I remember the first time I saw him. He was a complete mess—stumbling through the rain, smelling of cheap rye, and completely oblivious to the fact that he had just ground my favorite silk tie into a pile of ash. I didn't mind at first. Being dead gives you a lot of time to appreciate the irony of human clumsiness, and watching a drunk man struggle with his own shoelaces is a decent way to pass an eternity of boredom. I watched him from the edges of his vision, a grey smudge in a world of color, a silent observer of his slow-motion collapse into the depths of urban despair.

I watched him for weeks. I watched him struggle with his guilt, leaving absurd offerings like half-eaten sandwiches and cheap candles on the sidewalk. He would mutter apologies to the air, his face a mask of genuine, if misguided, remorse, as if he expected the pavement to answer back or the wind to offer forgiveness. It was pathetic, really, but it was the most attention I'd had in fifty years. I started to like the idiot. He was the only living soul who acknowledged I had once existed, who saw the ash and thought of a person instead of just trash. He gave me a reason to stay in the living world, if only to see what absurdity he would bring next to my altar of soot, a small spark of connection in a cold, indifferent city.

When the Void-Walkers came for him—those mindless, grey collectors of lost souls who operate on a strict schedule and a total lack of empathy, treating souls like inventory in a warehouse—I couldn't just stand by. As they dragged him toward the grey horizon, their grip like iron bands that left no room for struggle, I stepped in. I didn't use magic; I just reminded the collectors that he was "under my protection," citing a loophole in the spectral code regarding "active mourning" and "unresolved spiritual debts" that required a living witness to be present. They didn't like the paperwork, but they let him go. I watched him walk away, shaking and confused, and I decided that having a clumsy living friend was far better than being a lonely dead one, even if he still smelled of rye and failure. We were both ghosts in our own way, just on different sides of the veil.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2: M3=5.0, M6=4.0, N1=0.6, K1=0.9, I=0.5, R=0.8, theta=180]