QUOTE : You do not know me.”<br />My heart was breaking. I thought I knew, finally, what it meant to be a ghost. It meant speaking your words around a mouth full of loss. It meant grasping into echoes and hoping, praying that the words still meant something.<br />“I know your soul,” I said, my voice cracking. “Everything else is an ornament.”<br />“You have a strange effect on me…why is that?” he asked softly. “Beside you, I am reminded of something I have forgotten.”<br />My hands fell to my sides. There, beneath the rags of my robes, the fabric was raised and bumpy and I knew what lay beneath it--a broken circlet of hair. I fished it out of the pocket. My whole body was trembling, shaking against its restraints of bone.<br />Amar reached out to cup the back of my neck. I shuddered. I had forgotten how cold his hands were, like the soul of winter had tangled itself in his fingers. He stared at me and his gaze had all the finality of death--it was ferocious and terrible, a ravel of locked horns. He was <i>searching</i> me. I knew exactly what he was looking for--<br />Himself.