The girl was not breathing.

Her heart no longer beat. Her skin was cool, and pale. Her muscles, rigid. Her amber eyes had sunken in their sockets, and her corneas had become clouded, and tacky. Like those of a discarded fish head left too long in the open air.

This was the body of a person who was unmistakably, unequivocally dead.

The spirit’s sheepskin aviator jacket was still draped over the girl’s shoulders. Her handmade adipocere candles had long burned down to stumps and snuffed themselves out. All that was left to light her burrow were her own luminescent bones.

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And although her bones still radiated a diffuse teal light, it was no longer as vivid as it was before. No longer as intense. It was a dim, sickly light.

One of the spirit’s ribs fell from its cage, landing softly on the mulched coffin wood beneath them.

The spirit shivered and twitched. The nictitating membranes that had shuttered her sleeping eyes trembled momentarily. She was deep in the dream. A dream that had long since ceased to be pleasant.

The spirit, in her unconsciousness, only seemed to squeeze the girl tighter, nuzzling her face deeper into the crook of her neck. As if, for the first time, it was the spirit who was succumbing to the cold.

A second rib fell to the ground. The girl’s index finger twitched, nearly imperceptibly.