Hey everyone! This has been floating around in my head for a bit so I thought I'd take a whack at it. I tried to sustain the angst and bitterness, but it turned out the character's personality was stronger than my dying will to be angsty. My beta, who has very nice teeth should be happy though, she is mentioned a lot. (Which reminds me: mind beta-ing this? I wanted to get it up on FF so I didn' t email it...Love you!) Thankyou to Yami Moh, for her MSN beta-ing and casual laughter. Love you! ;)
Please read and review!
Ghost
Prologue: Reflection
The fire was dying down. The embers were cooling, the bright orange fading. I didn't care. I didn't need the light to reflect on death.
What is death? The parting of the soul from a mortal body to some higher, holy place? The toll of illness and injury? Of fatal wounds that rend the body until it can no longer stand under its own strength? The slow decay of time? The rotting of a corpse? The cessation of life? The end?
I do not know this death. I have watched people come and go, flitting in and out of this world like dust on the breeze, glowing in the sun for an instant and fading into the shadows, kicked into dark corners.
Death is an entity. A malicious being whose sole purpose is to cause people harm by dragging them kicking and screaming from the living world, and by torturing those left in their wake. Crushing the families and friends of the deceased who mourn their parting like they had ripped the life from them themselves.
Elves generally don't have to worry about this kind of thing. They don't die. If you don't get in their way, they live forever, immortal beings. Whoopee for them. Dwarves aren't much different. The miners live for an age, under the ground, hoarding gold and getting rip-roaring drunk. Halflings are similar. They don't look a day older than twelve, and they act like it too, getting up to their eyeballs in shit, or hiding in their burrows their entire lives.
Goody for them. Hooray for all those immortal, drunk, twelve-year-old sons-of-bitches. Whoot.
For humans though, death is an everyday occurrence. Babies die, men die in battle, women die in birth, kids die, and old people die. Eventually everyone dies. Some humans spend their entire lives fearing their approaching and certain death. Others get proactive and try to kill death, or postpone it with potions and the worship of evil, mean people with staffs or rings. Most of those proactive, generally psychopathic souls die. Or they end up bent, crooked, wasted and wishing they were dead.
Like me.
I may not be bent, or crooked or wasted, in fact I think I look pretty good considering how long I've been around, but I really wish I was dead. I wake up in the mornings and check my pulse just to be sure. Hey, I might have died in my sleep. You never know. And orcs skip in circles, cuddling kittens and bunnies. And Saruman and Sauron hold hands and chant "Coombaya, my Lord!"
I can hope can't I? Just a little, a smidgeon?
My best hope is to find someone who can rid me of the forsaken curse! I've been searching for more than two hundred years, and I've come up with zip. Nothing. A few con men tried, and subsequently their necks were enjoying a pleasant breeze. I've become bit of legend that way, by killing people. And that's okay. People are more inclined to answer my questions when they learn who I am. Or they run. That's okay too, because normally I'm not in the mood for conversation. I'm in the mood for bitter, angsty thoughts about death, and compulsive pulse checking.
Got a problem with that? Bite me.