Water soaked Carolynn Low’s fallen knees.
“But I am a prophet!” she shouted at the ghost hovering before her. “That has to mean something!”
The wind yanked her hair; the hail bruised the tender flesh of her frostbitten cheeks.
“I can be useful!” she wailed, clawing her frozen fingers deeper into the snowpack. “I promise! I can be!”
The spirit of someone she had never met floated a foot above the ground. He resembled a cloud of cold breath, the way he suspended in the air. He was just molecules, though the features of his face were still carved by the shadows and light of the darkening sky.
Tears touched Carolynn’s eyes. She swiped at them with her sleeve. “Please,” she begged. “Let me stay.”
The ghost grimaced. “Perceive me, oh great prophet, Carolynn,” he said. The way his ethereal face tilted and the expression on his lips implied the words were more vulgar than the phrasing allowed.
Was that sarcasm?
The ghost rose higher, letting the violent gail that surrounded them knock Carolynn to one side. A sheet of brown hair yanked across her face. As she pulled her hair from her eyes, the sunset hit the crest of the commune’s rock walls and limned the spirit with a foreboding sienna outline.
“I come to you with a destiny,” he said. “It is not an offer.”
“But I don’t—!”
As if the spirit had commanded it, the wind’s yowling became deafening. Carolynn slapped her hands over her ears, crumpling into a ball amongst the frozen tempest.
She felt the warmth of tears singe into the icy crust at the bridge of her nose. The hood of her cloak flapped against her head and she tugged it down over her face. She breathed in its homely scent—thyme, dandelion, paint, old books—trying to ground herself. Failing to ground herself.
Her heartbeat throbbed in her head; her mind screamed. All these sensations had become too much. She flung the hood away, pushed her palms into her ears, slammed her eyelids shut. The ghost was saying something; it was probably important.
She stretched out across the snow, pressed her face into the ground. Her head was going to explode. Spine prickling, teeth grinding, eardrums shredding.
She forced herself to be an unthinking, unfeeling thing.
Minutes passed. Carolynn became aware of her breathing. It had slowed.
The ghost was gone; the wind had stopped.
Carolynn flexed her sodden fingers one by one. She was cold, and most frighteningly, soaked to her skin.
She needed fire. Now that she was awake and alive and present in this moment, she knew she needed fire like she needed air right now. It was not safe to be out in the dark and the snow. She would freeze to death.
Already, her toes had gone numb. Hypothermia would pounce soon.
She rolled onto her back and stared upward. The stars twinkled between purple clouds. The hollowed peak that made her commune’s foundational walls framed the stars in a pleasing oblong shape.
