Listener. Silvertongue. Gravekeeper. Ah, so he could at least assume she was somebody. Somebody to somebody else, at least. Wraith had been as such once but now, he knew himself to be nobody. He had been very good at separating himself from the world of the living; slowly but surely, he had been able to have his name forgotten and his appearance even less known. Slowly but surely, he had drifted into the background of life and become as his name had always foreseen. Perhaps it was his sudden existence as nothing that had opened him up to such new things - the touch of a stranger, or touch at all. She did not touch him the same way as Nakki or Grimoire or any other; she was suffocating in a different way, like too much air rather than teeth around his neck. Which was a better death? He laughed somewhere inside him again, and then breathed out deeply when he felt her head upon his shoulders. Warm, heavy, a tangible force that existed in the real world. She seemed to pierce some membrane around him and for a moment, he felt as if he had entered into the real world too. It gave him the sudden realization of the cold, the hardness of stone, the rasp of his breath. He was glad to return to his world of nothingness, where he did not need to feel any of that.

And so, the two of them eventually moved as one. She probed with quiet words and he found himself answering, telling, and she gave what she could in return. When she spoke, he could not help but feel the others pull away from him, as if she chased off the very ghosts that had come to claim him. It was better, he thought, to be taken and set free by her then them at least. She said his ghosts were hungry for that final piece of life within him and so, he had been spiteful: he had given it to her instead. Spite. Perhaps it was the first time he had even allowed himself to feel it but he thought himself deserving of new things.

And days later, he'd found himself at the brink of one final new thing. Sudden warmth, sudden clarity. Beneath him, rocks fell away and became like water; he floated, he drifted, he too became like water and air. He'd always imagined becoming marsh water and swamp and yet, she breathed words into his ears and he became like the sky itself instead. Vastness stretched out before him and with one final look back at it all, he allowed himself to become part of that vastness too.