Dirt caked beneath Ymir's eyes and sat cloyingly between her teeth on the day she woke back into the world.
Her fingernails were scraped raw. Lip bitten with the kind of viciousness attributed only to those in their death throes, Ymir reached for a world she'd all but left, hands breaching the surface like a bird cresting a forlorn wave. The sea pitched to the side as she fought to free herself of its current, writhing against the churning soil with the kind of vigor that'd all but remained dormant for the last seventy years of her life.
Was it truly considered living, she wondered, to be buried of her own volition?
She was human again–viciously so. No longer an object of adoration, a figure of fixation for the mindless masses. Faith curled around her visage like smoke against a cigar: repentant, inflammatory. Who was she if she was not a creature of import? Who was she if she was not a mindless denizen hulking about foreign lands of the demons she'd been sent to consume?
To consume, Ymir thought, was to surrender.
So she spat out the dirt and rose to stand atop her grave. The sun bled honey yellow against the blue sky, vibrant throughout its stretching influence. Trees blushed under the celestial attention they garnered. Bushes hummed idly, swaying in the wind that swept its mild fingers against the filth coating Ymir's face. The faint scent of lavender, of violet, felt cool beneath her nose. A metal ring kissing her skin, painting the hand of the wind in riches far beyond her own. Ymir inhaled deeply, eyes closed, head tilted back to petition the sun for the warmth it shared with the world.
A cloud passed overhead. The sky darkened, a woman's cheek dampened with tears, subdued in silence. When the obstruction huffed its way out from in front of the sun the light returned in full. Only Ymir was no longer there to receive it: she'd already turned away, bent her head to brush off the earth clinging like skin to her bones. A passerby at a distance might observe her standing there above the freshly-tilled soil and assume she was a mourner. Perhaps, in fact, she was.
The thing about being hollow, Ymir knew, was that people attempted to fill that space with the funniest of things. Once upon a time it had been religion. Ymir was a god. Ymir was the god, their god. Her testament waved pardons and tempered pleas by the dozens. She sat poised like a bisque doll in front of her subjects and spent most of her time concentrating on maintaining the integrity of the pale white pleats of her skirt. Oh, Ymir, they gasped, breath expounded from their chests like sins ripped straight from the vine, oh, Ymir.
What was she full of now? Dirt? Not anymore.
The clouds returned in lazy droves while Ymir plucked idly at her tattered dress. What a shoddy thing it was: the halter neck was torn, individual seams crumbling with each step she took. She would need new clothes. That, or the kind of wanton abandon that declared she didn't need clothes at all.
The latter sounded better. Less work.
Ymir filled the space inside her ribs with wood. Rundown houses percolated along the hilly ridge of the field she'd crawled out of. She spent idle minutes perusing their ranks, skeptical and scrutinous, until she stopped at the one that appeared to be the most stable of the lot. Ymir stepped forward, bare feet chilled where they came into contact with a thin stone walkway. The pads of her toes followed the sensation forward as her eyes absorbed every inch of the house before her. The only front-facing window had fogged over with dust and detritus. Thin spindles of unwoven spiderwebs laced their fragmented fingers across the window panes. Ymir placed a hand against the grain of the door. Half a mind to drag her palm down its surface. Half a mind to refrain from testing fate for splinters she wasn't ready to receive.
The door, unexpectedly, was locked. She sighed. Ymir felt a sudden wave of ridiculousness at the act. What was she expecting? A house in pristine condition, ready for her to waltz into and claim for her own? Houses were not like people. They were vacant until occupied, and left standing until robbed of their tenants. Who was she to evict those who had never earned her ire? Perhaps the owners were every bit as dormant as she once was. When they woke to find sharp slats of broken glass decorating their front lawn and a door left partially ajar, would they stone her as those in the streets of Marley had done?
A change of clothes wasn't worth that. Not to Ymir.
And so she walked.
The world rolled beneath her feet, a cyclical carpet unfolding at her behest. Ymir walked until the distinct pangs of hunger in her stomach forced her to double over in stillness. Not a step further would she go without sustenance. She grimaced and ignored the way the sun attempted to wink goodnight before darting beneath the grassy knolls marking the horizon. Such a long day–the first, she assumed, of a tireless many. How long the world would grant her this time she wasn't sure. As Ymir laid down on the ground, back propped against the nearest tree, she thought idly of why she was even conscious again at all. Had it been another cruel turn of fate? Another way in which she would be expected to repent for the sins of her cult? False gods. Impersonation. Falsehoods. Imperfections.
Ymir yawned. Reached a lazy hand behind her, peeling bark in thin strips, and passed the first of her harvest between her lips to chew. Dry bitterness exploded into her mouth with a fervor and still she continued to gnaw on her food, nursing the saliva that dripped against her tongue. By the time she'd tricked her stomach into quieting the pangs of its hunger, the sun was long gone.
The first night of Ymir's returned life began. Then the next, and the next after that. Stars flickered in and out of her periphery like flickering candles. Ymir wandered. Ymir found others. Together they drifted. Together they abandoned their solitude. Kept at an arm's length, mute as the day they found her, Ymir listened to the words of the lost and began to paint herself a picture of what kind of life she'd been born back into. Some were as lost as she. Others, keener. Minds sharpened with the kind of acuity prescribed only to those who'd been lost in the suspended fog for a short time felt envious to Ymir. What she wouldn't give to understand the way their brains hummed with the kind of electric chatter she found herself incapable of summoning. Such vibrant fires in their faces. Such enthused passion for their returned personhood.
Titans, Ymir quickly learned, were no more. Humans were human again. The gangly flesh of her monstrous form had compacted itself back into her spine, never to be seen again. She would not miss it. But she did not welcome her new identity, not entirely. When the first wall appeared on the horizon and the guards demanded a life out of her, Ymir had nothing to give. Who was she but a washed-up goddess? Just the shell of some incarnate she no longer had any right to call herself (no, that wasn't right either; Ymir had never been born of royalty. Just of a street and a single acquaintance she still called fate).
They let her in anyways.
And Ymir roamed. She found shoes. New clothes. A place in a den of filth and a way to pilfer pockets laced with visible finery. A thief. That was what she had become. She hardly cared. That's what she'd been all along, Ymir rationalized. An urchin long before a fake deity. An urchin once again. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.
That is, of course, until she found a pocket she ought to have left alone. It sparkled, golden like sunshine, like melodious pollen carried on the backs of fattened honeybees; yet when she reached her hand into its depths, her fingers came back soaked in saccharine plum wine, a poison to her senses. Her fingers became talons gauging out a path straight to that hollow core of hers. Ymir gutted herself, lost in a frenzy, and laid what little there was left of her bare to the world.
No, not the world. Not the world at all.
The woman who crawled inside smelled of honey. Tasted so much sweeter than starsong and stitched-up identities. But of course this is not her story. But of course it soon will be.
For the Queen of Eldia birthed an heir on the day a fallen goddess crawled out from the underground. And sooner or later, the fingers of a thief would itch to steal the christening robes right off the little prince's back.
But talons are far likelier to snag than they are to snatch, are they not?