She approached the steps that had been carved into the glacier's side, leading up to the top.
Strange, she thought. I don't remember those. Well dang. It would have made getting up the glacier a bit easier.
She started the short climb up the glacier. When she reached the top, her jaw dropped in shock.
The crevasse! It was gone! How could it have disappeared in a couple of hours?! Glaciers took decades to change shape and heal their icy cuts.
She was about to shift back into a bird so she could look for the right glacier when a flag went up in her head. A tiny speck of color on the frozen, glacier.
She slowly walked towards it, suspicious that such color would be in such a colorless landscape. A land of white and blue.
As she came close, she saw that the color came from some sort of memorial. Realization struck her like a lightening bolt.
That was her memorial. Nobody knew she was alive because they all thought she was dead.
Though she was shocked to the core, her feet kept pulling her closer and closer to it, as if locked in a magnetic force.
The memorial seemed to be in some sort of casing. From no more than two feet away, Lily saw that it was a plexiglass dome.
It had been drilled into the hard frozen surface of the glacier. Condensation clouded the dome from the inside, making it hard to see.
Lily froze the dome and shattered it with a rock. Inside the remnants of its protective casing lay four objects.
The flash of color she had seen earlier was the red hair ribbon she had worn as a little girl.
The ends were frayed and tattered but it was still the same color, vibrant and sharp. The happy memories that had once filled that ribbon were gone.
They had vanished down that dreadful hole with her. The red color didn't look so beautiful anymore. It was the color of blood.
Fresh and bright, contrasting against the stark white snow.
The next thing she noticed was a vase filled with lilies that bloomed in the winter. There were three white Asiatic lilies and three Casa Blanca Lilies.
That was how she had gotten her name. Her parents had told her she'd loved the snow ever since she could walk.
So they named her after the beautiful lilies that bloomed in the winter. It made sense that they would put those flowers on her grave.
But the last thing she expected to see were newspapers. Two different ones. One was yellow and aged and the other looked brand new.
She picked up the old one first and read the date at the top. It was today's date. On the front page she read the title: GIRL SAVES SISTER WITH HER LIFE.
But it just didn't make sense. It had only happened a few hours ago. Seven at tops. How had the press published it in a paper so quickly?
And why would the paper look so old? She carefully set it down and picked up the second. She didn't bother looking at the date.
This section held all the obituaries from that day. She had expected to see her name, but when she scanned the page for it, she didn't find it.
Instead, she saw in big bold letters: EVE WINTER, AGE 90
Her jaw dropped in disbelief. Lily gawked at the title, horror spelled across her face. She couldn't comprehend what the letters had spelled out plainly for her.
Eve was DEAD. D-E-A-D dead.
Slowly, Lily's eyes traveled to the top of the paper. She stared at the numbers that made up the date.
Lily had been seventeen for almost eighty years.