PART 3

  Step Forward

  Wading through an endless crowd, the child pushed past person after person, making barely any headway. Had the festival been today? Had they forgotten? They were all supposed to go together—that was how it always was.

  Late. So very late.

  Applying more force only to fall onto the ground and feel even more people push from behind, the child desperately scrambled to get up, tugging at whatever could be reached. The clothes of people, stray hands, bags—anything so he wouldn’t disappear again.

  Met with swatting and angry barks, like anyone could feel anything in the swarm of festivalgoers, the child finally managed to regain their footing. But instead of trying to figure out which way was home, they found themselves pushed to the front, where the central square was. And at its center, the two children that he had been searching for. Home.

  The child stepped into the clearing, surrounded by the frozen city.

  Only the two in the center moved; the sad, misty-eyed girl speaking first, and then the dirty, light-haired boy.

  “You’re here.”

  “We were waiting for you.”

  “Why didn’t you show up like you said you would?”

  “How could you let them hurt us?”

  “Didn’t you promise that we’d stick together forever?”

  “How could you let us get taken away?”

  “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “That’s why you didn’t come.”

  “That’s why you were late.”

  Wide-eyed, the child watched as bruises—deep, blooming violets—appeared on their skin. It consumed them as they stood still in the silence, not even the beat of their hearts able to pierce the frozen city, turning them darker and darker, until they became only a deep black shadow.

  And, just as it seemed like there was no darker shade to turn to, they shattered. The child jumped back, stumbling not onto the mass of people behind them, not onto the stones of the city’s streets, but onto soft flooring.

  The child was in a familiar house.

  A small home. Wood panels lined the walls. A warm, comforting chestnut brown that stirred their emotions. There was a window to the side overlooking a green field, the morning’s rays piercing through the glass and into the living room furnished with a red couch, a coffee table, and a small dining table. On the other end of the house was a small bed that reminded them of unbearable heartache, and there was also a small kitchen and another bedroom in the back if they went further in—but they weren’t sure how they knew that.

  Everything appeared untouched—the deep red rug underneath their feet, the table, the two chairs on both sides of it that overlooked the greenest grass outside. The door beside them leading to the other side.

  Knock, knock.

  * * *

  Theo’s eyes opened. Sunlight was streaming through the window.

  In bed, once again. Staring at the stacks of books across from his bed, various tomes that he hadn’t touched for weeks. Since she had left.

  He had dreamed of this on many occasions. A nightmare, a knock at the door. Someone who wasn’t there, someone who was never there no matter how many times he checked.

  His eyes fell on the spot beside him, the space he now took up. He stared at it the way he stared at his books—dully, emptily.

  Until there was the accursed knocking again.

  Groaning, closing his eyes and throwing his blanket over his head, he once again cupped his ears and turned to the darkness to chase away the ghost of a person who would not return.

  * * *

  Knock, knock.

  The nightmare felt more real this time, but Theo did not give in. He clutched his blanket close and scrunched his eyes closed, trying to will himself back to sleep—it was dark, after all, easier to sleep when the compounding guilt of all the responsibilities he was shirking by staying in bed all day were all but stifled by sleep.

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  Knock, knock.

  “Go away,” he complained into his pillow that used to smell like her, feeling the nightmare take hold of him, shaking him down like he owed them money, like he had been living his life on the streets as a kid all along and none of this was true, and one day he’d wake up and realize that everything, everything was just a—

  “Get up,” growled the nightmare.

  Theo relinquished his steel grip on his covers. The nightmare had tried to shake him down many times, raise him from his slumber and lure him away from his bed, but never was it that voice. Sometimes it was the girl the ghost had loved, and then the ghost’s brother, but he never imagined hearing that voice ever again.

  It wasn’t her, but it was the closest thing.

  Right on cue, the blanket was ripped off him, and he opened his eyes to the dim light of a spell-candle.

  Staring at the books opposite his bed that never moved, now partially blocked by a dark-robed individual with a cane to their side, he continued to lie in a fetal position as he waited for them to speak again. As if it were still a dream.

  “Come on. Get up,” the new ghost with the cane asked again, this time in a softer tone as they stepped back and placed the growing spell-candle to the side, lighting the entire room.

  Thunk, their walking aid went along with them.

  “What’s wrong with you? You missed the first class of the semester, and you’re stuck in bed. Usually when you’re mopey, you spend all your time reading and studying.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” was Theo’s half-hearted reply as he stared at the impossible ghost shakily leaning on an obsidian cane they were clutching tightly with their right hand, so tightly he could see the deep blue veins jutting out of their pale, thin skin. “Why do you have that?”

