The lake ghost had haunted the snow capped mountains long before the people came. Draped in a flowery flowing dress, torn ragged at its seams, she skimmed the waters, singing mournful dirges. Her eyes sunk deep in their sockets, but reflected bright blue, piercing like daggers. Her skin tightened around the bone, marble beauty encasing a fleshless body.
The people came slowly at first. A lone hunter arrived at night one winter. He cut down a handful of trees and made a clearing. The lady ghost frowned, but he made no further transgressions on the land, and she returned to her songs.
Several months went by and the man built a log cabin. Its walls did not shudder until the weight of fallen snow. The man began to hunt, bringing home deer and rabbits for venison and stew. The lady was wary of this new stranger, but he had not yet angered her so much as to necessitate some response. So she waited; and she sang.
Several years later, the lady thought of him again. She paid a visit to his cabin and found an intact forest, a small garden, and the same now moss-covered cabin with a small plume of smoke trailing out of the little stone chimney. The lady smiled; he had been kind to the land. And his fire smelled so warm, she nearly stopped her mournful singing. She almost came a little closer to sit by the warm fire and sing happy songs, dream content dreams, and sleep soundly. But she didn’t; she turned away and glided across the icy water, crying and singing at the same time. The lady ghost had little sense of time, and so it was quite a shock when she paid another trip to the log cabin and found it in disrepair. She paused her singing and looked through the window, where he sat, his pipe on the adjacent table. The flies were feeding on his mangled skull.
The lady ghost cried like never before; the loneliness of the lake consumed her. More people came soon. She was hopeful at first, until they knocked down his cabin, removed his body, and buried it in the earth. They built brick buildings and wood shingled roofs on the lake’s banks, cutting down the nearby trees and stacking them one atop the other. They paved roads and dumped their waste in her waters.
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