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❝A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they're just what we want to see... Most times, a ghost is a wish.❞
― STEVEN CRAIN, The Haunting of House Hill
✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧
𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 rather haunting about the unfamiliar.
The faces of strangers flickered by Eryn's desperate gaze, a river of fading holograms without a single memory or name. Gaunt cheeks, calloused lips, hollow eyes - like a row of ghosts, their shrouded presence was thick with the ashes of fallen revolutions. Each feature seemed two dimensional, as thin and blank as parchment without ink, as dull and vapid as the stagnant pools which used to glisten after Sundari's rare days of artificial rain.
A face says more than a thousand words.
But even in an indefinite, savagely capricious universe of transience and brevity, the stagnant faces of the half-dead told Eryn nothing at all.
The girl's world rumbled, held in the umbra-metal fist of some ancient thunder deity, the rage of its churning, iron-wrought power echoing through her bones. Her skull shook, a chasmal swirl of quaking thoughts unable to grasp recognition of a single person before her. Like Eryn, their feather-fingered hands were suspended in the air above their heads, caged birds covered with the slate-grey skin of corpses and bound by cutting chandeliers of chains. Seismic tremors rippled through the cargo transport which whisked them all across Corellia, unsteady motions underlined by the live-wired heartbeat of a sputtering engine.
Each of her fellow prisoners had once been free at the girl's side, prowling the streets as a subtle reminder that she was not alone. Their footsteps had fallen in the same shadowed places, they had breathed the same sulfur-choked air and stared up with swallow-tailed longing at the same dull sky, eyes landing upon sickening streaks of citrine-infested clouds in perfect synchrony. Like fledglings with scorched wings they had fallen together into one doomed nest, as if drawn by the magnet of each other's withered suffering.
Yet Eryn had only ever truly known Qi'ra; all others were an obsolete milieu, a decaying matrix, a waning backdrop. Futile brushstrokes on deteriorating canvas, never quite able to paint a full picture. And it was Qi'ra, the girl who could never stop moving, who had brought them all down. (It seemed that the few Eryn chose to love were always the ones who reaped tragedy in their wake, trailing translucent sorrow like a bride's spectral veil.)
