The Counterpoint:
From the Ghost's Love's Point of View

Written by Lynne (Maniacal Dragon)

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There was a lot about this place that was intangible. In the bright of noon, in the chill dark of midnight, there was always the sense that something was there, watching. I had no idea how old this castle was, a towering edifice of stone that stretched to the sky and held within its cold stone arms many rooms, rooms filled with love, with joy, with power, with anger, with worship, with hate, with grief. The cold chill that crept along the forbidding hallways was attributed by everyone to 'the ghost', but I was maybe the only one who had ever seen or felt the ghost for himself. He was no ghost. But he held such a command and dark power over this place he resided in that he might as well have been. Everyone felt his chill, felt his wrath, felt his will tightening around their throats like a catgut noose. I was maybe the only one who had felt something more. Felt his warmth, and sadness, and love. The things no one saw in him, which even he struggled to be able to feel.

I didn't spend a lot of time here. Most of my time was kept traveling, making my way through village after village, all different, all with varying reactions.. some roofs of pitch and reed, some of hay, some of wood planks, some of grass... I stood on them all and reached my voice and arms to the sky, and then I reached my music. My own fiddle, as it melded to my heart, drawing my emotions out and singing of them as I never could on my own. Laughter, love, joy, and peace were the only things I played of, the only things I spread from my vantage on the rooftops. And I was never there long. But I would always notice a lightened aura around a village I'd played in. A more frequent smile on the faces of passersby, a movement of life that fairly danced, even as I danced from one village to the next.

And then there were the times I came home. Home to the castle that chilled by its very sight. The rulers who noticed little, the various friends of mine who calmly did their jobs and had fun with one another. The lush gardens, the sardonic kelpie living in the moat, the red and purple flags soaring from the turrets. Laughter and fun sparkled from the trees and the bushes and the flowers. It was always so refreshing to come home. Even the chill of the ghost was not frightening to me. When no one else was there, no one in the room or the hall, the chill flowed into a tender warmth. Just for me. Even when I never saw him, or spoke to him, which was most of the time.

My friends, the ones who traveled like me, would also come by here sometimes. Maybe to see the lax rulers who argued and chatted in their throne room, unaware who really ran the show. I felt the cold contempt of the ghost as he watched them. I felt his sneer, but I said nothing, did nothing. This was how he wanted it. He who had lured me into his emotion and his touch with his music and the painful struggles with himself that only I could see.

My other friend was a minstrel. Never had I known anyone as loving and full of peace as she, with her sparkling green eyes that sang and smiled to everyone who saw her, with her long golden hair and delicate hands that so expertly brought the music from her hammered dulcimer and through her soul. They traveled, and sometimes we would play together, flinging our praises of life and beauty together to the sky and the trees and the earth and the people around us. Her husband joined us often. He was a brooding character, tough and prickly on the outside but soft and as golden as his wife's hair on the inside. He reminded me of my ghost in this manner. But in his heart he didn't harbor the clinging blackness that I felt choking the ghost's soul. His understanding of his music, as he played the fiddle he'd named Sang Av Aere, was complete and strong, unbroken and clear. Although his greed and lust for power mixed and warred with the gold you could see inside, it was a roiling on the surface. It seemed nothing except the music and his wife could smooth that over and bring out the light inside. But when that light shone through it was pure.

They came to the castle once while I was staying there. For some reason, reasons that I could only guess at, reasons involving the dark rage and territorialism of my ghost, they did not find the throne room they sought for days. My friend's husband had it in his mind to use his mastery of the music to drive the rulers mad, control them to his bidding. He kept his wife and his daughter at his side and I think it may have been for them that he sought glory and power.

