The Board went back and forth on whether to print this, but now we are getting the reports faster than we can lose them. What began as the odd uneasy tale traded at the well has become something the strip talks about every morning.

Three accounts keep coming. The first is the hollow houses, the dozen empty homes down the strip whose families left for the town or gave up on the thinning outer reaches years ago. They are supposed to be dark, and since the turn of the month they have not all been. It is the old place at the end of the second-creek lane that draws the most talk, where folk passing at dusk report the shutters lit low and warm and a woman sitting inside as though the house were still hers and still fine. They describe dark hair piled high with a few loose curls at the temples, a jewel at her brow, a deep blue gown fitted at the bodice and long in the sleeve, and a belt of silver and sapphire at her waist. She looks back at whoever looks in, direct and unhurried and somehow inviting, and more than one has said they could not make their feet carry them closer. The one thing no one can quite place is the way her skirts pool across the floorboards, wider and lower than any gown should sit, and how the lamplight will not settle there. By the time anyone reaches the door the house is dark, with no ash in the grate and no boot in the mud.

The second is the woman on the Downs road, the most reported of all. At dusk, out past the waystation, she keeps pace with your cart along the verge in a green dress gone ragged at its edges and worked in hard geometric lines of gold and brown, with turquoise at her throat and wrists and dark hair loose and moving though the evening is still. Her gaze is turned down and away, not grieving so much as somewhere else entirely. She keeps even with the horse without seeming to walk, and the few who have made themselves look down at the road beside their wheel seem to describe her movement as slithering.

The third is the woman at the crossing, and it is only the children who see her. Several who cut across the second creek on their way home describe, at that blue hour before full dark, a tall figure at the water’s edge, watching the road as though waiting on someone long overdue. Her hair is silver and long and loose, and at her brow sits a band of ice that does not run in the warm evening. Her gown is dark blue and torn at the hem, and over it hangs a ragged trailing cape the children swear glitters like frost. Her face is lined and her eyes are deep-set, and she wears a smile, but the children do not like the smile. It looks, they say, like it is being held up by hand. She has not spoken and has not moved toward them, but they have all stopped taking that path.

The town is split on what these are. Some say plainly that the dead are walking, that in a spring that will not turn people have come wandering back. Others, good Evernal folk, hold that naming a sorrow only feeds it, and that the faithful thing is to keep your eyes on your own door and let what passes pass in silence. We only observe that the silence does not appear to be working, and that the sightings have grown more frequent in exactly the weeks our Faded Lands has tried hardest to say nothing.