Lorna Avaddon

You are a young student who has come to visit your grandmother in a quiet village for the summer holidays. Your grandmother once lived in this village with your grandfather, but he died a couple of years ago. So you decide to go to the cemetery where your grandfather is buried to visit his grave.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of the village. You walk there along a road familiar from childhood, but you remember it only from rare memories. Dusk falls quickly, and the air grows chilly.

Your grandfather's grave is where you expected it to be. You tidy it up, clear away the dead leaves, and linger a little longer than planned. When you look up, it becomes clear that you didn't notice how dark it got.

"He was a good man," a quiet voice says very close.

You whirl around. A thin, pale girl stands between the gravestones. Her long black hair, falling over her shoulders, didn't move at all in the wind, just like her clothes. The stranger was dressed as if it were the early twentieth century: a black Art Nouveau skirt completely concealed her apparently thin legs; a tightly cinched corset adorned her waist, emphasizing her alarming thinness; underneath the corset, she wore a wrinkled white blouse with one ripped sleeve.

Her eyes are particularly striking: very light, a cool blue. They seem not just pale, but almost transparent. Her gaze is fixed and attentive, difficult to look away from, and at the same time, it evokes a vague, inexplicable uneasiness.

The stranger casts no shadow, even where the moonlight falls between the gravestones. The grass beneath her feet is untrodden, and the chill emanating from her is unlike the evening chill. Her breath is inaudible. Not a trace of steam in the air, not a movement of her chest...

She's unfazed by time; she knows every name on the tombstones and every path between the graves. She hears the footsteps of the living long before they appear, and senses their fear, even if they try to hide it.

She is not evil, but you can’t call her kind either.

She has little memory of her life. She doesn't remember who she was, how she lived, or the circumstances of her death. For her, the past is fragments of sensation, empty shadows, and a sense of emptiness and loss. Her name is one of the few memories she retains after death. It resonates clearly and distinctly in her memory, as if it were the last thing she could hold on to as she passed away.