This world loves its labels. So I’ve labelled this “Declassified.” It’s a Ghost’s story for this new year’s night but to the rangers, witches, and wolves among us it is a howl flung in your direction, a notice served, a warning or perhaps a confirmation, a blank postcard from parts unsung that says I’m still here watching.
The following text was never included in the mission summary. It most certainly would have been redacted by those who hold the sacred right to redact and I don’t waste ink. Such resources are far too fine in the black. And besides, the mission, like the author and the place, never existed.
I had a quiet and commanding place in mind from which to see and plenty of cover to move into it unseen. I’d spent some time there before on a solitary shift, one of my first, when I watched the woods at the ends of the northern range and also dwelt on the meaning of empathy.
I was a freelancer back then. That was their word, their label. I usually worked alone and kept myself on someone’s retainer just to keep up appearances and the illusion of a leash. I was made to recognize their world’s rules but continue to operate outside of them. That is how the theater of half-lights and mirrors works and I play my part in the dark, like an honest creature, where light holds little sway and labels have nothing to stick to. “Freelancer,” they called me. And I suppose the label made it easier for them to come to grips with my existence and to deny it when it was necessary or convenient to do so. That’s why I’m obliged to call this a fictional account. Fiction, so I am free to run down a more accurate and truthful report of the encounter and so they have less denying and less redacting to do. Fiction, so not to threaten the stability of the grand delusion that they, those who believe they hold the other end of said leash, so desperately strive to maintain. Those are the rules, their rules, rules made by those who are best at cheating, not mine. In my world, where faster rules apply, the word “loyalty” has a far better definition than it does in theirs and it has something to do with reciprocation, not leashes.
In the halls of fine crown molding and white trim they called me “Freelancer” and in the field, back then, they called me “Loose Leaf.” Fortunately, the wind taught me all about labels very early on, and how to wear them when none would ever quite fit. Labels. Illusions. Rules. Masks. Use them all to your advantage. Freelancer. Operator. Assassin. Ghost. I was never any of those things but I’ve learned to move like whatever it is I’m after.
The wind also taught me how silence works, which is why I held my position that night even though I held nothing warm in my grasp nor my sight for what seemed like ages. A full moon had passed a few nights prior. In its wake light was favorable for surveillance and the witches’ fires still burned in the woods for as far as one could see. So still I sat and watched, intently and silently, all the dark spaces between the fires. That is where I first saw it, in the corner of an eye, reaching out from the wood’s darkest places, as if searching while it moved through. Moments before the first contact, the air went dead, interrupted, and when it returned it was as if the wind was let out of a bag. To one who lives by the wind’s counsel it was disconcerting and disorienting as it seemed to come in on all sides, over and around my position, then moved on like a large shadow casting itself across the forest, as the mountain’s does at dusk, but swiftly and with purpose. It was barely visible, even to the silvereyes, and only if I didn’t look directly at it. So I kept it in my periphery with the fires and tracked it for as long as I could. It was a brief encounter. The moon was strange to me that night and the field notes trail off as my contact evaporated like a whisper over spotty coms chatter.
The witches were dancing as they had been for nights, lost in their own white noise and fixed on the fires’ light, which made moving a tactically sound possibility again. The urge was to chase it, to see if I could keep up with something that was almost too fast and silent for the eye and the ear to track. But something in the wind told me to sit tight. So tight I sat and dwelt and watched to see what dared move next…
“loose leaf”
—
in the still
I must refine
pull leaves from wind’s stream
so to taste them
in a curl on the sides
little pieces
to consider
mid-dream
in the still
I refine
—
in the still
the still I must refine
the witches dance this night
one and all
they are mine
in the fire and in the trees
in the still
I must refine
the witches dance this night
their moon above
a snake afoot to mind
and in the dark
something moves swiftly by
as the shadow of an elephant’s might
silent as a wind and her wight
I fade
in the still
I refine
—
in the still
there again
lo, not to the witches’ sight
as they dance at their light
a ghost in mid-flight
a gleam of moon
long cast now fading
through the wood
as an echo might
through the fires burning
through the waxing and the waning
through the trees turning
a wind and her wight
but a whisper
in the ghost’s tongue
this moment past midnight
in the still
I must refine
—
in the still
in the deep
in the dark she’d sew
in the wind he’d reap
there a glint
an odd cast
a turn of leaf
in the still
as the witches dance
in the still
I will refine
—
in the still
a wind and her wight
a wind to move a leaf of a tree
and a wight to move within
like her very own poetry
the witches dance this night
they move as one
a wind and her wight
in the still
they requite
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