#ghostsince1738

“I believe that. Somehow, Alice, I think you might know more about love than any of us.”

| send this symbol for your muse to witness an event from my muse’s past on contact; not accepting |

     His experience with ghosts and other spirits was limited, albeit enlightening. Some were stuck in loops of sorts, unaware of their own demise. Some were all too aware of their demise and were out for blood.

     Others, well… others were somewhere between the two; gentle spirits who were aware of their fate and merely flitted around without having moved on to the great beyond. The latter was a type he had no experience with prior to tonight, and so he had no way of knowing if what was about to occur was a usual occurrence or not. Surely he hadn’t seen anything of the sort written anywhere in his research, but perhaps people didn’t like other people prying into their personal information, as personal information is what was shared quite without his permission.

      The conversation was normal, if “normal” could be applied to a conversation between a ghost and a necrothologist. Perhaps it could be, all things considered. After all, it was closer to the “normal” definition of necromancy( what the young man was beginning to aspire to), that of a person who communicated with the dead to tell the future. The latter part could be ignored, of course, but the former was currently–and quite often–true. 

     And so the two of them were in the dark library. It was storming, because that was often the way of things. Somehow during a strike of lightning the spirit ended up closer to him than she had been before the blinding flash, and he could briefly feel the strange brush-that-wasn’t-a-brush of her hand against his arm before his consciousness was hurled into blackness and roughly expelled a few years back into a memory he tried to bury.

     The run to the river was mindless and senseless, a desperate sprint that used all the energy he didn’t know he had. His brother was running beside him, calling out to him to stop, to slow down, to do something else other than run blindly into town for what awaited him.

     He didn’t listen.

     He saw the crowd first, a small and growing quiet gathering of people near the bridge that crossed the flowing water. There were men in the water, not caring that their trousers were getting soaked. They were pulling something from the water–no, not something, he knew, but someone. He was aware that he was beginning to shake, his vision tunneling with darkness as he looked at the pale figure being gently dragged onto solid land.

     He was aware of the shocked whispers and glances to him without being aware as he pushed through the crowd. Was he crying? He may have been crying. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t feel or be aware of anything except her, lying there on the grass, her skin with a deathly pallor, her gold curls wet and clinging, her summer dress ruined. 

     He was kneeling now, his hands shaking over her as though he was afraid to touch her. His vision was blurry, but that was only the tears. A hand touched his back–his brother, some part of his mind told him– and he jerked away. The hand was on his arm now, a firmer grip around his shoulders meant to be comforting but only feeling suffocating. A voice nearby said softly, “I’m sorry, Johannes,” but he merely shook his head and jerked away then.

At college the place we get work/homework is called the hub. Sometimes in class we randomly start chanting “praise the hub”. Freaks out our lecturer. None of us quite know when or where we started it. Cults spring up when you least expect it.

//thaaaaaaaaat sounds about right.

He was aware the question seemed to actually have two possible meanings. Hal knew Alice could have possibly been asking about his thoughts on those he had killed, but he went with the less painful option instead and guessed she was referring to his thoughts on whether his friends were in some sort of afterlife.