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“I brought you something you might like,” Lior said, holding a dragon-shaped pastry in their unsteady hands, face obscured by the gossamer-thin veil which they’d wrapped tightly over their silver hair. “Picked it up while we were in Arkadia and thinking of you.”
An icy wind blew from the north. Zlzira pushed up her glasses, catching the light of the pre-dawn morning, submerged in black clouds. Melamyra brushed the dust off her fluttering lich robes.
Lior looked at the other gravestones underneath the ancient boughs of their tree home. Elarion and Aoifa’s.
“Fuck! We only got the one,” Lior muttered under her breath into Zlzira’s ear. “Do you think they’ll mind?”
“I really think it’s gonna be okay,” replied their wife, infinitely patient and kind as she squeezed Lior’s arm. “They’re not going to be able to take it with them, right?”
“Yeah, you silly-billy!” The Lich Queen chimed in, playfully punching Lior in the shoulder. “Everyone knows that ghosts don’t like pastries. They prefer cake!”
Lior’s brow knitted itself together in confusion. “Wait, why?”
“Cause they only eat ice cream cake, Lior,” Zlzira sighed. “That’s like the ten thousandth time Melamyra has made that pun.”
“It’s an emotional moment for me, okay!” The other elf snapped back, cheeks flushing a bright teal color. “It’s not every day that we raise the ghosts of our dearly departed friends.”
“Wait, why?” echoed the Lich Queen, snapping her fingers together. “It’s not like it’s hard!”
At the Lich Queen’s call, a thousand ghosts materialized from the forest: rotten deer stumbling from the thorny bramble, birds with torn wings hopping along the ground, and wolves holding their own entrails between their bloody teeth.
Melamyra smiled at their two horrified faces.
“They made us promise, remember?” said Zlzira, gently. “We can only raise them once in a while. For anniversaries, special occasions, and such.”
“Sounds fake but okay,” Melamya said, rolling her emerald eyes so far they almost did a full round in their skeletal sockets. “I trust your memory better than mine or Lior’s, Zlzira. No offense.”
“No offense taken,” Lior sighed, startling a little when the ghost of an emaciated deer came to lick the crumbs from his fingers. “Let’s just get on with this.”
“Yippee!” Melamyra said, before pretending to cough into her hand. “I meant to say: ‘Yes, we shall begin.’”
The Lich Queen of Calencia, Melamyra the Æviternal was not one for unnecessary theatrics or belabored spectacle, but for her friends in the Starsbane, she could show off a little bit. The ghosts of the forest creatures which she had raised began to swarm around them in a delicate dance, following in time to the movement of her hands like she was holding a conductor’s baton. The hairs on Lior’s neck rose to attention as a storm of necromantic energy surrounded them, black lightning bolts cresting across the sky, before—in a brilliant flash of otherworld light—the ghosts of their dead friends stood before them.
Old age had been kinder to the druid Aoifa than it had to their rogue, Elarion. The Wild Mother’s druid bent her weary back over an oak wood cane, one which she had so dearly loved to playfully thwack her friends with in life. Onai, her otter pet, cutely hung around her shoulders, tiny face staring at the ghosts of the other forest creatures with wonder. Lior tried to give the otter a scratch, but her hand passed straight through the ghostly body and into the hand of Elarion.
“That’s kinda gay, bro,” Elarion smarmed without missing a beat, materializing just enough to give Lior’s hand a squeeze. “Holding hands when I’ve freshly popped out the grave? Something you want to tell me?“
“Shut up, Elarion,” said Aoifa’s ghost, thwacking him on his old knee with her walking stick. She turned to flash her crooked teeth at the rest of their party. “It’s good to see y’all!”
“Yeah!” Ventus added brightly. “Do you need us for something? ‘Cause I was kinda busy beating up this one genie in the Water Plane so…"
Even though it had been centuries, Lior still thought of Ventus as being the same stab-happy child that they had first met him as, and not the wizened warrior he had become. His old aquamarine body was tall and lithe, wearing proudly the scars of battle which crossed the taught muscles of his arms and chest. He cut an imposing figure compared to his father, who even in old age had not managed to grow out the thin wisps of his white beard.
“Well…” Zlzira said, looking at Lior with a humorous light in her eyes. “Melamyra was in town, and today is my husband’s special day, so I thought we’d get the band back together! A Starsbane reunion!”
“Oh, shit! Lior’s special day!” Elarion exclaimed, offering Lior a ghostly fist to bump. “It’s your due date, dude. Congrats on the greg-nancy!”
“It’s my birthday, numbnuts!” Lior hissed back. “It’s the big four hundred.”
Lior’d been dreading this moment since he was a kid. The same age that their mother Atarah had been when she’d had his older siblings—the point at which an elf could properly be called ‘middle-aged’. The fact that half of his friends had perished in the time that it took to reach halfway through their life was only adding insult to injury.
