#vefanyar

Mixed media, pencil for lineart (first attempt at Finduilas' face had to be scrapped and redrawn), digital coloring and extra details.

Tuuri doesn’t know she’s dead, Sigrun is sure of that.

She can’t not not know, when Tuuri shimmers into existence in her bed at night, lying there as if she’d been sleeping there all along - and maybe she has, invisible, intangible, unknown? How long has she been there?

Sigrun tries to imagine what it must be like - being there but having no one to talk to if they can’t see you, feeling cut off from the world and wondering how the hell that happened; why everyone is ignoring you, wondering what’s going on in their heads to be so mean. So when Tuuri fades in on the stroke of midnight - and she’ll fade out again when the red glare of the ship’s clock in the quarantine section switches from 00:59 to 01:00, Sigrun doesn’t lose any time.

She makes Tuuri feel alive. They talk, in hushed voices. They laugh, faces pressed into Sigrun’s thin pillow. Tuuri reads to her, sometimes. Rarely.

They kiss, even if the dead cold doesn’t ever leave Tuuri’s lips, and she never flushes with life or warmth. Her body stays translucent, an outline, shimmering, like a sheet of paper held up against the sunlight. But even so Tuuri is solid to the touch, and her body the familiar one that Sigrun came to know and love on their trip, even if it is cold now. Maybe Tuuri feels the warmth of it all.

She muffles curses in Tuuri’s hair when those icy fingers slip between her legs, and not even that particular warmth can drive away the goosebumps racing over Sigrun’s skin. She comes hard, bucking and clenching around Tuuri nonetheless, and returns the favour until Tuuri lies pliant in her arms, eyes half-lidded as if she needed rest and shouldn’t be resting forever instead.

Sigrun doesn’t tell the others. It’s too wild, too weird. She assumes that none of the others can see her, except maybe Twig, whom she caught sitting up on his bed in the dark a couple of times, but Lalli is nothing if not discreet. She’s not worried on that count, especially if he can see his cousin, mage that he is.

During daylight Sigrun sometimes wonders if she should tell Tuuri, to see if telling her that she’s dead will send her to rest for good. But that would mean - another plunge face-first into the snow, even if it’s figurative this time. If Tuuri left her - Sigrun would have blood on her hands twice over.

Other times she thinks that maybe the meds the ship’s medics are pumping into her when they come in in full hazmat suits to take care of the infected arm are what makes her hallucinate Tuuri. Maybe she’s on a drug high and has wish-fulfillment dreams, or something like that. Her mind playing tricks on her.

Or maybe Tuuri is really there, haunting her in the best possible way.

Sigrun wants to believe that. Nothing else will do. And nothing else will do for Tuuri, who appears like clockwork at ghosting hour, almost as alive as ever.