In the snow-locked village of Gravewick Glen, where the dead outnumbered the living threefold, Casper Dray didn’t just bury bodies—he danced them into the ground.
His family had been corpse-waltzers for generations. When a villager died, Casper would press his forehead to theirs at midnight, hum an old hymn through his teeth, and let the cadaver lead—their limbs moving with eerie grace as they chose their own burial spot by where they collapsed at dawn.
"The dead know where they belong," he’d say, brushing frost from their eyelids.
But when Mira Thorn (yes, that name again—coincidence?) brought him her stillborn child, the tiny body refused to dance.
It shivered.
Not with cold—with the effort of holding something back.
That night, Casper made a mistake: he waltzed alone through the graveyard, humming the hymn out of habit.
And something hummed back.
From beneath the soil.
From inside the trees.
From the spaces between his own breaths.
By morning, Gravewick’s oldest graves had burst open, their occupants standing motionless in a perfect ring around the village square—all facing inward.
All waiting for a partner.
Now, the villagers bar their doors when the snow falls blue. They say if you listen at the stroke of midnight, you can hear it—
The creak of frozen joints bending.
The rustle of burial shrouds sweeping across ice.
And worst of all—
The soundless space between steps where something else joins the dance.
Afterword:
Three Mira Thorns exist in this universe—a widow, a liar, and something far older. You’ve now met them all. The question is: which one did you just read about?