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Barry Bluejeans tears through the woods, lungs burning and head spinning. He has no idea where he is on his map, much less where he’s heading — and not even the stars overhead give him any guidance, with not a single familiar constellation beaming through the foliage. He can’t stop moving, not a chance, but he’s so turned around on himself that for all he knows, he could be running right back towards the way from which he came, and right back into the hands of the — of the very entity that he’s been fleeing. He could be as good as dead, and not — not just because of what they’d already told him.
A gnarled root juts out of the ground before him; in the starlight, he even sees it coming, yet he still trips. Head over heels, through the bushes and down the slope to the bottom of a ditch — bare hands raking across sharp branches, as he tries and fails to catch himself, the whole disgrace capped off with his head striking cold earth with a thud. He lies still, in that cold and in that silence, bracing himself for that pursuer to appear looming over him, curved crystal blade raised, ready to end him with a single strike —
He braces himself, not daring to move a muscle, for seconds, for a minute. When the silence stretches on, he gives into his aching lungs — and he hazards a single, shallow breath.
Still nothing. He may just be have escaped them —
Yet he is still terribly, horribly, existentially lost.
His sense of direction wasn’t always this lacking, he’s sure of that much. It’s just… vacated his mind, recently, alongside so many of his other memories — so many that, at his age, he should really, truly be terrified for the state of his brain. He’s not supposed to have this many holes at fifty…
Or… fifty-two. Or fifty-four. Or so. The second digit there shouldn’t change anything, can’t make it any less frightening —
He takes another breath. The air feels as cold as a dead man’s touch.
In times like this, when these fears get to him, he clings to what he does remember. He has to. There are whole years, even decades, that he remembers clearly — his mind couldn’t be devolving to dementia early with those memories so crystallized and vivid, could it? He remembers the neighborhood he grew up in, for one thing: the dreary gray apartment building, of his very, very young years; the move to a cul-de-sac from after his mom finished medical school and their fortunes finally turned; the little antique store owned by a family friend, who’d let him come in after school and clumsily teach himself simple songs on the old, out-of-tune piano that no one ever seemed to want to buy. His mind must be sound enough, or he wouldn’t remember that.
He remembers the cemetery where his grandparents and father were buried, where he got his first summer job mowing the grass and removing weeds from the graves. He remembers the high school that he graduated from, how the auditorium there was long-overdue for a remodeling, how some students swore up and down it was haunted; he remembers spending hours squirreled away in the sound booth up there, and the exact way he’d started that haunting rumor by using those sound tech privileges to put the fear of gods in an unsuspecting bully. He remembers all the little ways life got easier after that; he remembers more easily finding classmates and fellow theater kids he got along with, even if calling them friends would’ve be pushing it. He remembers the ways they drifted away, off to college or relationships or both, and he remembers years worth of class reunion invitations, left to languish alongside his junk mail.
He remembers the address they were mailed to, the address of the new apartment he bought — less gray, this time, and more beige — as close to his mother’s house as he could, and of course, he remembers his mother. He remembers she had prematurely gray hair and a faint scar on her chin, that she was a traveling cleric turned single mother turned trusted pediatrician with a very busy schedule, but that she always visited him on the first of the month — the same day of the month Dad had died — no matter her schedule, weekend or not, rain or shine, and she’d always tell Barry to get out more. That being a compulsory workaholic ran in the family, but that was no excuse, and that she’d drag him along with her to the bingo hall on Main Street tonight, if he didn’t go and get some fresh air on his own. He remembers that she was always the fun kind of stubborn, like that; he remembers how she was a long-retired adventurer, disappointed by her son’s homebody tendencies, but far too kind to ever hold it against him. He remembers that he’d visit her whenever he could, too; that she’d cook for him and he’d teach her what little of the piano he still remembered; he remembers that her favorite color had been periwinkle blue —
But, no matter how much still remains within his grasp, he does not remember why every time he thinks of his mother, he defaults to the past tense.
He’s fifty, or fifty-two, or fifty-four, or something, and his mother was already thirty-four when she had him. So, it’s not necessarily wrong, but he just —
He just wishes that he knew.
He can’t even remember when it started — he doesn’t know since when he’s been thinking in the past tense, and slowly, it’s killing him, he thinks. Faster than the isolation and the cold, to be sure. If he isn’t just dead already —
Far in the distance, a wolf howls, and his heart rate spikes.
