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I come to at the flap of wings.
A quivering. Amidst silence—why—and darkness—why—and a lack of sensation—why, why, why, I do not wonder—there is a flapping of wings.
With great effort—and why it takes such great effort, I do not think to examine—I open my eyes. What comes into view first is blue. Blue sky so rich and bright I feel my eyes ache, but it is slow to occur to me to look away, to close my eyes, my thoughts seeming to drip, one, one, after the other. The very thought of taking another action leaves me drained. I am nothing. I am a pair of eyes being burned by the sky.
The flap of wings. A shadow falls across the plane of my vision. A brief reprieve, a point onto which to focus. A butterfly, supplies my mind. It is perched on the bridge of my nose. I dare not breathe—it does not occur to me that I had not breathed since my waking and then—but still, a twitch of its wings and it is gone and all is quiet. Fluttering off toward the blue blue sky. At this point I become aware of leafed branches at the fringes of my vision, swaying in a wind I do not feel.
The sky burns into my eyes but all is quiet.
#
A piece of knowledge: A forest is loud. Birds in the trees, their talons against the branches. The brush of a fawn’s nose through the brush. Bark peeling. Insects in the dirt. The thump of the earth. How I know this I do not know.
#
Some time later, it begins to rain. I smell it before it comes, a thin, cold sort of smell. The dragonflies come low, crystal wings weighed down by the wet in the air. The clouds move in, crowding away the blue, and in one rush of air—it is a breeze, the first I can feel—there is rain.
I feel it on my face. I feel it seeping into the ground beneath me. The mud yields beneath my weight. And below, far below—farther than I should be able to feel, though I know not where these notions of my limitations come from—I feel the worms stir, stretch. I feel the bleached bones of the long-dead buried-deep groan.
#
“Hail, child.”
I am seeing blue. Blue… eyes, bright and intent. Arched eyebrows. It is a man, and he speaks. “…been waiting for you. I’ve been waiting to speak with you.” There’s a scar cutting through his lip, and it writhes with every word.
He pauses. Waits. I must respond, but cannot fathom how. Part my lips. Do I have a mouth to begin with? A tongue, a throat for breath to wobble through?
“Ah,” he says, mouth curving into a smile. “It is not yet time.”
He strides away into the black forest. He wears the skin of a golden beast over his back, swathed in rich blue cloth. Its jaw gapes in a permanent silent yowl.
It is a woman, next. She comes into existence as the sky darkens and begins to pour again. She has a comb clenched between slender fingers. Her mouth bows but it is not a smile. Both she and I know, and it falls quickly after. This grimace is honest, at least.
“Prince,” she says, ducking her head, hair moving in one flowing sheet like water. She turns, and retreats like the man before her. I watch the hem of her gown drag over the ground, but no foliage is moved. She is not here, I realise. Not like the rain, soaking the ground; or the fox, sound asleep in a shaded den. Not like me.
I am here.
I am suddenly tired down to my crumbling bones.
Still, another man appears.
He has black hair and stares at me for a long time. His eyes are the same colour as a rusted sword. He has not said anything but waits anyway for a response I cannot give. Nor do I know what I would say. I must certainly know him, for how he stares at me, but I do not.
“Dimitri,” says the man finally, “have you forgotten me?”
#
Dimitri.
My… name. My name. Dimitri. Dima, whispered against the little bundle held tight against her bosom. I remember that, and I remember the milk-scent clinging to her fingers. It is a memory of sensation. She was gone before sight came to me.
Dimitri, my son. I remember slicked hair so blond it had been nearly white, a patchy beard that scratched my cheek when I was younger and no more when I had grown too tall to be held and then no more when he, too, had gone.
Prince Dimitri, sometimes a chorus of sound, sometimes one deep voice tripping over the Faerghan tongue. Gone as well, now.
How had I forgotten?
How had I lost this?
It is but a tremble, but a tremble of the soul when you are but a soul is a tremble of the entire being, and I am thrown from where I had rested in the coffin of my body. I gaze at my stiff hands, scored with scars that I remember all of a sudden, a rush of memory that renders me blind for a moment or for eternity. How had I forgotten? How had I forgotten war? That red vengeance of mine? It stares back at me now. Crooked fingers and rot that had begun when I still lived and walked. I am seized yet again by the inability to move. Move. Move, I urge myself. I move my hands but my hands do not move. I have no shape. I have remembered my name but with that I remember I have lost all else.