  “Take a good look at me and ask that again.”

  “It was only one eye.”

  “It’s been two months,” responded the ghost.

  Gradually, Theo lifted his gaze from his waist until he arrived at long, thin and delicate black hair that reached past the chest by the slightest amount. “And winter is ending.”

  When there was no reply, the bedridden one finally confronted the shadow of the ghost he wished to have forgotten.

  Bangs barely covering the sides of his face. Pitifully pale and malnourished, like he was looking into a mirror. The slightest hint of pink in his cheeks, in his pursed lips. A black strip of fabric running across his right eye, tied somewhere behind his head. A single, stark violet eye remaining. In it, a coldness he had rarely ever seen directed toward him. Pain. Despair.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?” responded Theo passively, noticing Faris’s sunken cheeks. The extra lines marring his once-soft, noble complexion. The sadness he always tried to conceal in his expression. The truth that Theo had always turned a blind eye to—the truth that his own ghost hated.

  Faris held his tongue, and then he averted his eyes to the side, voice wavering as much as his thawing gaze. “W…where’s Ty?”

  “What do you mean?” Theo answered reflexively, having run through this exact scenario in his mind several times before today.

  “I need to talk to her,” responded Faris, looking around the room—anywhere but into Theo’s eyes.

  Forgetting all the false conversations he had imagined, Theo felt tears surface, threatening to taint the bed that had once been occupied with more than just him as he whispered, “You can’t.”

  “What do you mean I can’t?” The caster finally turned back to the one who was meant to be the next tactician, about to utter a sharp retort when he saw the tears sullying the bed underneath.

  Theo didn’t reply immediately, only stared at the one who had come back. The one who had come back with a look on their face...like they knew. Like they knew that this was coming. Like they had asked the question already knowing the answer. Hoping that the ghost would be here, despite everything.

  “She’s gone,” he eventually found the strength to say.

  “Where did she go? Did she get expelled?” Clutching his cane even harder, Faris did not move from his spot.

  She’s gone, he could not repeat.

  “Was it because of me?” asked the broken student.

  “No.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I can’t tell you.” Somehow, the words felt familiar.

  “What do you mean, you can’t tell me?”

  Theo, drained of all his remaining tears, finally cocked his head up to look up at Faris properly, the acid he had spouted to himself for the past two months still lingering on his lips. “What are you going to do about it if I don’t tell you? Beat me up?”

  When Faris did not immediately take up the challenge, Theo issued the threat again. “Come on. Don’t you want to hurt something? I know that look in your eye.”

  And then it returned. The painful expression. The one that had known something all along. Something that Theo did not—could not—comprehend.

  He sat up in his bed for the first time that day, eyes wide. “What did she tell you?”

  Faris stared, unblinking. Stony-eyed and biting his lip ever so slightly, as if suppressing a painful memory.

  Theo repeated himself, louder, voice raspy from weeks of not being used. “What did she say to you, Faris?”

  When he still did not answer, Theo got up from his bed and stepped forward, grabbing him and pulling him down by his shirt so he could ask him the question again before realizing that he was trying to pull down an incapacitated person at least a head taller than him.

  “Oh, sh—”

  Letting go of his classmate so he could cushion his backward fall with his arms, Theo ultimately landed onto the floor, pain shooting through his body as he grimaced and looked up at the shadow above him.

  Shaky arms propping himself up by the edge of the bed, barely strong enough to support his own weight, Faris looked painfully at Theo for a brief second, like he was about to cry, before letting go of an arm and half-rolling, half-falling to the side. Silent, giving away nothing as he grabbed his cane off the floor and slowly got up again, his steps off-balance and head down, his free hand reached out to the wall to steady himself.

  “Faris,” Theo called out in a whisper, eyes wide and thinking about how to apologize.

  Thunk, thunk, went the cane as the ghost-who-no-longer-was walked away, the only remaining words to leave his mouth tired and defeated. Slightly off-key, now that he was paying attention. Just the slightest.

  “I left dinner on the table.”

  When the spell-candle was finally put out, Theo got up from his spot by the edge of his bed and made his way over to the other end of his room that was bathed in darkness. He slid his hands across his messy desk, strewn with countless neglected tomes and books, and found his pocket tome. Using it, he lit up the room again and walked over to his study table, where he sat in his regular spot. He stared at the plate and cup in front of him, noticed the stack of papers to his side that read “Preliminary Report,” and then, in the deafening silence, steadily began to eat.