In early morning, with dawn glimmering over the horizon and our teammates sleeping peacefully in their beds, we could focus on our own body. Then we could feel our tendrils curling around long-dead flesh, animating the corpse we inhabited. We were not truly alive. The light of our dead eyes reflected off the opposite wall. If we froze the air into ice, we would see in its crystalline facets the reflection of a ghost, something unseeing. A distorted image for a distorted self.

It was strange knowing that this body was not our body, these organs not our organs, only things we had temporarily borrowed and put to purpose. We were trespassing in a corpse.

Could we split our body apart and stitch it back together? The thought made us faintly nauseous. Yet there was something lurking beneath that nausea, a morbid wonder or dread. We wondered what we could accomplish if we put ourselves to it. The scientists, from our faint recollections, had never tested our full capabilities out of fear. The original Leif had grown up hearing horror stories about what we were capable of. We were a parasite, a scourge upon civilization.

"Hey."

Vi's wings fluttered behind us. She leaned against the wall, uncharacteristically quiet. "Are you alright?"

"Just thinking," we said. As we spoke, our tendrils were threading through this body's vocal chords, up and down its throat, through every part of its long-dead organs. We puppeteered a corpse.

A corpse which Vi touched, placing her hand on its wrist. We felt it. It was a touch slightly dulled, as everything had been since we struggled free from that web. But a touch nonetheless.

"Leif," she said. "I meant what I said, earlier. Kabbu and I still care for you as teammates. You're our friend. Don't forget that, okay?"

We turned towards her. The smile that played on her features was more somber than usual, but it was genuine enough.

"We're here for you," she said. We managed to nod.


Corpses did not age. No matter how much time passed, our carapace was the same blue it had been on the fateful day we woke to a changed world. In reflections, our face stayed unchanging. We were suspended permanently on the brink of life and death, able to enter neither territory.

Vi and Kabbu grew old, but we did not.

We watched Vi's posture slump as she grew older, and moved slower. The effects were slight, but we could not ignore them. Her reaction time slowed. She missed more often with her boomerang. Kabbu no longer had the strength he'd wielded in his prime, when he could stab through swarms of enemies with a mighty swing of his horn.

For a time it went unacknowledged, until Vi slipped up on what would have been a normal hunting mission. A bug reared out from the underbrush. We speared it through with ice before its jaws clamped around her head. In the aftermath we rested, and a quiet horror lingered around the campfire. We had been far too close. Years ago Vi would have easily handled such an enemy, but things had changed.

Eventually, Kabbu said what no one wanted to hear. A break was mentioned. Retirement was hinted at. Vacations were good for the aching body, and the aching soul.

We agreed, knowing this was the beginning of the end.


"And what will you do after I'm gone?" Kabbu asked, his voice warm with good humor. Always good humor.

"We don't know," we said. We wrapped our wings tight around ourself, and we shivered. Not from the cold. Cold had not hurt us in so long. "We don't know."


"Stay strong, Leif," Vi murmured from her position on the sickbed. Immortality was no longer possible in this world, not for those like her. The one artifact that would have granted it we had destroyed, so many years ago.

"We will try," we said, for her sake. But the old emptiness gnawed at us. We watched her body, so much smaller than what it had been, curl up and close its eyes.


The days passed like rain.


We left.

We went farther than anyone else had ever gone. We saw the relics of giants, and more besides.

We ventured into wild and distant lands and saw wonders. We could not find it in ourselves to admire them.

We left flowers by roadside graves.

We encountered young larvae who tugged at our wings and asked curious questions. We answered them lightheartedly, except when they asked why we traveled alone.

And, always, we stayed the same.