This is how I imagined Artemis's short-lived time as a spirit.

Hope you enjoy it :)

Life As I See It

And so death slipped my body from me like an old coat finally, lovingly discarded.

"Artemis! Artemis!"

It does not answer.

"Artemis!"

I dip to catch it but the evening snatches me first, grips my arms like a mother restraining her child. She is warm, tries to hush me and wraps her night about me like a new skin. I struggle, open eyes of flower-buds, bird-song, curl oak-branch fingers and stretch toes of dampened bracken. My mouth parts lips of stone and mildewed ruin and screams in the dawn.

"We should take him to the house."

My head shifts, creaks, and I snap back into one. One leap and I have closed my arms about him. My evening skin is shrinking to mist, to bead on his jacket, in the hair of my corpse. I look down at it and shriek. I did not want this. I did not want this.

It is later and we are alone. The elf has flown. I bore her wings on the flats of my feet and her engines nicked my tendons, cut nerves of fog and blustered insect. I gritted teeth of brick and weed and kicked her high, away.

"God," mutters Butler.

He has my attention. I am the callouses, the cuts in his palms. He sighs into them and I am his breath.

"The world wasn't worth it."

My body on the table is quiet. The head is turned, faced away to the wall, its tongue dried inside a mouth carved of cold and silence. I approach it warily… And suddenly it sits up, screams at me.

"NO!"

I rear back in shock, become the paper, the pictures on the wall.

"Do you hear me?" Butler is standing, screaming. I am the plaster, the copper pipes beneath. "It wasn't worth it!"

Weeks pass. I am the seconds it takes, the fading arras, the bearding stubble, wounds that attempt to scab but cannot for ever-picking fingers. I can hardly swallow for dust.

In time I leave the weighted house. I smack the stratosphere, bust clouds with my bare hands and plummet with new, sharper rains. I rip the air with the wings of swallows. I cry. I crow. I strip the trees of leaves and autumn comes.

"Butler?"

"Mrs Fowl."

She is wearing the dress that is tailored from my heart muscles. When she walks they move, stretch, sway.

"Would you sit a moment?"

"I'm half way through a session, Mrs Fowl."

"Yes, I can see that, but I feel it's important."

The dress stills, waits.

"What do you want to say?"

"It's been three months, Butler."

"Yes, Mrs Fowl."

"You need… Juliet and I… You have not begun to grieve, Butler."

His eyes are my eyes. They hang, pierce.

"No, Mrs Fowl."

"It is not healthy, Butler." She, who has lost me twice, is better at this. "If you… if you wish to talk about… about him–"

I take the hit. I am suddenly the stuffing, the nylon sleeve, the sand.

"Butler–"

Again.

"Butler–!"

I am his fingers, the bandages that speckle crimson. I am the swing, the smack, the pull in his stomach. I am the flash of desire, the brief urge to buckle forwards, to wring my arms around this stupid, fucking piece of gym kit, to fall to my knees, to lie like he did, to die like he did.

We look up with eyes that hang, pierce. We are still on our feet, still stood tall. My mother, and my heart muscles, have gone.

And so I sulk in forgotten, slug-munched crocus bulbs; in dimmed green houses, listening to the buzz of heat lamps with ears of glass and filtered moonlight.

"Artemis..."

I fall out in sheer shock, burst away along the stem, to the grass, back to the artificial earth. She winds herself about me.

"If you… if you can hear me..."

I slip away through the loop of her. She follows, flitting, sweeping.

"Just know that we're coming for you… We are..."

I become the feet of shrews, of dormice, patter over mud and hard-trampled weed. But she is the barn owl's swoop and I am caught, lifted suddenly by my writhing fur, my twine-like limbs. The mouse's soul flees. I drop. Its death-light catches me like a remonstrance, a blow of discipline to my burning cheeks, and I plummet, bruised, back to the earth. Rain smarts on the glass of the lake I crash through and I sink down to see her, lying in the silt, smiling as I drift towards her.

"Just hold on…"

She reaches up and brushes back my hair of frog-spawn, of muck, of a long-forgotten flak jacket.

"Just hold on."

The snows come and gloss the gardens free of colour. My spine hardens, curves like the ice-bowed trees that stretch sheared, frozen fingers to point accusations at a ground that cracks and sheds its layers like hammered slate. I stay inside, where it is warm, and lie beside the children to blow monsters from their dreams like so many bothersome cobwebs. I replace them with light: with soft, easy bliss.

"He's so small…"

I turn my head of cotton playthings, of blankets, security.

"What? Course he's small! Did you think he just popped out all lanky and big-headed? He's got a lot of growing to do yet…"

"How much growing…?"

"Probably about three months more…"

"Can't you speed it up...?"

