She had felt the shift in the veil even if she had been nowhere near that desolate beach.

Their voices, usually delegated to background whispers, had gradually risen in volume until they became impossible to ignore. Their excitement was nearly tangible, with a frantic undertone that almost made her uneasy. In her experience it was never a good sign when they became restless; when they started to think they could have back all the things they had lost. When she had been younger and newly cursed, this had been the thing that plagued her most, the knowing that there was nothing she could do to help them. She could not resurrect them; she could not right whatever wrongs they had left behind in their lives. And yet that had done nothing to keep them from begging, pleading, bargaining, and it was only her fear of becoming one of them that kept her on this side of the afterlife.

She has grown now, and finally learned the best way to bear this burden. She has let go of that melancholic bitterness that had settled in her heart after she had briefly tasted magic (and the ability to control the voices) before having it ripped from her. She has learned how to ignore them, to feign indifference so thoroughly that they give up and dissipate back into nothing.

But this would change things. If someone had tampered with the gate that kept them on the other side, there is no telling how far it might escalate. Some of that old fear begins to creep back in, a nervous uptick of her pulse, an anxious flush beneath her skin. She could not let herself devolve back into that haunted, terrified girl she had been for so many years,

And so she goes to the meadow, where even in the pressing dark still felt livelier than anywhere else. She did not have anyone to find; she had isolated herself so thoroughly that all previous connections had been severed, and any new ones she never gave the chance to form. But she knew that here, at least, she would not be alone.

He is so dark that at first she doesn’t see him, and if she had not been cursed with her ghost whispering for most of her life she might have mistaken him for one of them. But she feels it, his very essence of being alive—the soft thud of a heartbeat, the quiet inhale and exhale of a breath, the warmth of someone with blood rushing in their veins. She is drawn to his eyes, the brightest thing that she can see, golden and glowing in the dark.

Like a moth to his flame she is drawn closer, the rubies on her face still glinting dully in the faded light. “Can you see them, too?” She asks, her voice a sweetened hush in the already quiet meadow. There is a tentative kind of hope in her question, at the idea that she will not be the only one to be plagued by Beqanna’s ghosts.