“It’s okay, Elarion,” The Lich Queen added, banishing the forest critters back to their graves one by one. “I don’t get it either since liches really don’t keep track of birthdays. But I was happy to help!”
“Are you okay, sweetie?” Zlzira said, brushing a stray strand of silver hair out of Lior’s face. “You look like—”
“—You’ve seen a ghost! Hah!” Ventus interjected. Elarion gave him a high-five. He turned back to Lior with a painfully earnest smile on his face, and Lior felt like he could die at that moment.
“Excuse me,” Lior said, sickness rising in her throat.
In a flash, she rushed into the abandoned ruins of their tree house, found a quiet corner beneath a man-sized burl, and passed out from fright.
A cold bucket of water on his face woke him up.
“Agh!” Lior yelled, pulling out his hand crossbow and aiming it in the face of his assailant. “Elarion, what the fuck is wrong with you!”
In the darkness of the tree house’s interior, Elarion looked like he had when he still was a young man—twenty-three or whatever age he had pretended he was. Squinting, Lior could see the dim outline of his platinum blonde hair and the red face tattoos, his ghostly face illuminating the room ever so slightly. He smiled and sat down next to Lior, who had curled up in a wet and miserable mess.
“They voted for me to get you, for some fuckin’ reason,” Elarion shrugged. “I guess after so many times of you guys chasing after me, they want me to try it for a change?”
“Heh,” Lior said, swallowing the acrid bile still swirling in the back of their throat. “You got better over time. When you had more to live for.”
“When I had more to live and die for. Excuse you,” Elarion’s ghost clapped back, tracing the healing ring on his finger. “I had so much practice dying that even my patron got sick of it.”
Lior felt a thrill go up her spine at the mention of Elarion’s patron. The decades had given her ample time to formulate her own theories about who they’d been and why they’d done what they’d done to Lior’s wife, but she’d never come up with anything truly falsifiable. Those were secrets, she supposed, they would have to take to the grave, which seemed much less distant today than it had been.
Elarion pulled out his half of the dragon-shaped pastry from Arkadia and took a laborious bite, only the smallest crumb falling into his ghostly mouth.
“Oh shit,” Elarion exclaimed, taking another bite. “I forgot how much this eating thing rocks. Thanks, Lior.”
“No problem, buddy,” said Lior. “I hope Ventus will enjoy his half. And the bouquet of flowers for Aoifa.”
“Yeah…”
“I’m being selfish, I think.” Lior finally said, pressing their hand against Elarion’s ghostly shoulder.
“How so?:
“Zlzira and I got Melamyra to raise you guys for my birthday, and I can hardly stand to look you guys in the face,” said the elf, miserably. “I don’t understand how Melamyra does this every day.”
“No, she’s actually crazy,” their friend agreed with a vigorous nod of the head. “Scariest person I’ve ever met.”
Lior barked out a laugh. “Keep your voice down, Elarion. What if she hears us?”
“Am I wrong? Not like she can kill me again!”
“You’re not,” Lior agreed, squeezing Elarion’s shoulder as best as he could, feeling the mist flow through his fingers. “I only wish… that we could’ve stayed together until the end. We all missed you and Aoifa so much in those final years, before Ventus followed you to the other side.”
“I know,” Elarion sighed in the way that only old men burdened with decades of worldly wisdom could. “But, we’ll be together again, someday. As long as the Wild Mother isn’t lying to me about that too.”
“I thought you were the Wild Mother!” Lior said in mock shock, revelling in the old party in-joke. “How could you lie to yourself?”
“Oh, well. Learned from the best,” Elarion said, kissing his fingers and raising them to the sky. “Hope you’re alright, Vix.”
“You haven’t found him yet?”
“The bastard’s been shy, but I’ll nick him eventually,” Elarion said, squeezing Lior’s hand where it lay on his shoulder. It felt like the whisper of a breath on Lior’s skin, but it was comforting all the same. “Maybe you’ll help me out when you make it here?”
“Yeah,” Lior said, feeling the ghost of a smile on his face. “I think I’d like that.”
Lior stood up, feeling his legs tremble under him. Elarion steadied him—or tried to as best as he could with his ghostly hands—and they went downstairs to where they’d set up the living room for the party. Aoifa and Ventus chatted over the crackling fireplace while Melamyra raised a small skeleton army to clean away the cobwebs from the sundry artifacts and mementos of their travels.
Zlzira emerged from the kitchen wearing an apron, smiling when she saw her husband, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Glad you could join us, birthday boy,” Zlzira snickered. “The cake’s almost ready!”
Lior embraced their wife and whispered into her ear, “You can’t keep regenerating the same birthday cake over and over again for me.”
“But I thought you said it was your favorite,” she whined back, playfully. “Why try to fix what isn’t broken?”
A chill wind blew through Lior’s coat, and he saw that one of Melamyra’s skeletons had thrown open an old window, not yet broken by time, to show that the sun was peeking through the dark covering of clouds, fingers of rosy light enlivening their house once again.