Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Fandom: Saga
Characters: Izabel
Summary: How Izabel found her (ghostly) groove.
Notes: Written for Night on Fic Mountain 2015 for elfin.
"How old are you?" —Klara to Izabel, on being surprised by Izabel's insight. (Saga v3)
Being dead sucked.
No, rewind that. Being killed, that had sucked.
Being dead was actually pretty cool, once you got the hang of it.
Izabel tried not to remember her death. It'd been mercifully fast... if there was anything merciful about land mines on supposedly civilian ground. But all of Cleave had been turned into a warzone, officially or otherwise, and civilian casualties were just another "unfortunate consequence." As far as both invading armies were concerned, those deaths just cleared the way for their forces.
Mostly. Cleave natives had a unique tradition of rising as ghosts when they died. Outsiders called them Horrors and to be fair, the spirits could be pretty horrifying when they wanted to. Especially when confronting the trespassers who'd ravaged their world.
Izabel had been the oldest of seven kids. She still remembered all their names, whispered them with her last moment before sunrise: Valente, Mateus, Catrina, Joao, Roque, baby Zita.
She didn't remember their faces.
She did remember Windy, her first and only girlfriend. Windy's eyes were brown, and they were soft and sweet when she looked at Izabel. At least until Windy's parents made her start going to that horrible church and suddenly everything was "sin this" and "damnation that" even while they were making out, and Izabel finally had enough of that shit. She told Windy to take a hike and not to come back until she shook the God-monkey off her back. Izabel smirked about the hurt look on Windy's face for the next two days...until she stepped on the mine and realized, dying, she would have given anything to take it back.
The worst thing about being dead was knowing she'd never have the chance to apologize for her cruelty.
She tried to make up for it. When Windy was conscripted by the Landfall Coalition, Izabel tagged along. She never showed herself, too ashamed to reveal her vaporous face, but she projected warnings when Windy hit danger zones and put on her most terrifying illusions when the moony forces attacked.
She got Windy through the wars to the fulfillment of her service. By then Windy had disavowed her parents' faith and—to Izabel's surprise—ended up in a sprawling group marriage. Izabel stuck around awhile longer, long enough to see Windy's kids and grandkids grow up. When Windy died at home of old age like Cleave natives almost never did, she turned her eyes to empty air and said, "Thank you, Izzy."
There was too much ectoplasm in Izabel's eyes to see Windy's ghost rise from her body.
Time passed. A lot of time, a lot of battles. The wings and the hornheads ran back and forth over the planet. Izabel learned a lot from the things she overheard. The soldiers talked about their homes, the places they'd been, the other people of the galaxy. She learned about Wreath magic and Landfall tech, the latter mostly through their drone allies. But after a while all the conversations became the same, all the gory and gruesome deaths became commonplace.
Everything was open to the dead. She could look at people and know their secret hopes, their darkest fears. It wasn't like mind-reading, she just saw the truth on their faces. Maybe being dead cut through all the bullshit projection and let her see what people were really like. Or maybe it was an extension of the illusion-casting power, automatically reaching into each person's psyche to drag out their secret terrors.
It wasn't just that, though. She could project good things too; some of the dead kids had a nice run playing through stories they read or Open Circuit shows they watched while alive. But after a while all the stories sounded the same.
Seasons turned. Months went by, decades maybe. Izabel fled the war, spending her endless nights in the wild places of the world. Her planet was awesome, and as a ghost, she could explore without any fear. Sure, she could only roam at night, but she could see just fine by starlight.
She went where the wind took her.
At some point Izabel looked around to realize her people were gone. All the living natives were dead and the armies were shipping in conscripts from other planets to fight. Every one of them considered Cleave a backwater, a last ditch assignment for losers and washouts. Its sole value lay in the gunpowder fields, and in the vast expanses of open land where the combatants could stage their wars.
Most of the older ghosts eventually faded and vanished for good, letting their ectoplasm blow away on the wind. They figured there was nothing left for them to protect once the last of the natives had been wiped out by the invading armies.
But the armies kept coming and there had always been more to Cleave than its people. By now, Izabel had seen more of the planet than most of its natives ever had. They'd mostly stuck to the cities. The untamed wilderness was just that—untamed and terrifying. The animate vines of the Endless Woods, the bubbling dangers of the Lava Swamps.
Izabel figured that "spiritual defender of Cleave" had to mean more than just defender of the people. All the ghosts hadn't been enough to keep the natives alive. But once the people were gone, the ghosts still remained.
