The Ghost of Adsophel

Two.

Adsophel is only kind to liars, beggars, and thieves. That's what my mother always told me, before she stopped telling stories. At our estate, surrounded by woodland and other rich houses, I never quite believed her. The sky was a vast tapestry, gilded in the mornings and evenings. From our cobbled and gated street, I couldn't see the chimneys that shrouded the city in endless grey fog and left smears on the glass. I couldn't see the bay, where sea-salt cliffsides crumbled into the wooden catastrophe of the docks. I could just barely see the peaks of the Black Jagged mountains to the east, where spindly mining machines scuttled across bare stone like lopsided spiders.

In my universe, Adsophel was kind. Even the creatures in the woods, which I could hear snuffling and scraping around the house at night, were always polite enough to never show their faces to me unless I wanted them to. No one else could even hear them, which was also a kindness, because I knew most people were scared of things they didn't understand. My mother's warnings were never enough to cut through my illusion.

But she left behind no will, no money to her daughters' names. Mina claimed our property and sold it, leaving Thea with little more than pocket change to keep us off the streets. She found us a cramped apartment at the grimy heart of the city, a few streets from the ocean. There, I started believing my mother.

The building sagged in on itself. The stairs up to the third floor moaned and muttered with every step, and the hall carpet was covered in ruddy brown stains that I tried not to dwell on. There was a sour, damp tang in the air that warned of mold. Our front door was uneven on its hinges and had to be wrestled into place each time it was closed. Beyond this door was a brick room with a single smudgy window facing the alleyway below. There was a woodfire stove, a rusty sink, space in the corner for a mattress.

It was barely enough for the two of us, but we subsisted; though we did have a roommate. Our tiny washroom was host to a large jade-colored spider, perpetually perched in the ceiling corner. Thea couldn't see it, but I could. I was thankful for at least some company, another entity to fill the apartment when Thea was away. Sometimes, when I was sitting in the cracked claw-foot bathtub, the spider would descend on a wisp of thread and hang in front of me. Its abdomen winked in the light and cast fragments of jade across the bathwater. I took to telling it about my dreams, since it seemed awkward for us to just stare at each other in silence. It always seemed to listen.

We hadn't taken much with us when we left. Some clothes, a few books, Thea's violin, some pots and dishes. Our old life fit into a few boxes, which we left stacked against one wall in place of cupboards or dressers. We could afford little, since Thea refused to let me work, and she could only pick up odd jobs for herself. Errand-running, mostly; at least I assumed. She refused to tell me much of what she did.

If anyone had asked me, then, I would've said I had a single possession to my name.

There was a chipped vase sitting on the stove when we moved in. I scrubbed it clean and used it to hold drinking water, in part as an excuse to hold it as often as possible. It was decorated in a style I'd never seen before. A vast, serpentine creature with an amorphous face wrapped around most of its surface, its body covered in unfamiliar symbols. Thea thought it was just a "weird snake," but every time I looked at the twisted mass of its skull, a hundred tiny eyes staring out of glazed clay, I was certain it must be a dragon.

My mother had told me about dragons, too. At the beginning of the world, so the stories went, there were dragons. They were bigger and stronger than the sky, yet the sky is where they lived, in a vast palace made of glass and mossy stone. A waterfall cascaded from its central courtyard, creating the ocean that now flooded Adsophel's bay. One day, the dragons followed the waterfall down to earth, taking human form. The form was new, but they loved it so much that they decided to spread it across the world. This is how humans were born. We are the children of dragons, the children of gods.

In these early days, our forests and mountains and oceans were teeming with strange spirits: wolves that drank blood, sirens that drowned sailors, ghosts that took the shape of trees, ravens that could inject madness into one's skull with a single croak. The dragons, in human form, played with us often, and in exchange we burnt offerings and built temples and prayed to them. We were their patrons, their children. This is how it always was, until it wasn't.

Humans are crafty creatures, and we invented many things. Leather-bound journals where we could record and share knowledge. Large ships to safely cross the waters. Tools to extract precious stones from the mountains. Vast factories to weave textiles and put together small, practical machines. Electric lights, whose flickers and hums drove away hungry spirits. Over time, we stopped hiding from monsters at night. We stopped praying. And as our connection faded, so did the dragons' power. Their palace tumbled from the sky, and the dragons, no longer in their human forms, went to sleep as mountains. The other spirits and monsters disappeared into the trees and deep under the waves. We left them behind, and then we forgot.

We forgot, but they did not. That's what my mother would say when I'd ask about the creatures I heard at night. They remember how to speak, but most of us forgot how to listen. I was born remembering. Mina thought I was a sick little girl, but only because she was deaf.

-

The worst thing about the half-year we spent at that apartment was the loneliness. I had never been close to children my age. But sometimes I would sneak down our sheltered little road and watch them play at the mouth of the forest, chubby limbs and sticky hands, tiny mouths peeled wide to smile at the world. They overturned rocks to catch beetles and shoved each other over and laughed. The world had always been kind to these children, it seemed. They tumbled into their mother's skirts or father's arms with such ease.

I had always been alone. I shouldn't have minded. But deep in the city, surrounded by the constant throng of human voices and smoggy air, the dishes clattering on the shelf from the rumble of nearby factories, the old creatures no longer visited me. It was a loss I didn't know how to be prepared for. I was left with little to do besides listen to rain tap-tap-tap through our roof into a pot, or watch dogs sift through the dumpster three stories below our window. Endless hours passed, my memories dying one by one. Thea stopped speaking to our family, so I did too. She told me to stay inside where it was safe, so I did. I whispered nightmares to a spider and sipped stale water from a novelty art piece. I curled against my sister's ribcage while she slept, leaking silent tears onto her shirt, and I tried my best to bear it.