A/N: Written for the Mix it List it Competition, word prompt #26 – aftermath, and for the Diversity Writing Challenge, a66 - write a fic centered on one character's view on something or some place

Spectre

Memories contained the many lessons and tender hooks of life, but his body had long since become mere bones and ash. Only his mind remained: a mind that clung to his memories even as his sense of being faded away, and the world he had known.

The children grew up too fast. They became adults. Had children of their own who knew him as a legend they never saw. They grew old. They died. They passed on, because they hadn't infused the digital world with their souls.

And that was fine. They'd done more than enough for it, and this was his mistake he paid for: his retribution…and his wish. The wish had taken his soul as the payment and he'd been willing to pay that and more. His body had been left behind. He supposed the children found it when they returned to their own world. They'd had the funeral anyway.

But now those children were bones and ash themselves, and their children as well. The future generations didn't know of him at all, as the tales of the Chosen were watered down each time they were told. He had only his own memories as reminders now, and they served no purpose in his essentially non-existent state. He was energy: intangible, affecting nothing, though he saw it all. He was no guardian. A guardian would step in when called. He was not even an observer. An observer watched. He only saw: the present…and the past that, without him, would have no place in the changed world.

Memories were valuable things: valuable lessons, valuable threads to the being one was, had been… But what use were those memories to a ghost who was, now, only a spectre of the world?