Their numbers had tripled, effectively, and Neith Heiwa paid it no mind. His interests remained focused on the past, hardly the present—what, or rather who, was now absent, instead of what or who had come.
In the first few months it was excusable, understandable. The doctor’s constant coming and going, his repeated walks along the coastline where the ocean took her, it was manic but it was justified. But now, wading into the shallows of winter while the moons marched on, while dozens of faces were born or wandered in to unwittingly replace her, his behavior persisted. Unhealthy behavior, for one who called himself a medicine worker.
He didn’t socialize anymore. He kept to his hovel. He treated those in need in his clinic. He allowed Taika to follow him about, though he suspected she had learned to read him and learned when to leave. Under veil of night she followed him partway to the Blackwoods, realized his destination, and had promptly turned back. He might have found it interesting given her interests and witchiness, weren’t he so sullen.
The doctor pushed through mud and snow-laden branches to the forest’s center, where he found no signs of Elphaba in the wind but a chill unique between the trees.
“Maugrim,” Neith called out in a voice not his own, emboldened by the numbness of grief. “Would you speak with me? I've questions I think only you could answer.”
She slept in the little hollow between the roots of the grandfather pine. Down deep, a pocket of stillness as tranquil as the bottom of the loch; There were no silver fish swimming here but the memories made their own swills, sparkling like frost over the crown of her head. In unconsciousness, Elphaba was as she had always been. Something precious, something wonderful, something rare.
Something powerful, something terrible, something warm with flame.
As the young queen dreamed, her brother watched on in the sleepless dawn of all-death. Nothing existed here but that which had always been, and would always be; Transient but permanent, shifting but the same. No winter chill could give him cause to tremble. No forest fire would bring a lick of heat to his soul. Each night, as the moon parted the black ocean above her, he ceaselessly stood watch to herald the weak dawn.
And each night, as he waited, he fed on the young woman's dreams and grew and grew and grew.
❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄
What felt like an age of unconquerable grief to the good doctor had passed as only an eyelash's length to the dead. With no slumber to mark the passage of time, all his unexistence had passed as one unending day, broken by singular catalysts that shaped the sentient limbs of the dark wood. To watch the live man now, emboldened by a heart gone septic with loss, seemed a trivial sort of thing.
Mourning made no sense to Maugrim, who had never treasured life overmuch but that he could not have it, and coveting is not quite the same thing.
Even so, once upon a time the doctor had been promised to him. For this reason he was - and would always be - of very special interest. Wrapping Elphaba's mind in a fog so thick that the sound of Neith's voice would not stir her, Maugrim extended his awareness through the lacing boughs of the gnarled pines.
The sound of his own name was a bright burst of light in the darkness. So careless had his numbness made the would-be paramour. Had he forgotten the single, cardinal rule of negotiating with those of the world beyond worlds?
A name gives a thing power.
Maugrim swelled with it, and the leaves danced, shaking free small crystals of ice and pale drifts of snow that clung to Neith like ash. Tentative, testing, he reached for the doctor with tendrils of thought, winding them like serpents through the ear and into the soul. A connection existed there, feeble as it was not of the blood, but a connection regardless.
They were not words that responded, precisely; rather, a sequence of things that violently manifested upon him at the same time. A flash of pain deep in his temples, not unlike every other headache he had suffered throughout his life, let alone in the months since his sister had passed and her teas ran thin. A noise, a wretched sound, moaned from empty trees and slipping snow and yearning winds. A presence, or so anticipated, and the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck.
If any of these were the ghost in the woods, Neith did not know. They had exchanged words once, now long ago. If something visited him now—if grief had not broken him, had not warped his perception in full—than it was not the same as the Maugrim of his memories. It was stronger, somehow. Bigger, like a spark in the brush turned to flames at the canopy.
It didn't matter.
The good doctor shuddered, spinning in place and searching all directions. Nothing. No one. No Elphaba. No creature of flesh and flora. The grief in his chest shook, momentarily stirred from its resting place by shock, and it did not occur to the Heiwa that it’d been months since he’d felt anything at all.
“Is it you? I need help.” Neith breathed deep to steady himself. What was he doing? Buried and stifled beneath grief and animosity, a glimmer of intuition warned him of his ways. “Please, my sister is dead. Months ago—she was killed, but something's not right. I don’t know how, I just know. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t...”
He turned in place, searching. “I know there is a lot you can see,” he lied. “Maugrim, can you help me?”
The feebleness of life was not lost on Maugrim, who ostensibly thought himself above such things. Their emotions ran hot and cold, like bodies wracked with fever, on and on indeterminably. When Elphaba was with him, the dead man felt echoes of how he might have been as a child, some semblance of the mortality he desperately craved - he felt her anger, her joy, her sadness or her lust press against him and ignite some reflection of it, some deep instinct that rose to match the tune.
Without her, he mostly felt hungry.
So hungry!
And alone, so very alone - more alone than even this whimpering wet-fleshed fool, wallowing in his misery, steeping and festering and falling away from the invaluable life he had so ungraciously dismissed. Grief was not true loneliness. Death was true loneliness! If only they knew, the devastation of it, the exquisite torment...
Maugrim felt a spark of some vague, fell inspiration hit him. It was unfamiliar. It felt like Elphaba's anger, but was instead his own. It had been some time since he had felt his own anger.
h̴̠̍e̸̻̋l̸͙̉p̴̢̕?̶̘̇
The pines seemed to creak as their shadows leaned in closer. Brittle twigs brushed lovingly against Neith's fine clothing as he turned, catching on seams, stroking like bony fingers. The boughs, burdened with heavy drifts of snow, sighed a gentle lament.
y̕e͠s .͞.̴.͜ i ca̴n ̧he̢lp̧
Still slumbering, her head swimming with silver scales, Elphaba murmured in her sleep down beneath the earth. But she did not wake. Glittering green eyes, the violent color of weeds springing forth after a fire, looked down on the good doctor from the high canopy. One might be mistaken for seeing a glittering toothy smile, only to realize that it was in fact a series of icicles catching the pale light.
Given direction, Neith moved at once. His mind blanked in its entirety, and Neith moved with purpose and without thought.
He did not know the way to the grandfather pine, but it did not matter; he followed by numb instinct. The wisps of long-dead creatures scattered from his path as if warded by his intent—as if frightened by his assocations, and a taint unseen upon him. Neith paid them no mind. He wandered, very likely, as he knew not how to navigate the forest. If Maugrim led him, the doctor followed by coincidence alone.
The woods turned deep. He did not see any pine as any different from the crowd, but the winds shifted and his pace turned slow. He turned in place, looking, waiting, expecting. Maugrim was dead, or so he had come to understand. What was different here than anywhere else among the cursed trees?
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