Madrigal's face was grim. She pulled a book from her library and flipped through the pages.

"Ghosts are not intelligent creatures," she began. "Most ghosts do not even have awareness of their surroundings. They are static, an imprint of the departed's emotional disquiet. Their wanderings are erratic and aimless, residual energy taking a human form... Sylvia is clearly quite lucid and quite objective."

She dropped the book flat on the table, opening to a page with an illustration of a man in tattered clothes, stretching out with gnarled claws for fingers.

"Sylvia, I believe, is a vestigium," she said, pointing to the man.

"A vestigium," Flora muttered to herself, looking at the description. "Skies..."

They were mindless, vicious creatures, praying on those who created them. The vestigium was known to manipulate, bully, and disorient its host into giving it all of the magic and energy it can provide. Nothing existed within them but an insatiable gluttony for magic that only served to fortify their tenuous, supernatural existence.

She looked at the illustration's face, devoid of anything but a hunger he could not control. And she saw Sylvia in it. Sylvia's staring, her poisonous words, her strange expressions, her disintegrating body. It was the only thing left in her, this irrational craving for Flora's help.

"How could Sylvia have become such a creature," she asked quietly.

"Oh no, that creature has nothing to do with Sylvia," Madrigal said, going back to her shelf, "It came from you."

Flora's breath stopped.

She raced through every moment before Sylvia arrived, grasping for any moment of accidental magic.

"But I didn't!" she said, "I couldn't have! I didn't do anything to conjure it!"

"It's not something one conjures on purpose," Madrigal said, pulling some more books from her shelf. "It is a manifestation­ – a real, solid being – that is made from something that one feels deeply and painfully. On it's own, a feeling like that would never become corporeal, no matter how powerful. But magic lives all around us. And if that feeling somehow comes into contact with enough magic or energy to manifest... the vestigium is born."

Flora shook her head, confused.

"But I didn't perform any spells, drink any potions... Nothing out of the ordinary, at least–"

"The energy does not need to come from you," Madrigal said, looking at her pointedly. "And two weeks ago? I can think of something it may have come from."

Flora pulled at her braid, thinking over and over of what could have happened, what kind of environment could stir up that much magic and power.

"You don't mean...the storm?" she asked slowly.

Madrigal nodded.

"Lightning is one of the world's most powerful energies," she said. "With the emotional burden you carried, I suspect all it took was one close strike. Then, of course, Sylvia appeared. It is no coincidence she was right outside your door."

The floor felt like it was tilting sideways. She thought back to what Felix had said, the night that Sylvia appeared. Then why is she here? Why isn't she in the bakery, where she died? Why didn't she go to her family?

She propped her elbows on her knees, then leaned her head into her hands.

"I can't believe it," she said. The full weight of it was crushing her. "I can't believe that I let this happen..."

Madrigal came and rested her hand on Flora's shoulder. It was warm and soft, completely unlike Sylvia's. The gentle pressure made her feel worse.

"My dearest girl," Madrigal said. But Flora was frozen.

She had tried so hard, and still it wasn't enough. She had let Sylvia die. She had let this monster materialize. She had let herself waste away under the pressure of her work; the necessary work for the wellbeing of the people she loved. She had accepted this responsibility, and she had let them down.

Even Madrigal. The first person who had ever truly loved her.

"I am so sorry."

"It's quite alright, dear," Madrigal said gently.

Flora shook her head, remembering. She was just a girl, skinny and pale, making bubbles bloom out of her fingertips alone in a deserted street because she had nothing to do and nowhere to belong. She remembered Madrigal offering her a roll, asking her name. She only accepted because she was hungry. Taking that roll changed the trajectory of her entire life.

She wanted to be good at magic, to help her neighbors, but it was more than that. She had always wondered how she would live up to that first act of kindness. How could she possibly repay the favor of her life? Of every good thing that became of it?

The answer was that she couldn't. She could only try. And now she was more in debt than before.

"It's not alright!" Flora insisted, "I failed! And now I've brought other people's lives down with me."

Saying it aloud was the final acknowledgement she needed. Madrigal wrapped her arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer, and Flora fell apart.

The sobs tore through her chest, ugly and wounded. They wrung her lungs sore and her back to a curl., ripping themselves out of a place so deep and dark she'd forgotten they were there.

"You trusted me," she bawled. "Everyone trusted me."

She closed her eyes and curled in on herself. She didn't know she could sound like that. The backs of her eyelids flickered with images of Sylvia dead in her bed, Vita's eyes spilling over, Caius battered from tragedy. Madrigal rubbed her palm over her arm and Flora barely felt it, unable to pull herself from the rubble.

Her grief ran through her like a river in spring, the snow melt turning it out over its banks. It rushed through her chest, her throat, the deltas of her eyes, and Madrigal waited, holding her together as it did. Flora felt that it may go on forever in its rage, but now that she'd let it have her, it was starting to settle. It was smoothing out her edges, her jagged sobs turning to deepened breaths.

Madrigal spoke softly to her as her crying slowed, and she realized that it was not Madrigal's forgiveness that she needed. Nor was it Sylvia's. The truth was more complicated and difficult than that.

"Madrigal," she whispered. "I don't know how to forgive myself."

Madrigal smoothed a hand over her hair.

"Oh, love," she murmured. "Even magical women are entitled to failure."

Flora's face ached, burning with salt. She breathe slowly, trying to settle herself, wiping a napkin across her swollen eyes and cheeks.

"I just know I could have saved her," she replied, wiping her sleeve across her nose. "With more time, more medicine..."

But even as she said it aloud, the logic started to crumble. She was so used to the awe of the villagers, their bright faces as her magic cured ailments or grew plants. To them, it may as well have came from nothing. Magic was easy, a power that defied the natural order of sickness, life, and death.

It wasn't. It was nature, and so was Flora.

"You can't know that" Madrigal replied. "I don't believe we can choose who lives and who dies, any more than we can choose the weather, or the season."

Flora looked towards the open window. She could feel the magic in the room with them, floating like dust motes, passing lazily through the walls and windows, through their bodies. It was as miraculous and commonplace to her as a flower or the rain. It didn't belong to her, and she didn't belong to it.

She sighed, feeling that weight lift out of her chest. The wind was blowing through the trees, ruffling their leaves into a thousand different directions.

"We cannot defy nature, dear," Madrigal told her. "She does what she must to make everything as it should be."

Pax burrowed snugly into Flora's hand, a fiddlehead of soft fur. His little heartbeat tapped against her palm, and for a moment, she was steady again. She took a deep breath, appreciative for the first time of how easily air filled her lungs, how natural she was in this world.

"But what now?" she asked. "Sylvia is at my cottage, waiting for me to return."

Madrigal sighed.

"If Sylvia were a person, a ghost . . .almost anything else, I could banish her for you. But I'm afraid with a vestigium, there's only one proper way to banish it," she said, reaching for one of the books she pulled. "And it's going to require a lot of strength."

Flora nodded.

"Tell me."