memories

Silent wings glide over the muted blues, silvers and golds of the realm of spirits, following the bright colors of the cities as if thy were lighthouses over an open ocean. Even far up in the air, the woman that soars overhead attracts the eyes of the realm’s native denizens. It’s like she’s a beacon of peace and acceptance, like she embodies everything the spirit realm stands for. It’s been a more common sight for her to be spotted flying overhead these days. She doesn’t know it, but she is the embodiment of Afterlife, returned to the world after a long and painful absence.

And today, she has a destination most urgent.

She isn’t just following the cities as she sees them, oh no. She’s flying from town to town along the vast river, which stretches on infinitely across the domain of the afterlife and washes away the past lives of weary souls, carrying them safely into the arms of her mother to be reborn once again. She hopes she can arrive at her destination before what she seeks is lost within it.

The river wasn’t always here. Long ago, there was no such thing. It only first began to flow with the birth, and subsequent death, of the lost child, Reincarnation. But such a thing was so very long ago that a time before it is forgotten. It is an ingrained part of her domain, a piece of a sibling lost in the ever-flowing cycle they created.

She wonders how she knows this as she drifts lower to the ground overhead of a crystalline forest. She remembers this place. She and a favored medium fought a demon here. She had rescued a lost friend from its grasp, brought him closure about his son, and worked to bring closure to countless others while they recovered. Only later did she learn the purpose of these beautiful, shimmering gem-like plants. They store memories, she knows now.

She lands in a small hollow in the crystal woods, on the banks of the river, just behind a young man staring deep into it. He is a strange one. Though he is fox-shaped, with nine soft tails behind him, two gray wings like an eagle’s wings sprout from his shoulders, cloaking him gently in thunderstorm-colored down. He is not a slow-witted man. He looks up from the river as soon as he lands. As she quietly watches him, she thinks about how this is an ideal place for this meeting. She beckons him to sit underneath the glimmering tree she’s landed next to.

“… Zorana?” He asks, incredulous, as it seems he’s been snapped out of a daze.

“Of all the people I could have learned had passed on, I would have hoped you wouldn’t be one of them.” She replies. “It’s been a long time, Rhythm.”

“The last time I saw you, you had just been given your focus… what happened to you?”

“Truth be told, I died too. I underwent a rebirth. I suppose what I truly am isn’t a secret to anyone anymore, myself included. I guess now we know why all that strangeness surrounded me back then...”

He looks sad for a moment, but then laughs. It’s a melancholy laugh, but it draws a smile from him all the same. “How you would always disappear… it still doesn’t explain me, y’know.”

“Heh… do you remember when cousin Jax first invited all of us to see what she had found?”

“Yeah… it felt like we had shrunk and walked into a mouse hole.”

“I don’t think we could have known a between when we saw it, not back then… not even me.”

“Zed sure did. He tried to warn us.”

“He did… but he seemed excited just to be there, too. How surprised he was when you got lost, when he found you again and you had those wings...”

“Fairest, he called it… tried to call it. He was never the best at English.”

“No...”

“I wonder what happened to him, after we all drifted apart. I tried to find him a few times, but I never did.”

“He’s safe. He has the companionship he deserves. He’s off wrestling the world like he did back then.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“A few times. Do you remember when he first found that chair? How dazzled he was by a metal folding chair from the Wylds?”

“He said it was made for him, hah… remember the old Guzzlord we used to hang around?”

“The one who lived in the marsh by himself. I remember… we dragged that old man through so much.”

“I wonder if he remembers us...”

“Back then, I’d say we were hard to forget… and not entirely by our choice. After all, with when we found out about your brother...”

“How he was taken as Fairest before I changed… and the old fae that had taken him… the way she used him as a pawn for a while...”

“And how she tried to do the same with my cousin. But my cousin was resilient, even if it made her act concerning.”

“But it wasn’t all bad. Hell, most of it wasn’t… remember the base we made in that old overgrown temple? What a strange place that was, it was built like a dungeon...”

“In retrospect, it would turn out that the lady of the wylds we read so much about, the Goddess… that was my mother. My… other moth-”

“You don’t have to explain. I get it.”

