(Backdated to January 3rd, immediately following Where The Lovelight Gleams)

She came into being at the top of an unfamiliar staircase, kicking up a cloud of dust where her soles met stone. It was all Chauvet could see in the darkness, white marble steps that curled downwards into the unknown that opened up beneath her. The filigree scrawled along the railing was not unlike the piping of her dress, given a thousand years to tarnish and crumble, and was lit only by a dim glimmer from behind her, more a reflection of light than a source. Chauvet turned and she saw nothing but stars, a vast canopy encapsulated in a massive circular window that bathed the entire foyer in stolen motes of light from other worlds. It was a brighter and more vivid night sky than anything she’d ever seen on Earth--it was beautiful. No sound touched the hall except for the swish of the trains of her dress across smooth stone and the echoed clicks of her heels as she approached the window. Tentatively, she touched a hand to the cold pane of glass.

In the low twinkling light she brushed away a layer of dust and varnish, and it was only then that she noticed another smear, lower on the window and made by a smaller hand. Chauvet stared at the twin marks of clean in the abandoned room until she saw a pair of footprints in the dust underneath it, small flats that jogged away from Chauvet and back towards the stairs. If she listened, she could almost hear the taps, the awed gasp, the giggle that might have been hers if she had arrived under less heavy pretenses. Still--there was no denying it--someone had been there.

Chauvet touched her fingertips against the stripes of the smaller smudge, still clearing away a thin layer of dust. Someone had been there, but not recently. Maybe a few months or years ago, it was hard to say. Something tightened in her throat.

“Hello?” It seemed entirely implausible that whoever had been there before was still in residence, empty and echoic as the space was, but all the anxiousness in Chauvet’s fluttering chest demanded to go somewhere else, billowing up and out of her throat until it was given the form of words. Nobody but herself replied, a chorus of muffled copycat noises that never quite hit the mark. And then, once all sound had settled, she heard it--a distinctive laugh, like the ghost voice she’d heard at home, from somewhere in the bowl of the dark foyer below. Chauvet bolted--hand skimming the railing, taking two, three steps at a time, down and down and down, but even when she reached the belly of the floor below she caught no sight of movement in the shadows, no body to the voice. She whirled on her heels at the bottom of the stairs, glancing back up where she could still see a half-moon of the grand circle window. Up there was nothing for her there except prints; she needed to press on.

Having a thought, Chauvet reached for her muggle-phone. Reached was an odd way to describe pulling from the space where Katie went when she powered up, but it was the only way she could think to verbalize the sensation of drawing up her phone from a pocket that was nowhere, but always beside her. A few taps on the screen and cold light split the hallway, where Chauvet could clearly see the jogging alternated steps of a pair of ballet flats, too small to be hers. They hopped along the gradient of her flashlight app and into the darkness, where their final destination was obscured. Chauvet was certain she wouldn’t like whatever she was about to find, but that made it all the more important to be the one to find it. Gloved fingers tightened around her phone and she stepped forward anyway, following the steps of a ghost.

The footsteps travelled into a dome-ceilinged hallway, darting around the corpses of fallen glass chandeliers to wonder at the faded portraits staring out from either wall. Handprints marked the tarnished gold of nameplates written in scripts Chauvet couldn’t read, too archaic and foreign to her eyes, but she imagined they had to be names to match the faces, imperfect recreations of people with various shades of sunrise hair and complexions, all wearing the Cosmos white and gold under lifetimes of varnish and grime. She never saw all of herself in a portrait, but sometimes she caught glimpses--a certain cut of a jaw, like her father’s, or a pair of drooping eyes that could have been hers, and the further she travelled down the hall, the more she recognized. The gild of the nameplates looked brighter here, the script changing--and eventually, she came to recognize a series of repeated symbols that had to mean Chauvet. So Hvergelmir had been right. She was but one of a multitude, and to that end she didn’t know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.

The last in the line of portraits was the least varnished and most resplendent--a young woman with a wavy coral bob reclined against a couch of alabaster, a crystal champagne glass teetered between delicate fingertips and raised in toast to the viewer. The white-gold whorls distinctive to Cosmos curled in the draped fabric on her body and on the tasseled fascinator in her hair, and she peeked with coy eyes from over a translucent starry shawl dotted with gems and pearls that she clutched to her chest. The painter had been delicate enough in their touch to smatter her cheeks with a healthy glow of freckles, ones Chauvet knew so well her heart stopped. She couldn't read the placard beside this portrait, but she didn’t need to. Someone had been kind enough to leave a sticky note beside it written in large, looping teal print--Genevieve Degrasse, Page of Chauvet. But Chauvet knew her better as Gwenyth Catigern--a different version, perhaps, one given a chance to be the eighteen or nineteen she was supposed to be now, but it was her handwriting on the note and her face in the portrait.

Gwen had been here and now she was gone, turned into some painting of a stranger with a knowing smirk.

The mystery was solved, the case closed, Gwen was never coming home, but closure felt more like a ravenous void in her chest than anything resembling comfort. It drained Chauvet of all capacity to feel, think, breathe, to do anything except stand limply in a hall of ghosts. If she stared long enough, she supposed, the portrait might blink or smile or climb out of the frame and be her Gwen, and she’d be starstruck by Chauvet’s dress and they could go home and all of the searching and vigils and empty rooms would be a ruse, a fake and a nightmare Chauvet could shake off. But this was more the sensation of waking up, reluctant and numb and wanting nothing more than to go back to the illusion of hope.

”I -- I knew your predecessor. Briefly. She was very young. And very brave.”

Chauvet tried at a breath, and she inhaled the dust and the understanding that she would never see her cousin again, and every old wound she’d covered in the last three years tore apart by the sudden heaving in her chest. Her world was spinning--it was changing--and she collapsed at the threshold of Gwen’s door in the Catigern home, throwing aside the glamour of Chauvet like it burned. In the aftermath, she curled away from the door and screamed in the darkness, white-hot tears on her cheeks and bile in her throat and the taste of space in her lungs.

Katie did not register the pound of steps up the stairs, the call of her name, hands touching her back. But when her aunt’s arms tried to pulled her in for a hug, Katie’s body moved before her mind thought, and she shoved Carol aside, stumbling down the stairs and all but crashing through the front door for her car. She couldn’t be the one to tell them, she couldn’t, she couldn’t, and she kicked her van into gear even as she saw the rest of Gwen’s family huddled assembled in the doorframe at four in the morning, watching her with confused and tired eyes.

How could she be the one to break the news? Why did it have to be her? She paused, watching them in turn, and then she slammed the gear into reverse and peeled out of the driveway and into the night. She could go anywhere, as long as it wasn’t here, as long as it wasn’t there.

(1456 words)