Ghost
There was a ghost in Hecate's temple; a vengeful, bitter ghost. A sinister visage that Athena had long given up for dead. Occasionally it would come to her in her dreams, haunt her while she was sleeping and vulnerable. A demon summoned by her subconscious to torture her when she felt upset or scared. It had haunted her when her relations with the Crazy Horns faltered, twisted her dreams into visions of violence and hatred.
She had never seen it before in waking life, though. The sight chilled her to her core. Just a fleeting glimpse in the dark dance hall, the face so quickly disappeared it could've been a trick of the smoke. Athena was certain it was a bufo-inspired vision but the thought didn't give her much comfort. The ghost only appeared to Athena as an omen of foreboding, as a grave warning of bad things to come.
Athena had settled into life at Ouroboros. She and the other forgotten Daughters engaged themselves principally in reverie and recreation. Every hedonistic whim she devised was indulged. She ate, she drank, she lounged. Athena felt herself slip away, her memories of the Crazy Horns becoming a drug-addled muddle of impressions and images, brief and disconnected glimpses into a life which was no longer in any way relevant to her. Pleasure became so commonplace she hardly felt it anymore, she was so submerged in the feeling of ecstasy she no longer recognized it. She was drowning, comfortably, and she didn't want it to end.
Then the ghost appeared and it shocked her out of her descent. It was a cold splash of water, a fleeting encounter with death itself. It terrified her, it truly terrified her. Something unimaginably bad was coming. Soon she was catching glimpses of the bitter ghost out of the corner of her eye every other day. She'd be lounging in the temple baths, soaking in the steam and talking about nothing at all with her new friends and it appeared nearly out of sight, passing menacingly through the corridor. She saw it in the gardens, a dark shadow skulking between the trees of the orchard. Often it would come to her in the dance hall, swirling around her, haunting Athena with its visions of death and betrayal. It was enough to send her into hiding.
She retreated to the bunker and refused to leave. She hid under her covers like a child hiding from the dark. The ghost in her waking nightmares held so much sway over her she was forced to come down from the bufo. She hoped that would end it, that the haunting would come to an unceremonious close as her mind sobered between her bedsheets. It didn't chase away the nagging feelings of impending doom, but she felt relieved that soon her waking life would at least be released of the visions.
Her roommates were concerned but were so steeped in their own self-love that they didn't put forth any effort to help. Athena didn't know what to say to them anyway. The ghost was a figment of a time long past. Its origins traced farther back than Athena's induction into the Daughters of Hecate, even. It was so wrapped up in her past that there was no way to clarify it to her fellow Daughters cleanly and precisely. There were no words for the vitriol or the fear that the ghost inspired in Athena, at least none in the common tongue. Perhaps in the language of her original tribe could she find the words, but she had long forgotten most of the Twisted Hair dialect that had once been her only means of communication. All she could say was that she felt terrible things were about to happen.
She was correct in her predictions of bad news. Once she sobered up and felt safe to leave the bunker, she returned to the Goddess' pyramid. There she discovered the most terrifying truth she couldn't imagine even with all her feverish predictions, despite how obvious it was in retrospect. She was stone-cold sober, so she could no longer blame the appearance of the ghost, the demon of her past, on drugs or visions. There it was, idly reclining in the main hall of the pyramid. She was older, obviously. Her hair was no longer in the style of their former tribe and her back was covered in hideous, unfamiliar scars, but her face was painted like a Daughter's, and she still had that unappealing air of cool aloofness.
"Arama," Athena spoke the name like a curse, and the corners of her mouth contorted with rage, "Arama lives?"