Some of the remaining ghosts had gone crazy. Some were flat-out mean, whatever they'd been before wiped away by the trauma of their deaths and the long, meaningless existence afterward. Combine that with fearsome projected illusions and the mad ghosts really had become Horrors to anyone who invaded their territory. It was easy, when they could use the already dangerous environment and the trespassing offenders' own fears. Solid ground instead of neck-breaking pits, fearsome beasts that jumped out of nowhere, images of comrades dying horribly. Half the time, the intruders did the ghosts' work for them by discharging their weapons and killing their own companions.
They were supposed to haunt the enemy, drive them away. But from who? There was no one left to protect.
Somewhere along the time she decided to guard the places that needed shielding from the constantly marauding armies, like the Rocketship Forest. Some of her people believed the trees were inhabited by the ghosts of Cleave natives who'd never been born, unformed souls consigned to the ether by the destruction of their race. Izabel thought that was crap, mostly, but she loved the trees and she thought the trees liked her. She slowly learned to decipher their reverse-photosynthesis "speech," the colors they projected signifying moods or warnings.
She convinced a bunch of other ghosts to help project multiple layers of illusions over the forest, making it appear as a burned-out ruin. The rough illusionary terrain looked too devastated even to serve as a battlefield, riddled with gaping pits and deadfall tree husks. The armies gave the area a wide berth, eventually coming to consider it "haunted" even beyond the general superstitions about Cleave.
Even that task eventually lost its urgency. She wanted to leave. To get off this dead world and see the stars. But leaving meant tethering herself to a Cleave native, and there weren't any of those left. The only people on-planet were the invading armies and the hapless conscripts they'd brought along to support the war.
Izabel had mostly stopped paying attention to the breathers that roamed across her world. They fought, they died, they didn't become ghosts, the end. Boring. She conserved her energy toward strengthening her illusions—by this time, they were so layered that even the strongest moony spellbreaker didn't have a prayer of shattering them, not that they were sending their strongest to Cleave—and chasing stragglers who wandered away from the battles. Occasionally the armies sent out scouting parties looking for new and exciting battlegrounds where they could engage their enemies, and Izabel routinely sent them fleeing back to their encampments in terror. The ones who could still walk, anyway. She didn't go out of her way to kill them, they were doing a fine job of that themselves. But her illusions played rough, and she was hardly to blame for broken necks or friendly fire.
She was drifting idly through the woods north of the Lava Swamps when she spotted two lost soldiers—
No. They weren't soldiers. Izabel floated closer. It seemed unlikely, but there they were: a moony and a featherhead, standing together. Dressed in civilian clothes and arguing like...not like enemies at all. Like her parents used to argue, untold years ago.
And the horned man was holding a baby. Izabel could sense the infant had been born on Cleave, the first child in an impossibly long time. She saw the shining aura surrounding the newborn and realized that here, finally, was her chance to escape.
But first she needed to get a better sense of these implausible allies.
They'd seen the carnage that had broken out in the aptly named Murder Valley and were debating which way to go. Izabel peered over the woman's shoulder to see that she held a crudely drawn map depicting a fairly accurate picture of the region, including the Rocketship Forest. They were trying to reach it, but the battle was in the way.
Izabel listened, astonished, as they discussed their options...and felt her intangible jaw drop as they kissed. They were married and the baby was theirs. A child of two intractably warring cultures, born here on Cleave.
Other ghosts were stirring behind her. "We gonna gank them or what?"
"Don't hurt them," she told them. They hadn't realized what these two were or what their baby represented. Izabel understood why; she'd been around a lot longer.
She ignored the grumbling and paced "Alana" and "Marco" as they traveled. By sunrise, they were deep into the woods away from the armies and would be relatively safe while Izabel was out of commission for the day.
Sure enough, when she rematerialized at the next sunset they were sitting on a rock together, fast asleep. Even the kid was zonked out.
Izabel was considering options when the spider-lady freelancer showed up.
That— that just made sense, dammit. Neither Landfall nor Wreath could afford to let these two escape, especially not with a kid who symbolized the pointlessness of the entire war. If they'd sent one hunter, more were sure to be on the way.
Marco was down and Alana was holding the freelancer off by the time Izabel rallied the troops. They started with eerie moans—the classics were classic for a reason—and their spectral voices melded into an uncanny supernatural chorus so unnerving that the freelancer's nerve broke and she ran. Alana might have run too, if her husband hadn't been dying on the ground. Izabel approved of her priorities.
"Hello," the ghost kids called in their uncanny voices. "Hello, hello."
Alana looked at the end of her rope. Primed to take Izabel's offer of help, even given the prerequisite. And the offer would be sincere, since the baby—Hazel—might be Izabel's last chance.
"Hello, we've been watching you." Izabel manifested into visibility and the other kids did too, taking her cue. She kept her hands at her sides, trying to look as nonthreatening as a ghost with her guts hanging out could manage. "Looks like you could use a hand."