Dimitri.
#
A forest is loud. Ghosts on your shoulders. Heavy steps and snapping twigs and a lack of care. You are either the loudest thing in the forest or the quietest. I have always been the former—
#
I lie my soul at the feet of my corpse. All is quiet. To be without the constraints of a physical body means a freedom I had never known before. I imagine it would be easy to leave.
Still, I hesitate.
I imagine leaving. I am weightless, and at the next breeze of wind I imagine uncurling my fingers and letting my soul be pulled away. I imagine spiraling into the air like a puffy dandelion seed. (They cling to my body, soft and white.) I would find Dedue—
A wrenching sob bursts through my sternum. I am made physical one moment to feel this pain, before I return to near-nothingness. Dedue. I have joined him in death, but he is nowhere to be found. Dedue. I would find him, search the entirety of Faerghus, nay, Fódlan. I could do that now. He must linger somewhere, like I do.
As if on cue, a breeze comes rushing through. Away the dandelion puffs go. Away I do not go. The breeze dies, and I look upon my frozen face. My eyes, half-closed, are milk-blue.
I am a puppet that never was strung. I slump back to the forest floor.
Tears are not for the dead.
#
The sky is vast and blue, and I pick out the Blue Sea Star where Sothis resides, twinkling faintly above, even in full sun.
Sothis. I speak her name for the first time since my death. Is she to fetch me or am I to go to her? Has she chosen not to come for me? In life she had seemed so very far. Though I now lie in dirt, lower than I had ever stood in life, I feel closer to the goddess than I ever have.
I am more comfortable here, I decide. I remain.
#
It is some time before I am able to confront it. My unmaking. It lingers, with the smell of rot, as much as I shut my eyes and will myself into calmer, sweeter times.
I try not to be wistful for that stretch of time when I first woke, when I had not remembered the war, when I had barely a shape and was barely a thought—but it had been so quiet. I’d had nothing. No joy, yes, but no pain. No blood. No memory of a spear in my gut, unravelling my flesh, cracking bone.
Or had it been a sword? It was red. That is what I remember.
I prod at the thought like one prods at a just-healed wound. No, what is dead does not heal, but the wound hidden by my cloak festers the same way whether it be by spearpoint or sword. Moss grows over my knuckles, and creeping vines curl about my slack wrists the same way.
I take the hem of my cloak in my fingers. I have come to know I cannot move it. I cannot even feel it, the matted wool between my fingers.
This is enough. I do not need to know everything, much less this.
#
It is not yet time.
I let myself wonder, sometimes: What had he meant?
#
I hear the intrusion, far off. How long has it been? I could not have hoped to hear something so far in life, but I am no longer my body, stiff and cold. I am just shy of nothing, and everything crowds in to compensate.
Trembling breath. The uneven gait of a man with a bad leg. The unsheathing of a sword— just to cut a thick tangle of brush. The branches die as they strike the loamy soil, but many things in this forest are dead and dying.
A flap of wings. Birds. They scatter, wings beating their slight bodies into the air.
A voice. A voice! I hear a voice, and then I am no longer.
Some time during the war, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd stumbles in the forest, and dies.
I ask you, ghost, wanderer: If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to hear it, nor see the corpse it lands on—does it make a sound?
What of a man’s final exhale? The exit of the soul? If there is no one to hear him, does he even die? Is he both, both alive and dead, man and corpse, or something else entirely?
The flies and fungi care not for the philosophy of man. When they find him in 1185, he is draped between two rotting logs, skin blackened with fester. In stubborn contrast to the quite dead centrepieces—or more accurately, because of—everything around them seems to flourish. Poppies grow thick, and hebeloma syrjense quiver in the catch of their breaths. Moths have taken his blue Blaiddyd cloak in their feathered mouths. The bones of hands hang below his head like he is praying, pious in death in a way he’d never quite been in life.
They leave him to it.