She sings to you from the ground, from the web she's spun in celebration of your arrival. She runs her fingers along the silken threads and they vibrate just-so, a siren call to the likes of you. She's a musician and she's an artist, she's the damned waiting to be known. She is not so bad, if you get to know her, and that's more her thinking than his.

The timbre of his voice is fading-- Dawson was it?-- as is the chirp of a quartermaster who'd foisted upon him a coat and a scarf and a room number, designated five-five.

You have nowhere to go but down, and down you shall go, into the room that's missing something, into the room that's waiting.


--

You woke up not too long ago.

Today's date is July 6th, 2017, but the thing is, you remember July 6th of the year prior. A calendar year, come and gone while you'd been sleeping, resting in your metal cage, waiting for her. And there's been a storm a brewing, hasn't there? A flurry of activity causing you all to wake, to stir from your Odinsleeps and face the world anew. Or so Dawson had said, and the rest is rust and stardust.

You woke up not too long ago, and you are still so tired. You woke up not too long ago, and you are not ready.

--

With a coat donned and a scarf wrapped, you take the steps in threes. Your parents had always said you sounded like an elephant coming down the stairs; all excitement and no class. Enthusiasm is the only language that you speak in the utmost of fluency, and it shows. You could have been an actor, you could have been a musician. Your parents are fresh off the boat and a far cry from traditional and absolutely rooted in it at the same time.

It's okay that you're not a doctor or a lawyer. It's okay that you're not an Ivy League kid who started a law firm, that you have not yet disrupted Silicon Valley with a cockeyed joint venture. But the expectations of success weigh heavy, and you are but a bartender, squandering your ******** degree.

They know you are.

You're aware of their disappointment. They don't hesitate to inform you, even as it comes from a place of love. They'll never understand.

--

Soles hit the bottom of the stairs and your thunderous steps echo through the room of plates along the wall, in long rows, in tall columns. They line it and there they lie for days weeks and years, waiting for someone just like them. They all live, according to a tech, they just slumber until they either find their hunter or they perish. Each and every one of them-- with their crude drawings, with their simple pictographs-- holds the soul of a weapon. Of a someone that used to be, not so long ago.

Who's yours, you wonder?

A girl, you know. Not from anything but her insistence, a thrumming feminine cruelty lurking as a predator does for prey.

You can't wait to see her.

Pacing around the room as fast as your feet will carry you without running, you trail calloused fingers along the rough hewn stone of the tablets, ducking low to the floor and stretching high to the ceiling. There are no cobwebs, but you feel them, catching on invisible threads as you press a warm palm to a tablet.

She's here.

Your weapon.

She's here.

--

Your name is Octavia and you are the eighth of your line, one of eight sisters that are also the eighth of their name. You are an Ungoliant, you are most desirous of adoration and praise, you are just a girl.

You attend Amtiyville Academy, the only one of your brood to do so. The rest have scattered to the edges of Halloween, urban and rural alike. You are the only one left at home, the baby, the one with the least of expectations.

But you have aspirations for more. You want to be appreciated, and this is all you recall, now that you are like... this.

It feels like a river of strung together dreams, this sleep. You know that you are waiting, as they warned you would. You know that you are hopeful for the day to prove to the world you deserved to be truly heard.

And after all this waiting: now he's here.

--

The tablet crumbles in your huge hands, into nothing, into an uncanny warmth. It crawls over your skin like dozens of pins and needles, if not hundreds. It takes a shape in both the physical world and the incorporeal. She expands from dust into a towering shadow in his mind, eight legs unfurling. She expands from a concept to a name, to a face, to a voice.

'Hello,' you say, wonder creeping into your voice. 'You're my weapon, aren't you?'

She glimmers teal and candy-red in your mind, all eight of her eyes narrowing slightly.

'Yes,' Octavia says-- it's her, that's her name, her identity, her soul-- 'It's me. And you're Johan.'

She knows your name. She knows you, her influence slowly threading through your mind, the very beginnings of her most elaborate of webs. You know hers, and the melding of knowledge, of personalities, leaves you unsettled and hopeful both.

You are not her. She is not you. But now you are aware of each other, your open mind offering the most welcoming of invitations. Octavia has found herself a new home, and hopefully you end up approving for real. She doesn't seem very intent on leaving.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

--

You have done your duty, you realize, and so you make your way upstairs, to the room you have to call your own, on an island you now have to call home.

And you are no longer alone.

Quietly, Octavia makes herself known. She's there, curled up politely in the corner of your mind, watching and waiting. And you smile, and you smile. You'd been right, after all these years.

Ghosts are real.

It's all real. And that's a fact.