Moira Ashenveil's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Moira Ashenveil crouched in the reeds and counted the dead. Six souls drifted between the black pools tonight. She was a wraith, and her work was simple in name: walk the recently dead to the door and see them through. The marsh made it harder. Souls lingered here longer than they should. Some were ready. Some had gone sour without knowing it. Push the wrong one and it would twist in her hands and become something that hunted the living. Her black hair hung in wet strings. Her clothes, tattered at the hem, dragged through the mud. She moved close to the first soul, a farmer still holding an invisible rope. He looked at her and spat. She stepped back. Anger meant not yet. Anger meant the curse would come, and she already carried one curse she could not stop hearing. The second soul was a woman turning in a slow circle by a broken stone crypt. Its roof had caved in and the door hung open on nothing. Moira could not read the woman's face. Ready, or ruined? She reached out, then pulled her hand back. Guessing wrong here would cost the woman everything. "Don't." The voice came from the crypt's shadow. A figure in black tatters stepped into the moonlight, hood low, edges frayed where edges should not be. Moira knew the shape. Another ghost, but wrong — pieces missing, outline soft. Vesper Shroud. She had seen them at the edges of her work before, drifting, never speaking. Tonight they spoke. "That one's turned," Vesper said. "Touch her and she bites." "How do you know?" "Look at her hands." Moira looked. The woman's fingers were curled in, nails toward her own palms. A small oil-black spider crawled from the crypt door and skirted the woman's feet in a wide arc. Its back caught the moonlight in slick colors. Even the marsh's smallest things knew to go around her. "The ready ones open their hands," Vesper said. "The turned ones close them. Simple as a fist." Moira looked at the farmer. Fists. She looked at a boy by the water. Palms up, empty. Her chest tightened. She had been reading faces for a hundred nights and missing the hands. She went to the boy first. He took her fingers without a word and stepped into the dark with her. When she came back, three more waited with open hands. She walked each one through. She left the farmer. She left the woman by the crypt. They would keep, or they would not, but she would not be the one who broke them. Vesper watched from the stones. When Moira turned to thank them, they were already fading at the edges, thinner than before. "I need a favor back," Vesper said. "Something is wearing my face. Help me take it off before there's nothing left of me to put back on."