XI. The Girl Who Slept With the Dead

She preferred the company of the dead. They didn’t ask questions. They didn't judge. They didn’t abandon her.

Every night she walked the lonely streets that led to the cemetery. She moved like a mourner, carrying candles, letters, sometimes a single flower already beginning to wilt. The graves had become her only friends, and she cherished each and every one of them.

She spoke to them tenderly. Whispered the names of those that no one else remembered. She told them about the latest town rumors, her dreams, the way her father ignored her efforts to reach him. She laughed sometimes, quiet and gentle, like she was telling a joke only her dead companions could understand.

Whenever the workers dug a new grave for the next day's funeral, she waited until they left. Then she slid down into the raw earth and stretched out, carefully folding her hands over her chest. She liked how the dirt felt against her skin, cold and damp. It reminded her of the last time she held Tristan in her arms. Sometimes she fell asleep there, breathing in the scent of soil and rot. Sometimes she held her breath for as long as she could and pretended she was finally with him.

Her bedroom was a shrine to what she’d lost. Photographs of smiling faces lined the walls. Tristan's shoes were still by the front door. His coat still hung on the hook. Plates gathered dust on the table, three chairs always set though one hadn’t been used in years. Her father haunted the place like a shadow, drinking in silence, pretending not to see her drift further each day.

She wrote to Tristan every night. Pages upon pages of desperate prayers and apologies. Then she burned them in a tin dish beside his grave. The smoke carried her words upward, drifting through the cold until it disappeared. She believed he read them that way, and that if she burned enough of them, he might one day answer.

I’ve stopped reporting to the Sha’harai. Weeks have passed, maybe months since the last time I gave them an update. There’s nothing new to say. Each world is a variation of the same misery: the same girl, the same insurmountable grief, the same slow descent.

Tonight, I watched her from a nearby bench. Her skin glowed faintly in the candlelight, pale as bone. She hummed to herself as she brushed dirt from his headstone, then pressed her lips to it. When she pulled away, a smear of red stained the marble from her blood, where the wind had cracked her lips. She noticed it, and it pleased her.

She lay down beside the grave, curling against it like it was something warm. The candle sputtered, its light trembling across her face. She looked peaceful. Too peaceful. Like someone rehearsing for death.

I stayed until her breathing slowed, until she slipped into a dreamless sleep.

This one wasn’t worth saving. She was already gone. Just waiting for her body to catch up.

The search continues.

M.

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