And why did the ghost seek it? Here was someone after his rightful place in the castle. Someone threatening to hold precedence over his shadow. It was the ghost's anger that brought him to the throne room. While it was unwittingly, and idly, that I chatted with my friend in the hallway, talking of our respective children, travels, and most importantly music... behind the doors that were the only thing seperating us from the throne room dark strands of anger and power twined together, lashed at each other, first only by the barely tangible sense of their emotions. And then the music came. They drew it out, my friend's husband first, playing a simple melody that grew quickly more complex as it danced and taunted. Even from in the hall I felt the hint of the ghost's rage. The rage that flared with this intrusion, with the wielding of musical power in his territory, where music was his domain, and everything was under his control. His music leapt to match that of his rival's. At first it was a show of technical skill. My friend and I stopped talking, and opened the door, caught in the waves of sound that drew us in.

The ghost was there. I had never seen him, truly seen him, when there was anyone besides myself around, but there he was. It stunned me to see them together, facing off. The similarity, the familiar narrowing of the eyes, the threatening snarl. Their boots hit the stones as they twisted, circling each other, their fingers leaping and dancing across the fingerboards of their fiddles, their cloaks swirling around their figures. My ghost, garbed in black shadow, and my friend's husband, primped up in the bright colors of red and purple. The music that wailed across the strings from under their bows assualted my mind and my ears. I felt the blackness and familiarity that was the ghost in his music, I felt the arrogance and intense color of my friend's husband, only I was no longer seeing them physically. They danced with the strands of their music. Higher and more intensely their emotions flared, rushing through the outlet provided by the instruments to grapple and lash at each other, each trying to swallow up the other. They battled back and forth, the notes twisting and screaming against each other, and sometimes blending in on the edges in a beautiful ringing harmony that caught my soul and threw me upwards with them.

And then they sent the call out. My friend took her dulcimer and sat with it as strong themes and colors of the deep connection she shared with her husband called out to her. Her harmony, tinkling and golden as it mixed with the strong and confident colors of his, weaved a beautiful tapestry of feeling and depth in that dimension where only music exists, and sound is color, and everything can be seen as well as heard and felt. As I relished in the feeling that their duet created in me, I was suddenly lanced through with black spears of emotion, hooked and barbed, chilling me wherever they touched. The ghost called. I felt the raw edges of his emotion, feeding and flowing along the hooks that sunk into my mind, sweetly, irresitably. They caressed and crooned, at first, and there was nothing I could except take out my own fiddle and put my own soul into the music, blithely giving my heart to the music, black as it was, and tangling my own light with the dark force of the ghost.

Still the tapestry of color and harmony that my friend and her husband created persisted, weaving itself ever stronger and tighter, mixing and guarding their souls within the beauty of it. I felt, somewhere among it, their hearts, connected and interweaving, and striking away the dissonant chords of night that struck at the edges of their song. Their colors rolled together in intense beauty, but my vision and my attention was clouded, trapped, by the soothing darkness. That darkness tore along its edges in dark red fire, rage that seeped and flamed, furious at the harmony of the colored tapestry that defied its every attempt to tear it apart. I struggled with my own music, throwing my song and my soul around and in between the black tendrils that leapt and raged, suffusing them with a white light that they took and wove into themselves, enhancing their power and beauty, but at the same time their deadly anger.

My ghost let his emotion loose. All of it. He flung back the shrouded curtain that concealed the rage, the jealousy, the tangled mix of feelings that he could not fully understand or control. The emotions leapt and soared, taking the flow of music and turning it into a raging rapid of destruction and violence. Our song was black and white, infused with the dark red of his rage and passion and the the weakened, silvery tendrils of my own song that sought to bring some semblance of control and harmony into his music. The emotion tore through me, shattered my music and flung it into agonized screams, tearing it, sucking it into the all-consuming emotion that roiled and rushed, crashing violently with and against itself. I was a boat in a storm and the storm had no intention of subsiding. I screamed. I couldn't stop screaming. The colors of my friend's tapestry sang in the distance, and I felt the energy of their connection that fought off the rage, brought them above, taking their souls into a union out of the reach of the tangled emotions that sucked me downward. It was a horrendous rape of my mind and rending of my heart and body. It tore me out from within, weaving the remaining shreds of myself into a ghastly wailing music with its own, horrifying but in a deadly harmony that drew me along with it, downward and downward, unable to escape, sucking me with it even as it tore at me, tore at the colored tapestry it could not destroy.