Remains has a minion!

Grim the Barghest

You used to be a dog (you think). A scruffy little thing (probably), with a lolling tongue and a collar (debatable, but that seems nice). But now you are a crumbling stone underneath the tree on the hill. You don't even have a label—it had been worn away by the wind a long time ago, or maybe no one had bothered with the inscription to begin with. You are as old as the churchyard. You are its Grim.

When the church is pressed against a blue, blue sky and the steeples reach up to touch cotton-puff clouds, it looks nice. The view from the tree isn't terrible either, full as it is with rolling pastures and fields of wildflowers. But it's lonely. The graveyard is empty because you do your job, and you do it well, and so that means that you are the only one who patrols the stones and paces to the gate. The plots are nothing more than bones and ashes.

The only time you have company—real company—the kind that can see you and talk to you and touch you—is when there's a funeral. You like to sit two rows away when it's raining, or by your cracked headstone under the tree when it's sunny. The mourners never see you, and your new company's bones have to settle into the earth first. You will inch up to the new grave after the mourners have dispersed, and you will wait, because that's what you do after every funeral.

Some of the spirits go readily. You like these the best, because they are comfortable to be around and you get to walk by their side as you lead them to the church doors. They might even scratch your ears or pat your head before they twist open the knob and push through to Beyond. The children are harder to deal with, because sometimes their parents refuse to leave and so you have to chase them out at dusk since no living being can stay on the night of departure—that is a rule that you know deep in your bones, if you'd still had them in you. Oftentimes the children are confused, and so tiny, and so you wag a spectral tail in an imitation of being affable and herd them along. What happens Beyond does not concern you, but for the really tiny ones, you hope that it is kind to them.

Then there are the ones who kick and scream and rage, and it is too loud in your empty lonely graveyard. Let them stay, they plead, and you will have to snarl too—will have to snap and rage back at them—because they cannot stay. You are a Grim, and you will not be like the ones who have failed and let their loneliness consume them, until their cemeteries turned to ruin with trapped souls and yet still they tried to raid for more. You must lead your spirits to Beyond, and then you must turn around and defend your bones and ashes from the monsters who will tear them to pieces at even half the chance. You must not let them rip a single petal or disturb even a speck of dirt.

You are a Grim, and you are as old as the church itself. You know every single nook and cranny of your churchyard so well that it takes away the bitter edge of not knowing what is Outside. You are a Grim, and you are good at your job, so all is well but it is so, so lonely amongst your neat rows of empty stones.

You were a dog once, but what does that matter? Now you are just a cracked headstone with no inscription. Your tiny bones had long been picked clean. They killed you first and locked you in here to watch over nothing, but you are its Grim, and you will do your job well.


Profile template by Lea.
Story by Monologue.
Background image from Pixcove.