Well. Still at least a little alive, then.
Grieving isn’t helping him, now. Clawing and scraping at the edges of the holes in his memory, hoping this time will be different, and he’ll finally be able to fill in the gap — that’s somehow helping him even less. Stop and get it together, Barry. Rewind. Back to clarity, back to adolescence.
When he was in middle school, his mother — wanting to make the most of all her precious time off — would take him camping four or five times a year, teaching him map-reading and basic first aid. Being a cleric wasn’t for him, he could already tell, but he learned how to disinfect and bandage a wound — and oh, he’s grateful for those memories now. He doesn’t have iodine or alcohol even anything saline on hand, but he still sits up — rinsing his many scrapes, with as much water from his canteen as he guesses he can spare, and bandaging the worst one with cloth strips ripped off of a clean handkerchief. He knows how to do this, he swears, yet the ripping and the tying both drag on longer than they should — he keeps dropping things and dirtying them, having to find a replacement, because his fingers are just so… so numb. Clumsy. Uncooperative.
Like… they think it’s pointless. Like on some level, his own muscles and bones insist that first aid will never matter for him, in the end. Like an infection, and a fever, and a gruesome death won’t mean much of anything —
And the worst part is, Barry knows at least one… entity who might agree, on that point.
They’d found him just as he was leaving town — leaving earlier than he’d planned, because he feared that his presence was making the locals uneasy, and walking without a destination in mind, hoping he could just find some spot to make a fire and rest. He’d barely gotten to the edge of the woods before he spotted the shadow in the corner of his eye, and whirled around, thinking it would be some paranoid townsperson he could at least reason with, like hey, I swear, I’m as nervous around strangers as you are —
When he saw them, though, when he saw them and they stopped in their tracks, glowering, Barry all but gave up on surviving, much less reasoning with them. They — they? it? he? — had a skeletal figure, a black-feathered cape. A crystalline scythe, bone and sapphire, leveled at his throat.
He barely believed any of what he saw, but the hardest-to-believe part of all was the way they stopped when he looked at them. The way they tightened their grip on their scythe, under Barry’s gaze, and the way they tensed, not quite afraid, but still wary, as if expecting him to pounce. Who the hell would expect him to pounce?
He didn’t get much time to wonder before they spoke — in a bad, bad, disdainfully bad accent, but gods, it still made his heart pound as he began to back away, hands in the air and trembling.
Barry, Barry, Barry, they snapped, it’s about damn time you showed your face again —
You’ve got the wrong guy! he gasped, almost twisting his ankle with the next step back. I — I don’t know what you want from me, but — but I swear, I’m not — I’ve never —
The entity’s eyes flared. You played that card last time. Besides, I know a lich when I see one —
A lich?! Barry had yelped, chest heaving, blood rushing in his ears, and the skeletal face scowled.
Last time I killed you, you went and returned the favor in a way naught but a lich could get away with — so forgive me, Bluejeans, if I don’t quite buy that you don’t know.
And then, they lunged, and Barry —
The hairs on the back of his neck had stood on end as his vision went red, so red his eyes might as well have been bleeding, and he —
And he —
Well. Barry was here now.
But maybe even being here was damning.
If he were the wrong guy — just a mortal who couldn’t bite back, who couldn’t pounce, then he would’ve fallen to the scythe — wouldn’t he? If he were innocent, he would’ve never been the entity — the reaper’s — match in a fight! If he were an invalid old man, with early onset dementia and terrible dreams of his own voice speaking from a coin, he wouldn’t fucking be here, breathing, patching up this — this fucking facsimile of life, isn’t that what it is, so refined that it even fooled himself! He doesn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to think about this, to let these truths into the open where they could eat away at him, but it’s too late to banish them now, too late to return to denial. He’s sinking, recoiling, retching on the ground. He’s as good as dead.
The bile at the back of his throat jogs a memory. Of tasting salt, seeing green, thrashing beneath the surface until he breaks out of the pod, gasping for breath on the ground. Gods, he’d — he must’ve fucking grown this skin he’s in right now, he’d been resurrected and he didn’t even know, and it was all right under his nose. His own voice had told him to draw a gouge across his palm, to leave a splash of blood behind, and he’d done it like he did such a thing every fucking Monday morning before work, as routine and devoid of second thought as making a cup of coffee. He’d just done it. In this body, and whatever comes next, and whatever came before, he was — wait for it, Barry — he was a real self-made man.
