The cemetery stretched wide and flat across the winter landscape, a vast field of snow and stone that seemed to go on forever.
The ground was buried beneath a blanket of pristine white, the snow so smooth and undisturbed that it looked like a sheet drawn over a sleeping body.
Here and there, the dark fingers of dead trees clawed upward toward the gray sky, their bare branches rimed with frost, their shadows long and blue across the snow.
The headstones were old, some so weathered by time that their inscriptions had worn away to nothing. Others stood at angles, sinking slowly into the earth as though the ground were calling them home.
In the middle of this vast stillness, a woman in a white dress stood alone.
She was not in front of any particular tombstone, she was simply standing, her breath misting in the cold air, her eyes fixed on some distant point that only she could see.
