Fog, weather & the Brocken-spectre

Weather works as omen-machinery, and a mountain-spectre brackets the long Marathe/Steeply desert serial. The presiding figure is the Bröckengespenst of pp. 88 — a magnified shadow whose "head's shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk," glossed in the endnotes as a wraith — an image the serial then closes on annularly when the Brocken-phenomenon recurs near its end (p. 641). Between those brackets, atmosphere carries feeling directly: a saddening dusk-light and "a grief felt in the bones," snowfall that "makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time," a "freak gust" that reads on one level as meteorology and on another as "first courtside wraith-physics." The motif treats weather less as backdrop than as an early-warning system — light, shadow, and gust tuned to the tension of the scene before its human content arrives.