• She sits, the phantom, quietly by my side; always, always. The same is true now, though there's little else the same can be said for. Hardly does my focus remain upon the specter while the sound of my footfalls is drowned out by the cracks and crunches of these woods. I know I've always been prone to paranoia, a thing greatly emphasized by the human inability to see all that well in the dark. You can't really see how alone (or not) you truly are in the sunless wilderness, and that notion stirs that bloody fear I've known far too well.

    The phantom unsettled the air by my ears and, turning towards the difference, my sight fell upon she whom I had felt for eons but hadn't seen for far longer. She smiled, the lifeless haunt, and beckoned me towards her hearth. Immediately indoors, the blacks and blues of the nocturnal forest dissipated into the oranges and maroons of a fire-lit log cabin. Her smile was disarming in the most appealing way, and I minded not her grave shroud or her silver pallor.

    "Death," she whispered, a hollow breezy sound, "is but the turning of a page towards a new chapter." The pause of her syllables was furnished by a glint of the fabulous light which had permeated her amber orbs of old. I reached for her porcelain hand with the heart-wrenching relief from suffering not unlike that of the soldier's wife when he returns, weary and wounded, but still he returns.

    Alas, my clasping fingers felt naught but a chillier space as they passed through the specter of my love. Her peaceful, charming smile dropped faster than lead does towards gravity; while my despair expressed its horror with an inhuman wail.

    "To have you before me but be unable to feel your pulse is a fate worse than to never lay my eyes on you again," I cried in desperate pain. She glared as I continued, "Demon specter! Leave me to my sorrow, you're holographic afterlife of palsy bliss is not for me. Suffuse your damnation alone!" I knew I was more enraged with my own gullibility than to this apparition, but it was of no consequence to me at the time.

    After my shrieks of malice, the phantom flew into a rage, her tragically beautiful countenance dissolved into that of some grotesque hell-beast. She snarled, "Spite me no more, I shall have your soul either way," and lunged for my wretched self. Stumbling backwards, I broke through the facade of her cabin.

    The wood was no less dark, but the sheer cold and weighty dew betrayed the little time that was left before dawn. Still, the devil spirit remained with wrath upon her sleeves, and I simply watched her blankly. My lack of terror perturbed the demoness, but I said nothing until I was certain I held every fragment of her attention. At the time I bluntly whispered, "You are not my Anya."

    Whether her ghost sat beside me or not, I would never hold her again while alive. I understood and accepted that now. Yet the glimpse I had snatched of what the soul can become after death brought shivers to my spine in dread for my eventual demise. Still, the phantom sits beside me no more.