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It had started innocuously enough, with Kiel asking a rather innocent question.
“What about you, Sarge?” he'd said to Stocke, one night their squad had been huddled around one of the rare hearthfires that could be found inside the Sand Fortress. The vast halls of the ancient citadel were dreadfully cold once the desert sun passed over the horizon, and the Valkyrie’s soldiers usually wasted no time finding what little source of warmth they could to endure those long nights. “Do you have any family left? Siblings, maybe?”
Rather than answering, Stocke absentmindedly stirred the slop that passed for stew around here. Across the fire, Raynie was looking at him with interest. She’d always been curious about her superior’s elusive past, prying what little bit of information she could take out of him whenever she could; she had found to her sorrow that the process was as arduous as extracting teeth. Meanwhile, Rosch’s brows were furrowed in concern. Out of their current little gathering—Raynie and Marco sitting side by side, with Kiel closing the circle—he was the one who knew the most about Stocke.
Which didn’t mean a lot, really. Stocke was a Specint man through and through, quiet as a tomb and reluctant to share his secrets. He wouldn’t have made it very far under Heiss’ tutelage otherwise.
“I’m an only child,” Stocke said, eventually. “My mother died when I was young. And my father…” The rest of his answer was accompanied by a dismissive shrug. “The man wasn’t involved much in my upbringing. I barely knew him.”
Kiel nodded in sympathy. “I don’t have siblings either. But I would have enjoyed growing up with brothers and sisters, I think.”
“Talk for yourself,” Marco muttered in his bowl. Stocke knew for a fact that he was the middle child of a big family—and that his many brothers and sisters had tormented him throughout his childhood. The mild-mannered healer had become a mercenary to make a life for himself away from the smallmindedness of his hometown, never looking back.
“I didn’t know my parents,” Raynie added, “but us street kids in Skalla, we were like a family, yeah? So blood’s not always the end all be all that everyone says it is.”
Her words stirred something in Stocke, like a half-remembered memory resurfacing after the waters of a flood had receded. “There was a girl,” he said, “where I lived, growing up. The daughter of one of our servants, I think. She followed me around like a shadow, that one. I guess she was the closest thing to a sibling I ever had.”
Rosch looked at him in surprise, blurting out, “Really?” Meanwhile, Marco smiled and said, “That’s nice. What was her name?”
Stocke’s frown deepened. His spoon hovered in the air, dripping grey slop back into his bowl. It was a simple question, one that warranted a simple answer. And yet his mind felt stuffed, his thoughts trudging through something as thick as the unappealing stew they had been served tonight. He could not remember what the girl had looked like; she’d had long blonde curls, hadn’t she? Stocke distinctively recalled that he had sometimes helped her tame that wild mane by putting it into two thick plaits. He tried to summon another memory, one of her taking his hand to guide him toward some wonderful discovery she had made on the grounds of his family’s mansion. Stocke could see her lips moving to say her name, a flash of pink against the pale blur of her face.
“Lycoris,” he finally uttered, feeling a strange prickling along his spine. That wasn’t the name the girl’s lips had been forming in his memory, was it? “She was called Lycoris.”
“That’s a strange name alright,” Raynie said with a snort, prompting Marco to roll his eyes.
“It’s a flower, Raynie. God, don’t you know anything?”
“Sounds more like a kind of sweet, right? Like licorice.” Raynie shuddered in disgust. “Ugh. Who would name their kid after that foul stuff?”
“Licorice is another kind of plant, the sweet is named after—”
The two friends began to bicker, a familiar occurrence with this pair. Raynie was right, Stocke mused. Blood was not the end all be all when family was concerned. He shook his head, barely hiding a smile. Next to him, Rosch hummed in understanding.
“It’s a kind of lily, right?” he said. “A red one, or so I remember Sonja telling me.”
“Red spider lily,” Stocke confirmed. “Quite rare in these parts. It’s sacred to the Satyros, however. They call it the flower of the far shore.”
“Why?” said Kiel, his eyes bright and curious. Stocke had not yet found a subject that the young man did not find interesting. Again, he had to conceal his amusement. Kiel’s boundless enthusiasm was endearing and concerning in equal parts.
“They often grow in graveyards,” Stocke answered, and Kiel’s smile turned sour. “The Satyros say the Lycoris flowers guide the dead to the far shore. To their final resting place,” he quickly clarified at the young soldier’s puzzled expression. “The living—those still grieving the passing of a loved one, especially—can follow those paths as well, but that will only bring them to their doom.” The others were very silent as he added, “That’s why the Satyros also call them corpse flowers.”
“Cute thing to name a little girl,” Raynie said with a grimace. “Man, but what were her parents thinking?”
“You know a lot about the Satyros, Sarge,” said Kiel. “Where did you learn all of this?”
Stocke mulled over his answer. He couldn’t exactly say he had met with a trio of friendly Satyros performers in a parallel timeline, could he? “I read a lot when I was a kid,” he said; it wasn’t a lie, not really. “And our gardener taught me a bit about flowers and their meaning.”
That man was another mystery. Stocke did not remember his name, nor could he recall his features. He could only picture hands with long, thin fingers that were covered in dirt and a wan, wistful smile the rare times he was reminded of him. Stocke had cared for the man, much as he had cared for little Lycoris. Still, it was strange that their faces remained obscured in his memories, that their voices were still muted in his mind even as he remembered sharing happy moments with them. Stocke had loved those two, yes—but not enough to make an effort to truly keep them in his heart, it seemed.
“What happened to her?” Rosch said, taking Stocke out of his muddled recollections. “Lycoris, I mean?”
The answer was blunt, well practised. Too well practised, Stocke found, the incongruity prickling his finely honed spy’s senses. “She’s dead,” he said. “Has been for years.” The little girl with the golden curls had followed the trail made by her namesakes to another world, one where Stocke could not join her—at least, not now. Still, sometimes in his sleep, he dreamed that she beckoned to him from that field of red flowers, calling out his name—and yet the movements of her lips never quite matched the sounds that did come out of her mouth. In those dreams, the nameless gardener would murmur at Stocke’s ear, hands resting over his younger self’s shoulders in a surprisingly paternal gesture, “She’s gone. Better forget about her, my boy. She’s crossed somewhere you can never follow. Better forget about her…”
Stocke shook his head again, as if to shoo those thoughts away. Still, the mysterious gardener was right. Lycoris was nothing but another ghost haunting the graveyard of his memories. Stocke had far greater worries than a dead little girl, namely to keep those who followed him, who depended on him, away from that distant shore where she was now lost.
Stocke only hoped he would not soon dream of more people standing in that field of corpse flowers, calling for him to join them.
And yet a few months later, in another universe where Kiel had never asked that simple question, had never even addressed a single word to his beloved Sarge, Stocke came face-to-face with a golden-haired, grave-eyed young woman—and in that moment, he finally understood, oh, he finally realised: that girl in his mangled memories, the one who made his heart ache so… that girl was not the phantom haunting him in this ghost story.
He was the one haunting her.