in memoriam

Eventually, after a while of searching, she did find the former residential area of Seattle where she used to live. The hollowed out outlines of the buildings stood distinct even underneath the shade of the trees that had grown from sidewalk decorations into a wild, primeval forest. But here, now, the air felt different than it did back then. Once upon a time, it was a normal city block. Maybe the air was a little cleaner than most urban centers, but it was just a row of apartments with a couple of bars on the street corners. Now, though, the air smelled like moss and leaves, petrichor and pollen, which tingled her nose in a way she wasn’t used to, and the place felt like a welcoming sorrow.

First, she stopped in front of the remains of the bar she always used to frequent. She might not have been able to recognize it if not for the moss-covered remains of the jukebox that she would put so many quarters into, and the bar’s name and logo engraved into the side of still-standing granite countertops. Eroded glass nuggets from old bottles of wine and whiskey that were now embedded into the forest floor like a pathway of gems paved the ground underneath her as she entered her old watering hole and caught the tears that fell from her face.

Here, in the soft earth where a foundation used to be, she began to dig two holes until they were about a foot deep. From her clear plastic box, she withdrew a number of little steel objects. One round, broad piece etched with alchemical symbols, and three clamps that looked like they fit around somebody’s spinal column. After gazing around the area to ensure no one had seen or followed her, she set them in the holes as gently as if they were made of crystal.

“Spirits of this ancient neighborhood… please join me in remembering the people close to me who are no longer with me.” She spoke to no one in particular. “Please, witness me as I bury them here, so that their memories may rest and so that I may move on and accept whoever Gaia may have made them now.”

After a pause, during which the wind seemed to rustle the leaves in reply, she bowed her head and filled the two holes again.

“Zerah Stark was a man like few others. He was not a man who was born to a mother and father, no. He  was created by the hands of another like him from the bodies of those who came before him and was animated by the stuff of the Wyld. Though he had his own problems, though he was driven to some things that I can’t say I was okay with, he was a friend like no other. Devoted, loyal, and caring, like the family I wish I had, and all he wanted was to be human like the rest of us. He followed schools of learning to hone and forge his own soul from fire, as all of the Created do. Through him, I met Candy. She was like him in what she was, but she handled it a bit differently. A fireball of a woman, a fighter, who took no shit from a world who only had dogshit to offer her. I didn’t know her as well as him, but I wish I did. Oh, I wish I did. Well, they met their goal, the both of them. In a whorl of flame and light, they became human. And what’s more, they remembered me. They kept me in their lives until the minute the Wyrm rose to end existence. I don’t know what became of them, after that, but I hope that, whoever they’ve become, they’re happy.”

Speaking those words of eulogy here, in this place, felt like a balm to her wounded heart. After a few moments to look upon the two makeshift graves, she picked up two mossy bricks from the ruins of the wall beside her, and etched their names into the stone with a small vibroknife she was given. The best headstones she could manage, but headstones they were nonetheless.

Not far off, there was a small patch bare of the marks of buildings where once she remembered a playground and a small park. Rusted steel bars stuck up from the soil, and a plastic slide where once children burned their bare legs in the summer playing upon it now held decayed leaves and the shoots of new plants. Here, she supposed, would be a good place to memorialize a few more. Ones whose homes and favorite places would be totally gone. Now from the box was procured a few sheets of music and rejected lyrics, and the shattered pieces of a broken smartphone.

“Jason Redstone, musician, just as troubled as I was. Terribly shaken, and especially be the circumstances of how he came into what was once a world sideways to what is human. But underneath that, there was a loyal friend, a voice of reason, a talent that I was honored that he would share with me in the form of a band. He was able to keep me together like few others were, and I tried to pay that forward to him, too. When I was with him, the boundaries of what we were no longer mattered. We were friends, and we always would be. Wherever he is now, I hope he knows that I meant that. I hope he knows that I will always be his friend.

“Aidan Kato was a mess of a Garou. His parents treated him like dirt and his brother was the golden child, so he left them to find his own way in a world that would eat you alive if you weren’t careful. And he didn’t just survive, he thrived. He was one of the most clever Theurges I ever knew, and he was one of the few Garou who didn’t judge me for what… what happened. He was a disaster in a chair, but… he was also a powerful leader, and very, very smart, even if he didn’t know it. Self-sufficient, and creative under pressure. If he’s still out there, I hope he’s just as successful as I knew he could be.”

The names of these two old friends were etched into a couple of fairly large-sized stones not too far away and placed as markers, and again, she got up, and wandered her former home, walking the broken pavement as if it were still an intact sidewalk. Past broken homes and shattered memories, she stepped slowly and silently through the eerie, quiet grove, letting that feeling of sorrow and nostalgia wash over her. She could swear she still heard peoples’ voices when she closed her eyes. The joys, the sadnesses, the hopes and dreams that still lingered here.

She stopped in what looked like what must have been an alleyway. The crumpled metal of a dumpster lay sunken into the ground, eaten away and rusting, and here she chose to bury her next item. A torn apart blindfold, still covered in faint bloodstains even through the dark fabric, drifted gently into the hole.