"Not without risks…"

"Then we should just take him up now. As he is…"

"As an infant? No. His body needs to be as close to Artemis's normal age as possible otherwise the soul may not recognise it and reject it…"

"How could you possibly know that? It's stupid to hold on this long! He could fade any moment…"

"Holly, believe me. It's the slow way or no way…"

My existence is the 'Way'. The humans, the animals, the plants, they have their own 'Way'. From observing the human 'Way' for such a time I have come to realise that I could never have been one of them. Nature agrees with me, is amused that I could ever have thought anything otherwise. I am wind, frog-croak and bracken, wiry heath-path, fletches of fern, the heart of the briar that the brook treads through. I am the filament glow, the skin rustle of wool against knee-cap, their sniffs, the way their hands curl, shying, about their mugs in the winter night. She is still my mother, him my father, but I was born in this shape, to taste life and shape it not stamp about it like a child, blindfolded, in this world of God-made wonders.

I did not ask for this. But now I am it. This is my 'Way'.

"I just want him back, Foaly…"

"I know. We all do…"

A rose bush begins to grow.

The world is disturbed. Sparrows take flight at the twitch of my eyebrow. I climb the nearest yew trunk, become the whispering leaves and breeze-trembling nest.

"Well, it's about time."

I clench fingers of bark and berries.

"Artemis's instruction were not exactly simple to follow. And, typically, they were totally illegal."

My eyebrows take flight again and I roll back to the ground, land softly amongst the murmur of grass blades. I look out across the meadow where a group of figures are making their way slowly, laboriously towards me. I feel the insects clutch the weeds at their foot shakes, the moles beneath them look up with blind and fearful eyes. The big one speaks and the air about me trembles.

"Are you saying that Artemis is a ghost?"

My hair becomes the breeze whip, my harried breath the dawn-light cold. The mist creaks beneath my feet.

"The Beserkers were ghosts for ten thousand years. That's how the spell worked. If they lasted that long, it's possible that Artemis held on for six months."

Then something drops like a boulder into the depths of my life's lake. I am crashing, overflowing.

"Possible? That's all we've got?"

I am broken.

"Possible is being optimistic. I would say barely conceivable would be a better bet."

I am broken.

"Yes, well, the barely conceivable is Artemis Fowl's speciality."

Something hurts and I clutch my arm. My arm of flesh and blood and bone. I am in another time, a room, laying a body slowly into cushions. There are drugs in my system and a faint taste of bile in my mouth. I brush my lips together and sound vibrates past my lips.

"I want you to know, my dear friend, that without you I would not be the person I am today."

In a meadow, somewhere very far away, a box is being opened. And like a fairy-tale princess, some fair maiden poisoned and awaiting her prince's kiss, there lies a young human with black hair, pale skin and an oxygen mask.

"I was a broken boy and you fixed me. Thank you."

My knees buckle. The tendons, muscles, gristle hit earth. I feel grit in my palms and smell metal. The world is ripping around me, hazing in a green, mephitic nimbus. I squint my eyes against the whip of my hair. The edge is near. I shall make it. I shall make it!

"Butler, you must place the bodies in the roses. At the centre of the spiral."

I sprint, I leap.

"Without life support we have only minutes before degeneration begins."

I hit spell. In the same instant I hit panic, despair, anger. I hit karma, I hit life. I close my eyes, my hands clench my trousers, my head bows. I choke. Then I hear the running. My voice cracks out.

"Stay back! The spell shall kill you!"

"These roses. They are a sign."

"Butler, stop her!"

I watch her wrestle in his arms and rise slowly to my feet.

"Wait. Just wait, Holly, Artemis has a plan."

Yes, I do. I shift my left foot a little further back from my right. Now, when I fall, my shoes should not bruise his arms.

"What if this doesn't work, Holly?"

"I have a fairy eye – one of yours remember?"

"What if I let Artemis die?"

"Why Artemis? Why did you do this?"

Because I am the person you repaired. Because as I stand there, the boy you patched together with words, punches and a single, bloodied kiss, you know this, and I do not need to tell you again. It was all there in my voice, in the way we have been looking at each other lately.

"Do you remember what I said to you?"

"It will work!"

"I remember. But…"

I look at you now. And, in panic, my eyes briefly ask you whether it is going to hurt. Your gaze does not answer. It only widens and mine is diverted as death lays her hand gently, finally on my shoulder. I panic, gasp with thorns and bleeding fingers. I become months of prayer, of bitten-back sobs; of hateful thoughts, bitter thoughts, regrets that festered and hung from hearts and shoulders like funeral wreaths. I try to grip the earth but miss. I grasp at its roses but their petals only come free in my hands.

The morning is crying. She grips me in this frenzy of light-spun kaleidoscopes, pushes me down, her hands soft but firm, like I am a tired child she is forcing, finally to bed. She strokes my head and kisses me, breathes life back into me.

Her fingers clasp about mine. And somehow, as the world about me ripens, as birdsong and branch-break stir in my ears, blood, hot and painful, slips around my muscles, my hair wetted by grass-dew and not the other way around–

"Artemis, please."

My eyes open.

Little bit mental, I know. But I love playing with words.

What did you think of it?