“I don’t think I could explain if I had years to do it with. Oh, oh oh, do you remember when we thought you died? And you had to project yourself to talk to us, but you were really in another realm?”

“That was the one with the races right?”

“Yeah! And then I got sucked into the same realm and we had to bring that magic stone out of the maze...”

“… because we were so lost that finding a bunch of those was the only way to get home. Okay I’ve got one. Remember the realm with the magic pencils?”

“That could draw anything you wanted and make it a reality, within reason… it took some doing to even get those to work outside that realm.”

“Zed loved those...”

“He did. I think we all did. He could make portals to different realms, he made a wrestling ring in our base… the only thing he couldn’t do was get us home.”

“We were lost in there for ages… Val came to find us. I guess it was a good clue when nothing happened to her, either...”

“Did… this, happen to her too?”

“In a more direct way… she sparked on her own. My mother helped her change, to suit what she always said she felt like...”

“… a dragon.”

“Yeah. She only ever told our group that. Justice, is what she ended up being.”

“Hah! Of course she would be. She was always good at that...”

“Yeah… remember when she first found us, how you had gotten arrested in that one realm and were all chained up?”

“She learned the laws overnight to bust me out, just like that… remember when Zed thought we were in Springfield, but it was just a realm whose color was yellow?”

“He still wanted to throw dynamite into the reactor, but it wasn’t even a reactor, it was just a weirdly-shaped formation.”

“He tried to talk you into drinking at the pub we ended up in, but you kept saying no.”

“That was pretty wise. I’m… a featherweight.”

“Remember the wedding?”

“When two of the fae friends we made got hitched because they wanted to do a mortalside wedding? Barely. It turned out that cousin Cyndra spiked the punch...”

“You dyed your hair orange, got hit with the lampshade and went off about nuclear physicists and then-president George W Bush.”

“History repeats itself, I guess.”

“You didn’t do it again, did you.”

“I was at a wedding. I thought, now that I’ve sparked, mortal champaigne should be fine. Somebody slipped me my mother’s drink. I called out my girlfriend for having a nice rack live on stage and got us both pregnant.”

“...how.”

“It would take me years to explain it. Funny that I’d be the first, and apparently only, of us to have that. There’s two of them. Both girls. I love them both dearly.”

“… I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks… hey, remember when...”

They speak back and forth for hours, trading memory after memory and filling that grove with bright colors and a mood of melancholic happiness over the times long past. Some of them are happy. Some of them are sad. Some of them are angry, and some of them are downright triggering. But they all trace the tales of a group of friends who once upon a time, explored the Faewild, with no one to rely on but themselves and the fae friends they made along the way. By the time they’ve reminisced on their whole story, that hollow is as vibrant as any wyld realm, and carries in it the spark of a friendship eternal.

But every story has an ending, and when they run out of tales to recount, they’re both left staring through the colors of their memories into the river again.

“…. How did you die? You were Fairest...”

“I was caught in an accident. I was so hurt I couldn’t move, but I was too resilient to die. They said I’d never move again, so I decided I was done. Death himself was waiting for me when I chose to go.”

“You’re only as old as I am. You could do the Walk. You could have gotten up.”

“I could do that.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because the next big adventure is waiting for me out there somewhere. No matter where I end up, we’ll always have this. You know that.”

“But...”

“You should know, Lady Afterlife. I might have stepped into the river, but I will always be alive. Right here, in this grove. You wanted that, didn’t you? That’s why you came to find me. To have one last chat.”

“I suppose so.”

“These plants and trees will remember. This will always be Our Place, just like that was all those years ago. And if you see Zed or Jax again, bring them her. Bring your sister here, your cousin. They’ll know. They’ll know I’m not really gone.”

“Then, if you really want to go… let’s make it official. Just like that tree in the wylds...”

“...I think we can do that.”

She pulls out a small knife and approaches the largest tree in the hollow. She carves their names into the trunk, and the etchings glow with an ethereal silver light. She gives her old friend one last hug, and gives him one of her shining red and white feathers. She tells him to give it to the river-man down the banks, and she watches him walk off into the woods once more.

When he’s gone, she’s left standing there. It’s an empty feeling. Like she’ll never be truly complete again.

But they’ll always have this.