She had not meant to walk back through the veil.

She had not meant to walk from the land of the dead back into the living, but she had known her mistake almost immediately.

The afterlife had been her haven, her sanctuary. The afterlife had been where suddenly she could see, after an entire life of living blind, and the colors were beyond anything her mind could have imagined. She remembers being alive and having someone explain to her the color of the sky, or the way the stars sparkled. They tried to explain the vibrancy of a flower or the way sunlight dappled through the forest, but words were never enough.

She had seen the tear, seen the way it shimmered like a mirage suspended. With a tilted head she had regarded it curiously, thinking that she had never seen such a thing in the afterlife before. It drew her forward like a magnet, and the closer she got the stronger the feeling in her chest became; almost like a heartbeat, a thing she had not felt in ages.

Her mistake had been apparent the moment she stepped through.

It happened all at once, the way it all went dark, and the way her lungs suddenly burned with the feeling of the air that assaulted them. Could you suffocate on air? It felt like it. She stood on the shores of the beach gasping and shaking, her heartbeat so loud in her chest and her ears that she almost does not hear the waves.

And it is dark, and not just because of the eclipse.

It is dark and her eyes are again a milky white, it is dark and she is again blind and stumbling, having long since lost her natural ability to navigate the world she had been born into.

She finds the meadow and it is purely by accident, and it is there she stands in the middle of dull-colored grass and a world that has not seen the sun in far too long, trembling and alone.