The fires had been burning for only a few days, but that was enough.
They called the girl a witch, a spectre, and an angel, but never to her face. Only in quiet whispers behind her back, and even then, only in the shadows of the Ruins where she dared not venture.
She was an odd one, this girl. Her clothes were the torn and tattered remains of what once was a respectable T-shirt and a pair of fatigues, clothes that had seen fire and water, blood and dirt.
Her eyes were the colour of the earth, a brown so pure they seemed to be wells of both wisdom and madness, at once both blank and alert. When what sunlight came through the Ruins, sometimes there would be red or gold fleck amidst the brown.
But her skin was what truly fed the rumours. Amidst the burned and blackened debris of her former neighborhood she walked, skin as white as what little reflective markings were left of the Road, as white as the moon. Her hair was just the opposite, so black it appeared to be a piece of the night sky, utterly devoid of stars. Like many others, she bled freely from various wounds, not caring about the pain and infection of week-old gashes and scrapes. One particular wound, a slash under her left eye, bled constantly, giving her face an even more ashen appearance in contrast to the deep black of her hair and the vivid red of her blood.
Rumours were that she was the namesake of a powerful witch from long ago, but those tales were hard to believe when she walked past, her eyes wide with some unforgotten horror, clutching a small scrap of paper in her burnt and wounded hands, whispering to herself a familiar litany she had been speaking since the Beginning of the End.
"Where are you... my friend... I must find you..."
The picture was only perhaps a month or two old. Its subject was a handsome boy, not yet grown to full adulthood, his hair spiked and the colour of red-brown tree bark, eyes gleaming, mouth slightly turned up at the corners to merely hint at a smile.
Today was no different from yesterday, or the day before, for that matter. She walked, never stopping, through the remains of houses, forests and even, sometimes, cities, their once-majestic skyscrapers brought down like proud trees to the blade of an axe. Her bare feet trod over all manners of things, from dry earth to cracked pavement, from shards of glass to splinters of wood long enough to impale both hands easily and still have a foot more to go, leaving only a trail of bloody footprints behind. Her lips moved in the cadence of words she had begun whispering only a week prior to the End, as the survivors called it.
"Where are you... my friend... I will find you..."
-
Finally, one day, the girl's foot trod on flesh and she gasped and looked down, the only other two motions she had made for the entire week.
She knelt down, blood streaming down her face like macabre tears. She held the crumpled and worn piece of paper next to the body's face and gasped in recognition and anguish. She knelt over the body of the boy in the picture and sobbed, cursing herself, cursing whatever fate had done this to the boy, and the wicked people responsible for the destruction of everything she loved.
Then something feather-light touched her shoulder and she lifted her head, tears mixing with blood mixing with dirt until her face was no longer pale and white but a brownish-red. Then she gasped again. There, in front of her, stood the shining, perfect figure of the boy over which she sobbed. Her mouth opened and shut like a fish, but no words came out. Slowly she rose to her feet, her eyes reflecting the light of the spirit in front of her. Her voice, raspy without water and sore from the smoke in the air, returned, and her cracked, blood-caked lips moved together to form words.
"But... but you're dead..."
The spirit of the boy smiled sadly.
"Don't worry, everything'll be all right."
The girl sobbed and, through the tears and blood and dirt managed to shake her head.
"You're dead... it's not all right..."
The spirit flowed over to her and embraced her, a feeling of warmth and comfort spreading through her entire, wounded body for the first time in months.
"Don't worry... everything'll be okay..." He kissed her softly on the lips and glowed brightly. "I'll wait for you, Lirael," it said, and then it was gone as mysteriously as it'd come, and the girl was left standing over the body of the last of her loved ones.
She stood there for a long time, looking at the cooling corpse of the boy and wondering what she should do next. Then a sudden inspiration took hold of her and she reached down, picking the dead boy up and tucking his picture into a pocket of her battered trousers. She carried him away from the Ruins to a relatively clear spot, sweeping a circle clear of glass and other debris with her feet.
She lay the boy down in the center and arranged him so that his hands lay over his chest, then stepped back and wiped her face clean. She muttered a word and a single tongue of flame appeared in her hands.
"Goodbye..." she managed to whisper, and threw the fire at the boy's body which immediately burst into flames too hot and tall to be natural. She watched the flames, entranced by them, and blinked only once to keep smoke out of her eyes.
Then, deep in the fire, she saw a face not unlike that of the boy she'd just set aflame. The face smiled, then vanished upwards with the rising fire.
The girl's cracked lips turned upwards in a smile, then she turned around and walked back the way she'd come, the sun rising over the Ruins behind her.