Circe

Sometimes, when one passes, they do not continue their journey into the other life, but remain in their current forms as spirits. These are individuals who have died and have unfinished business. Some manage to figure it out and move one, while some need guidance. Others, well.. others remain spirits for centuries. Circe is one of the unlucky ones. Rather than moving on, she has been chosen to stay.

She spends most of her day wandering around and scavenging materials for her personal use. The rest of her day is used to make potions and practice her magic. She is a witch and a scavenger, living her life in the middle of the woods within the roots of an ancient tree. She has long ago given up moving on, and has decided to remain who she is.

This excerpt was written by the lovely TrappedInTime:

Time is a tender thing, beyond what we can regonize or truly comprehend. It never ends, so did it truly begin? But who am I to know? It seems out of place, out of this reality that a mere mortal would even stop and ponder these things. Ha, yes, I was no different than all of you, and that is where I stumbled to fall beyond mortality and the realms of time as you know them to be. There are things we cannot understand, powers beyond the very confines of our imagination, so great and lasting that even I, yes I, after all this time wandering beyond the gates of eternity do not understand. But the future is unknowable, or perhaps so it seems. The keys lie in the past... and so to the past I will return and there, just perhaps, I can find my purpose that I never fufilled, leaving me to this state upon which I stand.

Youth, it was something I cherished. The days behind to run free among the trees and explore the world that surrounded me. I was naive, wrapped up in the simplicity I called reality for there was nothing beyond, or so I thought. Who was there to teach me? My parents? They were gone, many a moons before, though perhaps not by fault of their own. No, I cannot say the fault lay with them but with fate. But that is another conversation that you, in your mortal form, do not have time for.

My father, I did not know him well. I remember visions of the blurry figure, warm and gentle, loving and kind. Or so I believed. He was large, at least as my small mind perceived when I had yet to see beyond blurry lids of puphood. Yet, I never saw him once the world began to take shape, nor was he mentioned by my mother... who he was, or even is, I still do not know. As for my mother, she was a stunning beauty, with a love for the life-giving source she called the Etherean. Water. That is what you mortals call it.

It was by the Etherean that she met her end, by the jaws of death and toxin. A creature of darkness, a worker of evil masked by beautiful colors and patterns across shimmering scales. It did its work swiftly, and what was I to do, young in age not able to comprehend the workings of black blood? Venom in your simplistic terms. No, it was beyond the reaches of my ability to capture time once my dear mother was left in the vice of death itself. But the serpent, the evil worker stayed near, and that was where it too met its fate.

I know not what saved me from the foolish act of attacking the slithering beast, but my life was spared while it was left to writhe as my mother did. And yet, I took no peace in it... to see it suffer, to see my mother suffer... it ate me, long beyond that day. How could life be robbed in such violent spasms? And who could find those who had crossed the line of time and death to take mortality's length into their own hands?

My heart, my core, was shaken between the bodies of good and evil, I standing at the center. It was there that a took a small step to evil, tearing from it the lethal fangs that had robbed good as if to throw the warning into the unseeable abyss that had sent this hell creature. They were the first of many... to which I hold around my neck and to my heart even to this day that immortality has been unable to rob me.

It was here I thought my purpose lay... in rendering my help to others who were faced with such demons as the stunning serpent. I wandered then, frolicked in my youth and set out to search for any I could help. I was silly... for in thinking I found my purpose, I abandonded it in liue of the comforts of the confines of time. Another day, another week... beyond I would settle to see if there was more, but not now. Now... it has no meaning to me, but you would not understand, how could you when now is tangible in the mortal realm? I so believe now was a concept of mortal time and it was there my folly lay. For now is not this instant but the conjoining of today, yesterday, tomorrow... eaons ahead and eons behind.

For how many moons I stood in your form, I can barely remember since it has so long since been, but I had passed some years, though not many. I was in the now, thinking of nothing but the mortal moment of which I stood, wandering through the natural realm... wandering like a robin hood of the human stories, to be a hero. I wore this necklace with pride, and perhaps my folly even now is that I hold it with a light of recognition. But that is not of purpose. Now, what is comes from that moment in the now.

I stood at a crossroad that mortal eyes cannot see, and neither could I. And that is where I stayed, making no choice for which way I was to go, wandering in the metaphorical circle of life, no direction in mind but to wander. And it was there my mortality was crushed, shattered and thrown to wind so my eyes could be opened to reveal things beyond... beyond what my words can express.

A giant stood in my path, the sun incarnate as it seemed. A blaze of yellow and red, fire, life, death, combined in this creature, wolfish in nature and appearance and yet... not, beyond. Yes, beyond. It towered, blazed through my soul, scorched the very depths of my heart. There were no words as it came down upon me but it spoke, as I heard it deep within, powerful, painful, familair. Your life is not your own... Your purpose beyond... YOU were born of the beyond and merged to the below... If in this below you cannot find, then in the beyond you must search.

My mortality died that day, and in the same instant, it, he, was gone, leaving me to gasp and shake upon the ground. I had not been touched but passed through, the beyond tearing the very mortal breath from my lungs until there was nothing and I was plunged to darkness... darkness so frightening and suffocating until I pushed up and swam through the abyss... and I broke the surface of the Etherean to step onto mortal ground in the form of the beyond...

Things still yet beyond my comprehension... But NOW I will find my purpose..