It’s abso-fucking-lutely hysterical. He doesn’t laugh one bit. He doesn’t know why, for just a moment, he still thought that he just might grin.
He has died, and he will die again, and he doesn’t have a clue if he’ll come back any wiser. He sure didn’t this time, and short of asking the gods-damn reaper, he has no way of knowing how many mortal wounds he’s born before —
Gods, he’s a lich. He shouldn’t be invoking the gods in the first place — they wouldn’t fucking want him. They’d just —
They’d just, what, assume he wants to overthrow them? Take their place? Is that what gods think? Is that what liches do?
Gods, he’s a fucking lich.
He spent so long tiptoeing around the holes in his memory by saying, clinging to the grace, that well, he’s human. If he’d lost too much time, he would know, because he wouldn’t look fifty, or fifty-two, or fifty-four, or so —
But he’s a lich. He’s died and gone right back to the same middle-aged body more times than he knows. He’s not fifty; he’s not even in his fifties; he’s older and there’s nothing that scares him more than wondering by how much. By how much.
It’s in spite of all the fear in the world that he reaches over his shoulder. Into a pocket of his satchel, from which he pulls out his map. Unrolling it, he angles it to catch the starlight, and squints — towards what he already knows will amount to strange squiggles and names that aren’t even a bit familiar, not even those of the largest cities.
He grew up in a place just like this. Geographically, at least. The climate and the small farms and the far bigger pine forests all scream home, but…
He grew up only an hour or so from the coast, but the shape of it now is different than he remembers. Eroded away, maybe; either that, or just flooded.
And coastlines may change shape, cities may change names. Centers of population grow, and shrink, and shift; accents evolve, until the people around you — besides that damn Cockney skeleton — sound like they’re both from right next door and so far away, depending on the word.
But that all takes so much time. Too much time, too many years to comprehend.
He never, ever knows where he’s going anymore. He’s outlived his sense of direction, and there’s no hiding from the only explanation any longer — he’s outlived each and every place he’s ever known, ever relied upon to point him on his way.
The cul-de-sac home that meant so much to Mom? Gone. No use pretending it isn’t. The antique shop, with the old piano where he learned to play? Gone. Dad’s grave and the green grass, the purple wildflowers, that grew over it? Gone.
The not-so-haunted auditorium. The musty sound booth above it. The not-quite-friends from each year of school, everyone he never tried to get closer to when he had the chance — and his mother, who never angered, but always worried for him, right up until she faded away, too. All her pleas, for him to love the world he lived in before he left it behind, eternally unanswered. As good as gone. He could live a thousand more lives, and never be able to bury that regret. He doesn’t even want to try.
Tears well up and begin to run, from the inner corner of one of his eyes; each one is warm against his skin for only a moment, before dripping from his chin and disappearing against the dark, ice-cold earth. Look at him — a lich, a fucking so-called undead demigod, curled up and crying here in the forest. Why’d he even fucking become a lich, in the first place; what was he fucking thinking?
He wraps his arms around his legs, bringing his skinned knees up to his face, and the movement causes something in his pocket — cold, round, metallic — to shift in place. It doesn’t speak, this time, but Barry thinks he better understands the voice that once came from it. The sheer desperation he had, to find this missing woman, this fiery presence in the cold — because, whether he remembers her or not, he realizes, she may just be the only thing he has left.
Would he wish that upon her? Would he wish that upon anyone, upon someone that he didn’t love? He doesn’t know. He can’t change a thing anymore. Each tear that falls is a little less warm than the last.
If, if, it’s not too late for her, then he can only wonder if that’s only because she is undead, and a lich, and a monster, in her own right. If she’s just as lost, in space or in time, as he is. Whether it would comfort her any, wherever she is, to know there’s at least one more disgrace of an undead abomination who’s curled up alone and crying right now, too.
Barry hopes for it just as much as he doubts it. He wipes his eyes, and looks up to the stars —
And remembers, right, he doesn’t recognize any constellations anymore, either.