“I didn’t know Midnight well at all… she was my weed dealer, but I never questioned where she got it, because she didn’t make me pay too much, and my only other option was the horrible snake that also trawled the alleyways. But she was respectful, and we would talk every now and again. I wonder if she got away. I wonder if she finally found the peace she always needed. I wonder if she was treated right, in those intervening years. She was a good woman, despite her circumstances. I hope she finally found rest somewhere out there.”

It wasn’t far to the ruins of another building, this one with a large patch of lilies inside it, waving in the breeze. Seeing that sunset-colored sea, she smiled despite herself, and here is where she came to sit.  At the edge of the bed of flowers, She dug out three more miniature graves. In these, were placed a beaded bracelet, a dried and preserved rose, and a simple red tie.

“Reva, my dear roommate. My dearest friend. You came into my life through a want ad for a roommate after my sister left me, and you were never anything other than the best partner in crime that anyone could ask for. You were sweet when you needed to be, overwhelmingly genuine and earnest, but you had fight in you. Fire, hidden away until you really needed it. Maybe we weren’t the best for each other’s vices. The two of us drank far too much, but how much of that is our fault? We had problems. But I never really got to tell you how much I loved you. How much I truly valued you and how precious your company was when I was otherwise all alone. Sure, I managed to put together friends. But they weren’t always there. You were. Wherever you are, I still think about you. Your strength, your fire… that will never leave me.

“And… then there’s the two of you… I once heard you both called the Salad Twins by a particularly petty vampire, before I ever met the two of you. We were from two different worlds, but by the time we met, the lines had blurred for me. I was wary, sure. My only other experience with kindred at that time was… painful. Unbearably so. But you showed me that the Wyrm really doesn’t hold sway over all of you. That you can fight back, that you can still be a light in the darkness. You two, who would have been my husband and sister in law, if only I had worked up the nerve to ask before the end. Without you in my life, I am left with a hole in my heart that I can never fill. There will never be anyone like you. I miss you. I will never stop missing you.”

After a moment’s pause, she gazed into the now-empty box, and reached into the backpack she wore. From it, from among several others like it, she withdrew a vial of dark crimson liquid, which swished around in its bottle and left deep red residue on the glass.

“… Sister.”

She scooped out one last hole nearby the others, then popped the top off of the vial. She emptied the vitae into the hole, then with her vibroknife, stabbed into her hand without a moment’s hesitation and let herself bleed into it.

“You aren’t dead. If you have any say in it, you never will be, and as much as it scares me to think about it, neither will I. It was by your insistence that I fled instead of trying to prove that I was actually worth something in the Final Battle, and you carried my sleeping ass across the galaxy with you for three hundred years. Were it not for you, I would have woken up to nothing. Without you, I would have woken alone and scared, and I probably would have claimed my own life. You gave me the questionable gift of vitae, and in this strange new world, I am accepted despite it. No longer do I walk a path of exiled solitude. I have found a makeshift family with other Changing Blood. Finally, I belong. Though I miss many, I have faith that Gaia will lead me to them again. But I would not have survived without you.

“If you were here, listening to this, you would ask me what the point of wasting that vitae is. You would ask me why I bleed myself into a dirt hole. The simple truth is, I’m not burying you. Not really. This is not a burning of bridges. It’s a rite of sorts. Not a real, spiritual rite, no. It’s three men to a pack minimum to conduct one of those, and I sit here alone, with no rite knowledge to speak of. No, this is just a ritual of my own design. A symbolic burying of my own bitterness. For a long time, I held your choice as an insult to me and everything I am. From my end, you rejected everything I tried to do for you, every means I tried to elevate you with, and turned to a more instant solution. Older, less compassionate mutts held my refusal to harm you against me, and it is only by the grace of Gaia and Cockroach that I still held on, that I never gave up, that I never fell to the boundary of darkness where Ronin tread.

“But if you had never done that, I don’t think I would ever have found the others that I buried today. If you hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t still be here. I still don’t view what you did as a good thing. It hurt more than anything I can imagine, and in a way it still hurts. But fate is funny that way. What might hurt might also lead you to the greatest people you have ever met. Without that, I would never have put up the Craigslist ad that brought Reva into my life. I would have never sought out companionship and met Zerah, or Jason, or Candy, or even Aidan. I would never have given other vampires a ghost of a chance and met the love of my life. As I sit here, so far removed from the world I used to know, I finally see that. It was far from a good thing, what you did. In the moment, it was horrible. But it led to so many good things, good people, that as I speak their eulogies, I lay my bitterness to rest here with them.”

She finally closed the last hole, and laid down in the sea of flowers. She knew the others that had come with her on the ship would wonder where she had been, and they’d wonder why she was wounded, but now that she had laid bare her soul, she was tired. Tired, yet the ache in her soul was eased. Here in the calm, her loved ones as they were would forever rest, and now she could greet them as they are. Maybe check into that therapist, too.

But right now, a short nap wouldn’t hurt.