The castle was endless. The faded entrance gates, made of rough wood, lead deep into the crimson-painted walls, filled with the sinful silence of unfolded secrets; candles stood unlit, drowning the place into a sea of pitch-black nothingness, empty, rotting from the inside. 

   She walked the hallways as if she knew what they were made of; as if she knew the nooks and crannies by heart, as if they were engraved in the back of her mind. To the castle, she was a ghost; a particle of dust strolling around its moldy walls and dripping faucets, storming in and out of rooms trying to find what had been lost a long time ago, desperately trying to light wet candle wicks with her bare hands and hot breath. She stopped when she heard the bells chime in unison and a few dainty clinks in the other room; she knew it was the other ghost. 

   The other ghost used to run as she chased it, but this time it stayed and she felt it. Her wet, pale hand turned the doorknob right, entering the room lit with tiny beeswax candles, with honeycomb-like texture; decorated with divine rosaries hanging along with dried roses; gilded gold bells engraved with lilies and lilacs, angels and olive branches; a pale creature emitting a tinkle of soft light, right in the heart of its core. She dared to reach her hand out, lifeless eyes sparkling with a tinge of admiration: could she ever be what the other ghost was? 

   Looking at the hand she had reached out, she deemed it unworthy of touching the other ghost. She retrieved it as her cold skin turned paler, and took a look around the room she had been chasing this whole time. It sparkled and gleamed with light, unlike the rest of the castle, and stunk of this strange, eerie, rancid odor coming from something she had yet to figure out what it was, and where exactly it was located; it smelled foul as if whatever it was, had been cursed to decay for eternity. 

   She scrunched her nose and furrowed her brows, crawling around the room on all fours, sniffing like a desperate dog as the wooden floor turned muddy and her knees sank a few inches deep. The scarlet liquid covering the walls started dripping, exposing the old wallpaper, a canvas of pastel flowers and gold-tinted angels, as old picture frames, carefully curated with ceramic paint, shook and the glass broke. Her breath turned shallow as the other ghost crawled to her. This time, the other ghost wasn’t emitting light, no, it was reeking of darkness and a piercing stench of death. It crawled closer to the ghost as she took a few steps back from what she had been yearning to become. 

   No use. She couldn’t do anything but let the ghost plunge its hand deep inside her chest, searching for the heart that had stopped beating a few hundred years back. An act of love, she thought, as she sunk her soggy hand inside its chest, reciprocating, failing to meet its heart. 

   A wave of disappointing, dreadful heartache shocked her heart into beating again. Thud. Thud. Thud. The other ghost turned angry as the sound reached its ears, its hand frantically moving inside her chest, trying to stop the heartbeat. The rot was eating at it, already having bruised its body with onyx-colored splotches, void-deep, as its white veil got tinted black when it fell to the mushy ground, matching its dirty fingernails and emptied soul. The castle let the darkness take over the room for a split second until all that was left, was a pile of misery on the ground. She could breathe. 

   The other ghost was everything she was not, everything she could have been; it was what she’d never want to be. Thud. Thud. Thud.