Chapter Text
It was at night, the twenty fourth of the Bluesea Moon, that Lysithea saw her first ghost. When she opened her eyes (maybe it had been the rattle of claws against her desk that had woken her) it stood on her bedroom floor, lupine head perked and tail swaying. A red glow emanated from it, light that shifted like the lifeblood of a living amber stone along the streamlined body and down four slender legs. What else but a ghost could look like that?
In a moment of overbearing “I knew it” feeling, she wished she could have jumped out of bed and shouted to the world:"Ghosts are real. I told you. All of you, and no one believed me. Idiots every single one of you."
If that was too much to ask for, she should've at least been allowed to scream. She would rather howl in terror than lay paralyzed in bed, beyond the ability to draw a proper breath. She peeked over the covers, eyesight becoming super sensitive for the sole purpose of letting her see her fear more clearly, the whiskers that trembled whenever it sniffed the air, and the muscles that contracted beneath the gleaming hide as it moved.
She expected some noise to come out of its jaw since its chest was moving — a spirit’s lamenting sigh — but it was entirely soundless as it peered at her many books stacked atop the shelf, then at her studies on the desk, letters, pens … It swept its eyes, spots without iris and pupil, toward the bed, perhaps having heard her drumming heart. She clasped her eyes shut, praying to the goddess that it would think she was asleep, her most frantic prayer in years.
Trapped in the darkness behind her eyelids, she strained to hear padding from sneaking paws, but the only sound that seemed to exist in her chamber was the muffled whine from the wind blowing outside. Wait; she felt something. A pressure on the covers below her feet. Had it jumped onto her bed? The pressure was moving upward. In her imagination she saw the ghost walking toward her head, eyes burrowing into her down to her soul. It knew that she was only feigning sleep. The long snout opened to reveal gleaming sharp fangs …
She snapped her eyes open to see: Nothing. There was nothing in her room. Not daring to turn her head she shifted only her eyes from side to side, straining until it felt like they might pop out of their sockets. The desk, each and every shelf and all the dark corners: No glowing figure there. The chamber laid dormant as if the whole experience had been a dream.
Had it been a dream?
Her neck was prickling as it usually did when she was studying some book or artifact and the need to figure something out became so intense it affected her physically. She wanted to run over to the desk and look for prints, glowing hairs, or a paper moved from its rightful place, anything that proved that she hadn’t imagined things, but what if the ghost was only lying in wait?
Lay still and count to three hundred. Don’t move or even blink until you have reached three hundred. That felt like an excellent compromise between terror and curiosity. Focusing on not mouthing the numbers with her lips, she started counting. Soon after she passed the one hundred mark she became glad that she had waited.
First the head appeared, not from inside her closet or beneath the bed, but from within the chest where she locked away any volatile magic material she worked with in the event that somebody she invited over turned out to be a sticky fingered idiot. The padlock was still on. The ghost was pushing itself through solid oak. Inch by inch, like it was a wall of syrup. When at last the tail had reappeared, it flickered its ears and sauntered over to her door, then the light exuding from it dimmed (her boots visible through its body) and it sank through her door as well.
As soon as it was completely gone, she sprung upward. The air trapped in her lungs was let out, drawn in again, then out, in, out, in …
There had been a ghost in her room. A ghost in her room. It had walked through solid surfaces.
It took a while before she realized she had thrown away the covers and rushed across the floor, grabbing the silky white dressing gown that hung in the wardrobe. Not until she was fumbling with the knot around her midsection, did her brain catch up.
Was she about to go after it? Why was she about to go after it?
Lysithea did not know yet the most perplexing paradox concerning ghosts: The more shaken you became by spotting them, the stronger the urge to see them “just one more time” became.