Disclaimer: All characters property of DC Comics. What I have done with them is mine. Accidentally provoked by the Bloody Ink first-line challenge: "I can see dead people. I just wish they'd fuck off."

I can see dead people.

"I just wish they'd fuck off," my beloved Val used to say, deliberately using the vulgarity that was so unlike him in an attempt to shock me out of the somber state that always befalls me after trance. Or perhaps it was an artifact of his homeworld culture; the people of Earth, as I came to learn in my time there, retain odd notions about their dead. But that is a judgment based on my own preconceptions of what is true, and if my time in the Legion taught me nothing else, it is that truth is, at best, subjective illusion. And who should know that better than I?

Val thought of my Orakill's ability to speak with the dead as an imposition, merely another burden of my royal status. Duty, yes, but a solemn and joyful one. The knowledge and wisdom of Orando's dead sustains the living, and they remain as fully a part of our society as when they drew breath. Val's unease with that concept represented one of the few places where he and I did not share the same ideals. But then, it was nowhere demanded that my consort needs must agree with me on every point, and I would not have wished it so. Val's perspective, unclouded by the whispers of the spirit world, often proved far keener than my own.

His calm judgment sustained me, sustains me still. All of the wise choices I have made, both as Legionnaire and as Orando's queen, I may ascribe at least in part to his influence; all impetuous errors have been my own. Including the one I made by executing his murderer cleanly, instead of staying my hand so that Hart Druiter might suffer the torment he had so richly earned.

I can see dead people. And I thank the gods and spirits for the gift, for through its power, my beloved Val still speaks to me.

{end}

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Who: Queen Projectra of Orando, former Legionnaire, master illusionist and Orakill (a mystic who can speak with the dead). Her consort Val Armorr, also a former Legionnaire, was killed in battle.