obscured the appearance beneath but he knew it well. The visage had ever haunted his dreams, an amorphous face shifting between glimpses of loved ones and lost friends, felled foes and wicked villains, all that had gone ahead before him.

Grasping his sword hilt weakly he strained against the muck, held vice-like through the embrace of his dead foes ribcage, the wicked snarl which his blow had frozen on the foes face jeered at him in macabre final slight. “How many times must you try that?” The voice floated through the air as a whisper through fog, the familial tone snuck through his heaving chest to snatch the breath from him. The choked sigh felt wretched to his ears as his fingers dropped uselessly from the pommel of the sword. “Every battlefield, you are ever the last.” The voice sounded neither amused nor sad, yet still layered with a depth of rich emotion. The hood moved as it peered off over the vast plane of ruin and despair. “May you finally find peace in the next turning of the light.”

The now fresh corpse simply stared at the clouds above, the body no longer headed the call of the soul within, the rage and loss, the fury and grief were made dull, ineffective, losing their very meaning by the simple fact that the spirit was trapped in the now dead flesh it had been so intrinsically tied to.

The figure simply waited as if eternity could roll by, the very earth could crumble away to dust and the light of the sun would extinguish long before the patience of this being would ever falter. “Your promises to this life are moot. It is ended. The next begins once you let go, as ever old friend I will ferry you beyond.” It was without malice or admonishment, as if stating the weather or commenting on the tide coming in. “Your family will mourn. You kin survive this onslaught. Your line thrives yet in your daughters & son. Your sacrifice was not in vain. Be at rest, let this turning be done.”

The words brought comfort but it was chased but the weight of realization, the full weight of total loss. Not just the grief of losing one loved one but all. The final knowledge that no more chances were to be had. There was no bargaining, no amount of skill or strength or cunning or smarts, no knowledge or wisdom or money or power could undo what had been done. He had died. Death’s avatar was unmoving and immovable. The offered solace was a measly bucket of water against a volcanic eruption of lava. The pain and anguish were eternal.

And yet, the corpse lay still. The material world no longer attached to the spirit, though it writhed in agony of total all encompassing loss. “The eternal mystery, the mortal spirit only truly understands the fleeting nature of life once it’s gone. Come, let me ease your suffering ” Bending to rest a hand on the heavily armoured chest piece, then dipping through as a hand into a still pond to once again emerge gripping a roiling cascade of starlight shimmering and flaring with pure brilliance. If any mortal eyes could behold such a sight, they would be struck blind by the sheer intensity.

The avatar of the beyond held the spirit’s light at arm’s length, headless of the excruciating brilliance that burned through the avatar’s mask of the fallen, revealing the true head of the raven. It then stood holding it’s prize, gaining immense size as it straightened, leaving the battlefield to shrink away into obscurity. As the colossus reached it’s full size once more, the pure light of the spirit was matched by the thousand thousand motes of celestial light stretching eternally off into every direction. “Back to the nursery old friend, find your family there, stay a while ’til you are ready for the next turn.”