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There was something comforting about being dead, at least for having time to yourself to sit around and think about things. Richard Gray had a number of things to think about and had spent a very long time pointedly not doing so. Particularly during the span of time that he’d spend doing the most horrific things imaginable and looking back to realize he didn’t even know why.
He’d committed unspeakable crimes, and why? Immortality? He supposed he had that now, in an entirely different way. But did he enjoy it? Well, yes, he couldn’t lie to himself that it was fun being a ghost and that there was a whole world behind the veil that existed between life and death. He couldn’t even say he felt particularly bad about gifting or cursing his daughter with youth and life… really it was the least he could do.
There was no physical pain in the afterlife, but mental pain was something altogether different. He was trying to decipher his own memories, looking for motives and plots he couldn’t quite remember.
He had one memory that flickered in the back of his mind. Gazing dead-eyed into his bathroom mirror, burns and scrapes and arcane runes etched deep into his face and hands. His eyes had roved over his chest, hand coming up to hover over the oozing sigil carved over his heart. He’d smelled of blood and magic, somehow knowing it wasn’t all his own blood beneath his nails and caked into the creases of his knuckles.
His memory had been faulty for awhile after, his history had gaps here and there, seemingly spontaneously, but something had happened when he was barely twenty years old that had defined the rest of his life and he couldn’t fucking remember. There was a vague childhood that he somehow knew was idyllic. The Gray family was wealthy in money as well as power and he didn’t even have to remember anything to be certain he’d been given whatever he could have wanted. He’d gone to school, a mundane education and then a magical one. And that was where everything stuttered to a halt, where the longest stretch of cold and blank nothingness started.
He resumed his studies as soon as he’d strengthened his spirit and enabled his immaterial hands to rifle through books and paper. It was very convenient to be able to simply reach through locked cabinets and bookshelves hidden by illusions that held no secrets for him. What he uncovered in his own old library and the hidden tomes in all the places he explored alongside his daughter he uncovered an odd and uncomfortable phenomenon. There was something about the darkness, the power that was always dancing just on the edges of every mage’s awareness and ready to use if one were so inclined - a slow demoralization that twisted everything a person had once desired. The burning need for more power, more knowledge, more and more and more. It chipped away at them until they went completely insane and had no compunctions about the horrific things they decided were worth doing in order to achieve it.
There was a quite specific and eerily familiar pattern that followed the first foray into evil power. One started with their own goals, their own reasons for reaching for that power that was right there and so much easier than any other method, but over time be it weeks or months or years the mages desperate desire shifted. Whatever it was they’d wanted before, only the pursuit of immortality would quench their thirst. He couldn't even remember what he’d been doing before, what his goals had been. He’d married his wife, sired four daughters, and proceeded to brutally murder two of them in order to gain power. He remembered that part, it was the first truly clear recollection he had and wasn’t that fucked up beyond all reason?
He didn’t shy away from what he’d done, couldn’t say “Oh, it wasn’t my fault, the madness…”
He’d watched the Star Wars films not too long ago, misting into a tiny theater entirely populated by other ghosts indulging in a ‘marathon’ and he wondered if the ‘dark side’ wasn’t just something invented for fiction. A potentially sapient energy that corrupted a person, who had once been a good man, into a mass murdering monster who had no compunction slaughtering children who’d once looked up to him? That sounded about right… It was still his own fault of course, just like it was Darth Vader’s. Richard had made a choice, even if he couldn’t remember when or why he’d done so. He wasn’t entirely certain which was worse, having full recollection of the method of his downfall or…
The runes carved into his skull flared bright blue and then ebbed away as he left it, shifting through the ethereal plane until he stood in the Evergreen mansion just beside his grandson’s bed. He looked so innocent, face slack in exhausted sleep. He stared at the rising and falling chest for a long moment, wondering if he’d ever done this before with his children. Probably not. Shaking that off, he misted through the door and began to go deeper into the places even Anna hadn’t discovered in her investigation. Rooms that had been bricked up completely and not touched since before she’d been born.
Things hidden by dark magic as well as simple masonry.
He wondered why Gabriel had done this, because it couldn’t have been anyone else. His eyes fell again on what he’d wandered across while attempting to find whatever he could to help his daughter - old photographs scattered and covered in dust atop a desk that looked as though it had been stabbed over and over in a frenzy by the knife blade broken and embedded into its surface.
He recognized himself in them, and what had been Gabriel before he’d gone mad, and others he couldn’t remember. It took him days to go through everything, slipping back once in a while to see if Anna needed him. She didn’t, although she seemed to be touchingly concerned that he kept vanishing for such long periods.
He didn’t fucking deserve to have her as his child. She’d never forgive him for what he’d done, but she also didn’t pick and rant about it and had listened when he’d rambled about what he’d done and the history of the family and seemed to accept that he was telling the truth that he simply didn’t *know* why he’d done things.
The dead didn’t feel pain but he could imagine the headache he’d have right now trying to focus on the information he’d uncovered. Gabriel had been a prolific writer of his own thoughts and indeed had kept everything he’d ever written and enshrined it as though it were the words of the god he seemed to see himself as.
Gabriel had been his friend.
He and Gabriel had studied magic together.
He had, apparently, been a noble child who wanted to see the good in everyone.
Gabriel hadn’t. Or he probably had until he’d begun to give in to ‘the dark side’ as Richard had taken to calling it now. It was frightening how this bright young man had been so completely twisted over the course of only a year or so, entries changing from ‘I love magic, I want to do good things in the world, I love my friends,’ to ‘I hate everything, people who want to do good in the world are foolish and naive, I hate having to pretend I love anyone’.
For as long as he could remember that was how he’d felt as well. He hoped he might have loved his wife in the beginning, she was too good to have married him for any other reason, but he’d betrayed that love and used it to his own ends.
He flinched back from his own memories, of what he’d seen as betrayal when she’d left and taken Anna and Luisa away with her. As though she should have understood that he had to sacrifice their children to achieve his goals - after all he was the only person in the world who mattered. That was how he’d felt - that anything he did was justified and that everyone around him should mold themselves to his will. If he’d needed to murder his twin girls to regain the memories he’d lost, what did it matter? It wasn’t like anyone who wasn’t himself was a real person and murder was just fine as long as it produced the effects he wanted. It hadn’t though, he hadn’t gained anything he’d wanted in life and now he had possibly an endless eternity to try to remember his past and to regret it regardless.
The pages that he needed to find were shredded into tiny pieces amongst the photos - one corner at the bottom of the deep stab wound in the wood beneath the knife. The last entries that involved himself in Gabriel’s journal and the only pages that had been ripped out and not preserved like holy script.
He didn’t even remember who Alessia was, although apparently he’d loved her, that he’d given up everything he believed in for one wild moment of desperation and dipped his hands into the festering ichor that was dark magic to bring her back. That he’d willingly given up his memories of doing so for the opportunity.
He wished he could be a poltergeist, could whip up a mad wind and destroy this stupid shrine to a madman who had also sacrificed his own children and his wife for his own benefit. The most he could do was focus his energy enough to flip the table, scattering papers and debris all across the floor and burn the reassembled pages to a fine ash with cold blue fire.
The runes on his skull glowed a faint weak blue as he slipped back inside of it, energy depleted by his tantrum.
Some day he’d tease out all the memories locked away in his head, or skull as the case may be.
Somehow he would make amends.