Mira Whisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Mira Whisper opened another wrong door. Behind it sat a broom and a dead spider. Not her bones. Never her bones. She had drifted through this manor for longer than she could count, trying every door, searching for the room where she died. Mira could not speak. She could not rest. She only needed one living person to find her body and bury it. But no one here listened to smoke. She left the broom closet and floated down the hall. Sorrow trailed behind her like torn gray cloth. She passed a window and stopped. Outside, the veiled woman walked the edge of the grounds again. Purple lace covered her head to foot. She carried a candle, its flame leaning sideways as if blown by nothing. Mira had seen her before. The woman spoke to spirits in the forest. She might be the one person who could hear Mira at all. Mira slipped through the wall and drifted onto the porch. She lifted her own thin hand toward the woman. She opened her mouth. She tried to say the one word that mattered. Bury. No sound came. Her lips moved on empty air. The veiled woman turned. Her covered face tilted. For a moment Mira felt seen. But the woman only nodded, the small nod you give a passing stranger. "Another lost one," she murmured. "The trees are full of you tonight." Then she drifted on, candle held high, searching the dark for her own lost family. She thought Mira was just one more wisp among many. Mira's chest went cold. The one person who answered her did not understand her silent drifting. A nod was not help. A nod could not dig a grave. Above the treeline, the pale aurora twisted and shimmered, bright and useless. Mira had no voice to call the woman back. So she stopped waiting to be heard. She turned and rushed back through the wall into the manor. Two residents sat near the fire, a man and his grown daughter, warming their hands. They had never once looked up when Mira passed. Words had failed her. She would use her hands instead. Mira formed solid behind them, closer than she had ever dared. She found a candle on the mantel. She pushed it. It tipped and fell. Wax splashed across the floorboards. The flame guttered but kept burning, a strange ghostly light spilling from the melted pool. The man leapt up. The daughter screamed and pointed at the wall, where Mira's shape hung plain for one full second before fading. "Something's in here," the man said. His voice shook. "Something wants us to see it." They saw her now. Not a wisp. Not a stranger. A thing with a purpose. Mira had traded being ignored for being feared. The living would not help a ghost they ran from. She had made them look, and now she had to make them understand before they fled the house for good.