Skeleton Ghost

Recollection

((In my frenzy to write and update Andlátkyn I yet again forgot about Skeleghost, so I'll just drop this chapter here!))

He slowly awoke, feeling nothing but a faint buzz. He slowly opened his sockets, seeing nothing but vague, watery shadows. Everything was heavy and weightless. It made his sense of self feel foggy.

... Actually.. who.. was he?

Names flickered by, names of those he knew, animals, dragons, serpents, monsters, humans, elves, spirits, multiple species of plant- but. But what?
Damn, he was a mess.

What could he last remember?
..Right. He had been afraid.
More than afraid. He had been overflowing with complete, overwhelming, primal terror.
He was dragged underwater after slamming face-first into- wait no- he was pulled under through a window?
He remembered..

Warmth blossomed from within, spreading along every bone with gentle sincerity, pushing out the cold numbness in his wingtips, bringing sensation back into his hands and tail, soothing the ache in his face and neck vertebrae from the painful collision as his tension left.

…
Saecshiun. He was and was not.
The sense of self was beginning to return, yes.
He was Frisk, the final human to fall into the Underground and singlehandedly freeing monsterkind. The one who could turn back time, who once lost hope only for it to return a thousandfold in a family he had never had before. To belong, to feel closer to who he was meant to be.

He was Napstablook, the overcharged and downtrodden ghost, who once fought so hard to be the kindest, gentlest monster in the Underground, fought to keep his family together.
But no matter what he did, they grew further and further apart, and slowly he lost his will to keep going, his desire to keep on fighting, his.. Determination.

And he was Sans. He who could slow time. He who could teleport wherever he so desired. He who dabbled in science alongside his father at much too young an age, and lost everything but his brother and became entwined with the Void itself. He who saw into the Souls of others, who simply gave up one day when he saw just how dangerous a mere frightened human child could be.

Yes, they remembered now. They remembered now. And yet, bubbling up like a pot set to boil, more memories surfaced, almost as though a barrier keeping them back had been broken. Shattered even, leaving the old memories to come surging up on the forefront.

Saecshiun. He was them.. and perhaps they too, were he.
He had lived a long, long life. He had a youth of intense curiosity, forever seeking knowledge, forever delving into the untold histories of the world and it's races as he learned how it worked. Science and history, he grew to love these things.

Gradually, his burning curiosity dulled with time, and he retreated to a secluded stretch of beach and acres of ocean, far from other sentient creatures. He desired solitude as most do.
But it did not last.

Centuries went by, and he came to know of the new race that emerged in the world, slowly banding together in large groups and building their own collection of homes together out of the trees, the grasses, the earth and stone. Something he had not seen before, and though it was strange, he felt indifferent to it and his curiosity.

But not long after he began to hear of many new races similar to humans yet obtaining a likeness to the Elder Folk. Time went on and magical subsets of man came and were far more agreeable than the first. Perhaps not always peaceful, but cooperative in ways that humans were not. It was irritating, to say the least.

In his woods around the beach they had infiltrated, cutting down old trees for their precious unnatural and fallible dwellings. They burned their fires near constantly, leaving the smell of smoke to continuously pervade their claimed territory. On some days the wind would blow it and the beach would be stuck with the smell.