It was cold for September.
The trees were already a riot of red and gold, the wind threading through them making a sound like a far away tide. People camped in their houses in sweaters with mugs of tea, feeling the early bite of winter and thinking it both unnatural and unfair.
So the figure in the cemetery was alone.
She wasn't so striking... she had taken great pains not to be. Wrapped in a drab afghan, feet in worn boots, skirt dragging the ground. Her hair she had stuffed in a knit cap, her face devoid of makeup and reddened by the wind. If not for the way the trees around her seemed almost at attention, how the sky seemed a dome specifically for her head and the grass a carpet rolled out just for her to stand on, she could easily be mistaken for a bag lady. That and the fact that she had simply appeared in the cemetery instead of walking...but everyone was too occupied with their tea to pay attention to magic.
The lady was staring very had at the carved stone in front of her. She had been for a long time, in fact. She hadn't moved. The wind coaxed tendrils of shimmering blue from under her hat; she was reminiscent of a firmly rooted tree that allowed the wind to tease her.
The grave was relatively new. The arrangements surrounding it had not yet died... some even looked fresh, from the faithful visitors. The lady should have been one, but she had a feeling this was her first and last visit to her twin's grave.
Abigail Meyer
1991-2064
Beloved Wife, Mother, and Friend
It said nothing about sister.
The lady stared, and a shining bead of moisture formed in the corner of her eye. She wiped it impatiently away, and it fell to the ground. The grass there was greener for a moment.
The lady knelt, stretching out her hand with the flowers in her fist, like a peace offering to a wild animal. She placed them on the patch of dirt marking the coffin's point of entry, and they shimmered blue and gold. They began to take root, to spread. She wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed.
Abigail... she hardly remembered her. Her memories of her twin were old, outdated things, tea parties and make believe, experiments with makeup, talking about boys... fairy tales. It was not the first time the lady wondered why she had been chosen over her naive, dreamy-eyed twin. Abigail had been so much more suited to fairy tales than the lady had ever been.
She wondered what Abigail looked like, after she herself had ceased to exist. Whether her eyes were as bright in old age, whether her baby fat had melted all away like her own or simply became curves. How time had treated her. She wondered whether it had buffered her twice as hard, to make up for the twin it couldn't touch.
She looked at the youthful hands, her slim body. Still eighteen. The byproducts of her choice.
There were days when she wondered how that worked, the eternal youth. She felt eons old. She wondered how living with one foot in one world and one in another made you so youthful on the outside and so old in your soul.
Fairy tales pick one in a millenia. One focus, the lucky one, the one everyone secreted wished to be long after they professed not to believe in such things. Her fairy tale had not disappointed. The love of her life, adventures beyond her imagining, freedom and beauty and hope... against all that, not knowing one's sister seemed like it shouldn't matter so much.
But now that the option was gone for good...
The lady had always expected to come back at some point. Come visit. But something more exciting had always come up, as was wont to happen in a fairy tale. She was too busy living her happily ever after to give much thought to her sister, or what kind of ever after had been set aside for her. Her sister was a commodity that didn't run out, an everlasting connection with earth. Abigail was her rainy day plan, something to do when there was nothing more entertaining to be done.
And how exactly had she planned this visit to go? She had never fully acknowledged the fact, but it would amount to little more than bragging that she was the one chosen, not the other twin.
She hoped that Abigail's ever after had not disappointed.
She wondered about her nieces, whether she should find them... but decided no. She had disappeared. She should stay that way.
The wind kicked up for a moment, and there was a presence at her back. One she knew well.
The lady leaned back, and he was solid, real, not diaphanous like she had first expected of someone made of air and magic and wind. She sighed, and the wind fluttered the shimmering flowers already twined helplessly around her sister's gravestone.
"She is well and truly gone," he said, staring at the graves with a quizzical line between his eyebrows. Death was a mortal thing and he did not quite understand it.
The lady nodded. "She is well and truly gone." Death was a mortal thing, and she wasn't quite sure how she had managed to escape its sting.
They stood, hand in hand, and watching the aftermath of the thing neither of them truly understood.
Finally, he turned from it. "Lets go home."
The lady nodded.
And they were gone.
No one noticed how the trees gave a single violent sway, or that the wind sounded more like music for an instant, or the patch of summer green on brittle grass headed rapidly towards winter.
They were still preoccupied with their tea.