Chapter Text
It's getting dark. The golden hour is long gone, though all day the gray clouds have covered the sky, as they do almost all year. It may rain. You could walk and enjoy the cold air but rather wait for that childhood friend to pick you up in that old car from someone's grandpa. The songs you once listened to in the midst of pre-pubescent angst are the ones playing on the radio as you both laugh and yell the lyrics at the top of your lungs. Everything's blue, except for the red neon signs hanging from old brick and wooden buildings from the 1800s, you can't believe how little people they're around, motels, shops, bars and restaurants with the occasional psychic. All closed their windows as soon as night came and locked their doors once they saw you. You can hear their hush on the streets and feel their gaze. Do you see the ocean? Do you hear it sing? Better not to pay attention to her. You can almost taste the salt, though maybe it is from the fries you had at the local dinner. You two should head home soon, the crows are watching. In nights like these, they say the forest calls upon its lost children. Don't get lost in the mist.
Funny to think the soul that now inhabits your body would despise it. Maybe you’ll get any of their memories back one day.
The manor was cheap, nobody wants a house falling apart and covered in cracks and moss. The rain hasn't stopped for days. There's crows on the nearby dead trees. The fire's cracking, you just burned the evidence. Now you write to an old acquaintance that owes you a favor. You can hear the storm raging in the sea, and you know who's causing it. Perhaps a shipwreck will wash ashore tomorrow. The seagulls may peck at the sailor's bodies if the sea didn't claim them. A vicious cycle, studying the dead to cure the living, bury the ones who didn't make them and call upon their corpses. Or maybe you are the hunter with a bloody hatchet who puppeteers with each prey or the one with an old rifle who pulls the strings, maybe you are the bar owner collecting information from each patron or the deranged sea captain. Even the runaway sharpshooter. Perhaps you are the undead. Either way something calls upon you, something ancient that speaks in long gone tongues, and you know you won't find the answer in old tomes and bones.