She looked no different dead than she did alive. Always a beautiful woman. And tall. She had a grace about her and a kindness. The serenity of one who lives with love.

I guess it wasn’t all that odd she didn’t remember that she had died. After all, she looked as whole as you or me. You could touch her, and she could touch you. She laughed, she cried, she seemed to breathe. There was nothing of the grave about her — except when she turned insubstantial and walked through walls or vanished and reappeared.

Nothing of that registered with her. And she had that smile … so oblivious and unsettling. Like a grin on a leper’s face, doped to the pain.

I think she’d been trapped in a dream. The world had become such horror that she utterly denied reality, not even realizing that was what she did. In the end, she even denied death. She saw her world as she wished to see it, and in doing so she was forsaken.

Living in the past, she surrendered her future. She lost whatever it is that lies beyond and all the mysteries that might be answered and all the wonders she might behold.

I think she will always stand between, neither here nor there, seeing what she would, rewriting her history, trapped till time comes to an end.

I don’t know what to feel about her. Pity? Yes. But when I think of her, I feel sorrow more than anything. Of all the cruelties she may have suffered, she was cruelest to herself.

And my love for her makes it hurt that much more.

– Götling Hans Velsing, Apprentice of Ulm –

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