How, out of all things is it here? Those snaking worms of harrowing light that slither through the air, as they seep forward, crawling like the tendrils of an extending rot. Like a fungus spreading out beneath the dirt. The strands of it glide just past me and I feel its familiar presence, like the feeling you get when you stand next to an old friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. That deep connection, that feeling that there is something to which you belong. But it simply whispers past us, simply pushes on ahead unhindered and unbothered by our presence, as it crawls towards the things on the other side of the bridge, the living things making noise, those people preventing its slumber. Its feelings, dead and cold, reaching for them.

What an interesting conundrum I think to myself, as the zombies begin to shuffle our way, as the horde of our friends and families makes its way towards us. I wonder…

  But as I stare out into the many dead, rotting faces shambling towards me I don’t see my own. I suppose it makes sense in one way, Miika never existed so he can’t be there. But here I am nonetheless, Miika in the flesh. Sort of. Another Miika. A little sliver, a lingering remnant of a life that never was. A final whisper in the setting sun of the man that was. It makes little sense, I suppose. But that’s what happens when the timelines get mixed up. This was all never supposed to be like this. This was all never supposed to happen.

  That the narrative of the dungeon’s story got this out of hand, that the dungeon became so twisted and shuffled. That the red-string, the tightly strung string of fate, became twisted and knotted. Pulled together by the dark god. And here, now, I stand at the intersection of one of those knots. Watching as it all collides. Narrowing my gaze, I look into the crowd and see Piotr. Pitor as a zombie. I tap my flaming friend on the shoulder and point towards himself.

“Hey! Piotr! I didn’t know you had a twin!” I jest.

  But he doesn’t tell me to shut up like I had gotten used to, I’m a little let down oddly enough. He just looks at the man shuffling his way. At the rotting, wet corpse that doesn’t recognize the burning shadow it approaches. Piotr stares at Piotr. The fire-elemental Piotr quietly raises his hand, as the zombie approaches and places a single palm on his zombie body’s forehead. The rotting skin crackles and hisses immediately as the zombie groans and moans in a language we can’t understand in this form.

  The fire surrounds his skull as Piotr’s gaze grows wide and disgusted as he looks at his old body. At the thing that had shambled towards him. The rotting husk, wet, damp, filthy and filled with so much goo, in body and soul. With so much black-water that fizzles and hisses and bubbles beneath his broiling skin, as the fetid body quivers and shakes.

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  He presses down tighter and the wet skin catches fire, the zombie body all the while just trying to walk on ahead, as the dead-light manipulates it. As it tries to drag him forward against the firm hand holding it in place. He burns himself, fire spreads around the rotting skin, crawling down and setting the scraps of dank cloth alight. Fire crawls in through the hollow sockets of his eyes. The ash. The ash. It collects in his skull. It burns. It makes his eyes clean. It removes their secrets. It removes everything they have seen. It makes him pure. Everything burns in Piotr as the fire travels down his throat, visible through his missing jaw as if a serpent were being forced down his gullet.

A great eruption takes place, as the collective heat becomes too much all at once and the zombie Piotr is engulfed entirely in fire and then, a second later, falls into a heap of ash.

  The strings of dead-light that were present in his body crawl around in the heap of cinder and charred remains, like worms in a carcass, trying to pull it all back together. The power of his own malice trying to restore him once more. It isn’t dead. The dead-light can’t die from something like this. He raises his hand out again and shoots a stream of fire into the pile at his feet, all the while the rest of the zombies walk on past us, only able to spare a glance at most. But never able to stop. The dead-light won’t let them stop for something like this. Piotr burns and I watch in fascination, as the man I know destroys himself entirely. Utterly.

  No matter how often the heap of ash spasms and twists, he keeps on burning until eventually there is nothing left for the dead-light to salvage. The strands of pale white light sicker away, befouling the warm winds that I had found so pleasant, as they press on forward without Piotr. He was unimportant anyways. A puppet, one of hundreds. While his feelings had made up a part of the dead-light itself, in the end those strong feelings took control. Remember how I said that ghosts are only made manifest by strong negative emotions? The dead-light is like that, and once it was made manifest; it never really needed us anymore. We’re just puppets. We dance to its pull. Sure, we enjoyed it. It was what we wanted in the end. Our goals aligned. But that malice made manifest, that thing that is the dead-light. It doesn’t care for us. It just consumes and twists and wants to make everything quiet, not through the purity of ash, but through the sickering worms and manipulation.

  Piotr stares down at the heap of ash in disgust, as a familiar warm wind comes to surround us, pushing away the dead-light for just a moment as it blows past us. Together, as the zombies march past us towards the fighting hero-party, we stand there and watch the cloud of his own body’s ashes fly off into the distance, carried by the warm winds to someplace, that I hope is kinder than here.

  As he watches himself fly away, I look at my friend’s eyes. They seem different, all of a sudden. Cleaner. Purer. As if all the goo… as if all the black-water and the bad memories and the hatred and the anger and the malice and the angst and the fear and the failures and the regrets and the doubts and the weaknesses and letdowns and disgusts, as all of it is simply carried away by the wind. Just like that. Gone.

As everything that his life had amounted to, was cleansed by single flaming baptism and all of his sufferings were literally carried away by the wind.

  He looks so light, that person I see behind those eyes. Ah, I’m a little jealous I think as I watch the flame in his body grow dimmer. As I watch his weightless eyes grow a little fainter. He has realized what the dead-light made him, no. What he made himself. And by purging that, by clearing up that gunk that tarnished his soul, he has unbound the spectral chain that binds him.

"Hey, Miika," he says.

"Yes, Piotr?" I ask my absolved friend, a little sad.

"I think I got a sun burn," he laughs as his fire slowly begins to fade away to nothing.