Health and heart and heath and sound

Danger lurking, all around

Where I’m next, I think I know

Certain voices tell me so

Whispers lying in my mind

Are they new, or are they mine?

Health and heart and heath and sound

Danger’s always, here it’s bound

If I could skip the next few years… that would be nice.

Assuming it all turned out exactly the way I wanted it to… that would be nice.

But I can’t do that.

I have to get what I want for myself, by myself.

Why does it have to be so hard??

If I could see him… the way he sees himself.

A new set of eyes.

Something different for once.

Yeah.

But I can’t do that.

So, anyways,

why the fuck am I still talking?

And here's the last chunk of a much longer poem:

A connection has been made, I cannot resist!

Guide me power to my bloodied fist!

Fill my lungs with air, my brain with blood,

my mouth with words, and my heart with thought.

Sing to me a hope I have been searching for!

The valley.

A heaven, a haven, a place, a home.

My home.

And now I know

that I myself

am the only one who has made this

for my own

-B

She narrows her eyes, clearly just as nervous as I am. "It's hard to reach you when I'm not dead or severely depressed. So I'm dead now, and I'm here. Tell me why this all happened. Tell me why Otto died. Tell me why you shamelessly lied to my face and put my friends through hell."

I sigh, guilt weighing down my stomach like a stone. I can't possibly provide the answers she's looking for. I can't justify what I did.

"Nothing I say will change the past. Why bother?" I can feel the fog closing in around me, suffocating me, drowning my senses in that horrid white noise again. I knew she'd seek me out eventually, but I'm not ready to face the past again. The fog has never felt more welcoming.

"Because it's kept me awake at night for years! Ever since the war ended, I've never stopped blaming myself and- and hating myself because of you! Because you chose me of all people to manipulate and torment, and I don't even know why!" Eisla tears up, her voice shaking and cracking under the pressure of her bottled up emotions. I want to reach out and comfort her, but I can't do anything. I can only watch, wishing I could bring myself to explain that I know that feeling all too well.

A long silence follows. I sit, gazing into the unmoving water at my own reflection. Those cold, glowing amber eyes. I can see now why Camille hated looking at them so much. I try to formulate a response, but the fog still won't let me process anything. All the while, Eisla's emotional outburst cools down, and she continues to glare at me from across the water.

"So? Are you gonna tell me?" She hisses after what feels like a second eternity.

"Of course I'll tell you. But it's a very, very long story, and I don't think it'll justify anything the way you seem to be hoping it will," I murmur, not being able to bring myself to meet her gaze.

"I don't care. I just want any kind of closure. Please," she begs.

I sigh again. "Alright, but don't say I didn't warn you."

Another silence as I try again to put my thoughts into words.

"Well?" She asks, getting impatient.

I snap back to reality. "Oh! Sorry, I just don't know where to start. This is going to be…difficult for me, to say the least," I say with a nervous giggle. Fuck, I don't want to do this.

I shift in my seat uncomfortably and nod, finally finding a decent place to start.

"Okay. Did anyone ever tell you much about Camille?"

"Uh, I know she was the leader of that army. You were her second in command, right? You nearly incinerated Anna trying to exorcise her."

I laugh again. "Yeah, that sure was an ordeal. Hell, I nearly incinerated you too. Anyways, that's all true. But I didn't exactly follow her willingly."

Eisla raises an eyebrow suspiciously. "So you're saying you didn't thoroughly enjoy fucking with people's heads like that?"

"Um…" Oh boy. I was dreading this question. "It's kinda complicated…I mean, I didn't exactly despise it, but it was all I knew. It never sat well with me, like, I always kind of knew that what I was doing was wrong and that I should be helping these people instead, but- but I was desperate. Camille demanded my help, as in she wanted me to do all her work for her while she sat and laughed, in exchange for helping me find out who I was. I should've known earlier that she was lying, but I hoped that if I kept going just a little longer, she'd finally crack. It wasn't until the war that I realized just how much I hated doing it. I was terrified of what Camille would do to me if I just abandoned her and changed sides, and I didn't think anyone would trust me since I'd already betrayed them twice, so I just did little things from the shadows to help the rebels. Ultimately, I still had to follow Camille's orders, but if there was a chance she wouldn't find out that I failed to burn down this village or that one, I'd take it and show as much mercy as I could. A few other demons had the same realization as me, so I helped a few of them disappear. You know Osamu?"

"Yeah, he was Anna's brother. He's a demon?" Eisla looks at me as if she's surprised. 

Did nobody tell her anything? Yikes.

