the ghosts

A man came to town, to Feinfall. Strange; tall and dressed in a cloak that billowed behind him as he walked. The rags of a drifting specter that glided slowly into town, untrusted and unwanted.

He had a name for himself: Wren Grassfell.

The people called him Wren Ghost.

Unique. Rare. To share a last name with another was nearly unheard of. Only one living pair existed out of the hundreds of Feinians.

Wren and Shrieva Ghost. Unheard of.

As it is with pairs, they were like two sides of the same coin. The dark stranger and the pale Apothecary, silver and shadow, lifeless laughter and devious danger. They fell in love instantly, and the estranged and the stranger found solace in their isolation.

But then a man was found dead by a poison, and their world was ripped apart too quickly for Shrieva to realize it had happened.

The body's veins turned rust red where he lay in the back alley of his shop. Shrieva the Apothecary, Shrieva the Ghost, Shrieva the unknowing, named the poison Crimson Ring after a forgotten flower in a distant land. Shrieva the innocent condemned Wren as surely as would the town. For Wren was known to have possession of the poison, of two blood-red petals seen by Mole the bartender.

The council met in their closed rooms and damned the foreign man to death for the muder of their fellow with the poison of a foreign blossom.

Crimson Ring.

The people gathered in the courtyard; not a single soul was absent because they might all be needed should Fyer by invoked. No one thought it likely. Shrieva's eyes never left her pair, and Gunter Black's eyes never drifted form Shrieva's tears.

Gunter. Beast of a man. Brave of heart and quick to wit. Strong, and fierce to enemies. Broad and and course as a black grizzly. Lover and wife. Hung his hat outside of town, in a small one-room cabin by the farm he called home. The same that Grendel Goose called home. She would call every evening at sunset, voice carrying from the blades of grass by her feet to the last crumbling lumps of dirt at the farthest edges of the strawberry rows. Pledged to the beast of a man.

Mother and Father to a ghost.

Will anyone invoke the Laws of Fein or Fyer?"

Gunter Black's eyes never drifted from his daughter Shrieva's tears when he spoke the damning words.

"I invoke the Law of Fein!"

Silence. Then, places switched, brief words exchanged, eyes still glistening but for different reasons as the great Black Bear knelt in the place of the haunting, horrified Ghost.

Gunter's head rolled four times before it halted, dead on its side, eyes reflecting Shrieva's tears.

The people did not leave for home. And the weeping of Grendel and Shrieva rose like the keening of spirits for their own bodies after death.

Wren Ghost left that night as Wren Grassfell and was never seen again in Feinfall. Although it was said that he pled his innocence to his pair, to Shrieva, before departing with a bag slightly lighter than when he arrived. The only things missing were the two dried Crimson Ring petals that were stolen from him hardly two days before.

Grendel was widowed forever.