"Uh, yeah, he is. Unfortunately I had to leave him with Camille when he died because of what he did during the attacks on Bethelin. I know he was just following orders, but I digress. At some point he realized he didn't want to hurt anyone anymore. He came to me and begged me for help, so I helped him plan his escape. He was caught by the rebels, and eventually gave up and went back to the Pahaverse."

Eisla slowly nods as I speak, trying to process my hopeless rambling and make sense of it all. After I finish speaking, we fall into another silence. She gazes down into the motionless water, her chestnut-colored eyes flashing as she scrambles for more questions to ask me. It's kind of relieving to know that she's just as sorely unprepared as I am.

Finally, she speaks up. "So you only worked for Camille because she promised to help you find out who you were?"

I nod. 

"That seems a little silly to me. Why did you care about who you were? I'd love to forget my life and start over with a clean slate. Besides, don't you have the memories of all the people whose minds you were in?" Eisla raises an inquisitive eyebrow at me.

Chills run up my spine as Eisla's question causes the turmoil of that time to come rushing back. The fog seems to swirl around me as I'm overcome with dizziness for a brief moment.

"You have to understand, I had absolutely no identity of my own. You saw what I was like. I had no face, no name, hardly any voice. It wasn't just a simple case of amnesia. I'd lost my entire being, my very soul. I was nothing. It was fine when I first met Camille because it was all I knew, but once I started poking through people's minds, and witnessing their memories, and walking around in their shoes, I was overwhelmed with this feeling of being out of place. I never felt like I was really…there, you know? It was like…the whole world, but slightly to the right or left. I often didn't even feel in control of myself. I was my mind, but not my body, and at times I'd recede into my thoughts, like someone else was making my arms and legs move and I was just there to observe. I hated it. I needed to find some shred of an identity so that I'd feel like I actually existed. At first I looked for it in the people whose minds I inhabited, but as time went on I realized that being someone else wouldn't work. If anything, waking up in someone else's body and seeing someone else's face in the mirror made it even worse. Having the memories of countless people when you have none of your own is like you're constantly trespassing in your own mind, and you're going to get kicked out any second. No matter what I did, it felt like I was missing some key part of my being. I felt so empty and confused all the time. I took it upon myself to look for that key, and asked Camille for help. She agreed, but only if I kept on doing her bidding."

Eisla looks at me with wide, deeply concerned eyes. "Yeesh. Sorry I asked."

I chuckle awkwardly. "Don't worry about it. Actually, it's kind of nice to talk about this stuff. Or just to talk at all, if I'm being honest."

"What do you mean?" She gazes quizzically at me.

I shrug. "Well, after all was said and done, Camille, Alejah, and I just kind of went back to doing our own thing. Things are running smoothly now besides some slacking in Camille's department. We really had nothing to say to each other. I've just been here helping people reach the afterlife, and that’s no place to talk about myself. It's been pretty lonely."

Eisla looks shocked. "You haven't talked at all? In, what, 60 years? Nothing's actually been worked out?"

"Uh, no. Guess things kind of worked themselves out. Camille knows her place now, and the world isn't completely fucked anymore, so-" I'm cut off as Eisla stands up and storms over to my side of the pond. "Whoa! Hey, what are you doing?!"I gawk as she marches up to me, grabs my wrist, and pulls me to my feet.

She locks eyes with me, a look of unbending tenacity in her eyes. "If there's one thing that whole ordeal taught me, it's that problems like these never have answers this simple. We are going to talk to Camille right now. Come on!"

"We?!" I retort, being helplessly dragged behind her.

He wished he could remember their little make out session - he wished they had not been so foolishly drunk - he wished they had spoken about it properly afterwards. He wished a lot of things. He wished desperately for something other than the small snippets of things he had managed to piece together about that night. The blinding headache he'd had when he woke. Her glittery lipstick smushed across his collarbone. The split second memory of the gasp she gave as he snaked his drunken fingers beneath her top and made contact with the flushed skin of her stomach, and leaned into his touch with a certainty he had longed for since.

“Oh! Y-yeah, she said to tell you “Plan three,” but never told me what it means.”

Ariel’s sigh became external this time. Three meant either Ariel, Eydis, and Metis, or the third plan along a specific vein of thought. Metis had already attempted to join forces with Ariel twice before, and it worked for about a week the second time. Given the addition of a third, and Metis’ tendency to escalate plans in a more exponential manner than most, it could only mean one thing.

“She’s planning to destroy the world.”

Eydis blinked for a moment, unphased by the suggestion. “…Well, I’m not entirely opposed?” Her sweet, innocently confused smile hid a dark expression that had flickered across her features for a split second. Her fidgeting had changed from grand gesturing to small shifts in place, and the very air around her seemed to vibrate in excitement.