Archive of Our Own

An excerpt taken from the journal of the late twelfth century King Khalid of Almyra, read the museum plaque inscribed with the seal of the Fhirdiad Museum of Fodlan History, donated by his great-granddaughter Princess Zaynab, referencing a young noblewoman who was a classmate at the long defunct Garreg Mach Officers’ Academy. 

The translation of the excerpt itself read:

“The words of the song were quite entrancing, I must admit, and no less so for the singer’s personal charm. At first listen the lyrics were utter nonsense, but on inspection into the legends of northeastern F———, from which I believe Miss D——— hails, I have discovered an interesting hint of lore of restless spirits lurking beneath and over the earth, trapped in this world by regret rather than passing on to whatever the Church teaches of an afterlife.”

Anna read and reread both plaque and excerpt tucked into the glass case, wondering why a chill of deja vu crept down her spine. She’d heard of King Khalid of Almyra - of course she had, anyone who survived a Fhirdiad public school would’ve - so maybe that was why?

Still, why did the rest sound...familiar?

“Ready to go, Annie?”

Anna flinched, nearly crashing into the red velvet rope that ringed the lackluster “A History of Fodlan’s Ties with Almyra” display. But despite her heart leaping into her throat she recovered enough composure to turn towards Mary and say, “You bet! Um…” Her gaze drifted to the book in her best friend’s hand. “You bought a book on hauntings in Fhirdiad from a history museum?”

“Hauntings are the overlap of history and the supernatural, Annie,” Mary said with the air of someone who’d explained such a thing many times before but would happily do so again. “Besides, I am sure this will be wonderful reading on the bus ride since it touches on some things we’ll be seeing for ourselves!”

Anna shuddered - was it possible to be too good of a friend? - but said, “Well, as long as you’re happy…”

“Very happy!” Mary said with a bright smile. She tucked her arm through Anna’s and started towing her away from the exhibit. “Now let’s go! I want to make sure we’re sitting as close to the tour guide as possible so I can hear everything!”

“There should be speakers on the bus,” Anna reminded her, but Mary’s delight was infectious and she found herself smiling. 

She also couldn’t help her own sense of accomplishment. She and Ashton had pooled their funds for this little three-day trip to celebrate Mary graduating her nursing program, and maybe just to return a little something to a friend that tended to mother them absent their own parents. 

Unfortunately Ashton refused to actually join them on the trip - “I’m sorry, Anna. I love Mary but I just can’t handle ghosts, even if I know they’re not real.” - so the full force of Mary’s haunted geekery fell onto Anna’s shoulders. 

The tour began in Fhirdiad and would circle back after three days after strategic stops throughout what was northeastern Faerghus hundreds of years ago. A part of Anna dreaded it - ghosts didn’t frighten her like they did Ashton, but the idea of lingering dead spirits did not exactly soothe her high-strung nerves - but she still grinned and swung her duffel around as she boarded the waiting bus behind Mary. 

“Oh, perfect!” Mary exclaimed, because sure enough the seat right behind the driver was still empty. 

“You were not one of the cool kids in high school, were you?” Anna mused with a laugh as she stood on her toes to stow her duffel in the overhead rack. 

To no avail, unfortunately. She was just too short. 

Mary helped her, and as Anna filed into the window seat she said, “No, I guess not. I always felt a little bad for the bus driver having to deal with everyone.” She sat beside Anna, giant Mary Poppins - Ashton swore that was her namesake - purse sitting in her lap with the book on hauntings on top. 

“Did you bring your bus driver cookies too?” Anna asked, because of course Mary was already reaching into her bottomless purse to tug out a plastic baggie of white chocolate macadamia. 

“All the time!” Mary said. “He and Eric had the same favorite, so I would always make a little extra to share.”

Anna glanced at the window and mouthed the word nerd at her reflection. Not like she had much room to talk with her laptop tucked into her backpack. Nice little trip over a three-day weekend or not, she still had exams to grade and lessons to plan.

The driver himself clambered aboard after a few more passengers. He wore a blue hat with Fhirdiad Haunted Tours stitched in white thread on the front of the cap, and a matching blue polo with a logo of a castle tower. His teeth flashed when he smiled, greeting every passenger as they climbed aboard and flirting with the little old ladies while they giggled and their equally old husbands scoffed. 

“And look who snuck aboard while I had my back turned.” The driver propped an elbow on the back of his seat and winked at them...or at Mary, most likely. Men - especially young and attractive ones - tended to overlook Anna. 

She blamed it on her height, even if her orange hair shone like a traffic light. Or a sunset, if she was being more generous.

“Hello,” Mary said, smiling politely. “We’re looking forward to the tour! Will you be doing the voices for the ghosts too?”

The driver blinked, then laughed, the corners of his brown eyes crinkling pleasantly. “I can just for you, Miss…?”

“You can call me Mary,” she said. She gestured towards Anna, who grinned and waved. “And this is my best friend Annie. She’s the one who bought us these tickets, you see.”

“Why, how generous of you, Annie,” he said, “to bring such a beauty as Mary into my life.”

Anna pressed her lips together and retorted, “It’s Anna to you.”

“My apologies,” he said with an air of formality clashing with his flippant tone. “So I’m not actually supposed to hit on passengers - bad for reviews, you see - but if you’ll permit me to wonder if you believe in love at first sight, Miss Mary?”

Anna rolled her eyes at her reflection. This was hardly the first time someone ignored her to hit on Mary though, so she kept her automatic rude from slipping out. 

“Not particularly, no,” Mary admitted more seriously than Anna thought the driver’s question warranted.

“Then I’ll just make sure you get to see me many times this weekend,” said the driver. “I’m Sam, by the way, and I hope both you ladies enjoy the tour.”

They chimed their thanks in time for him to take his own seat and pick up the handheld intercom to introduce himself to the whole bus. 

“Welcome to the three-day Noble Faerghus Ghost Tour out of Fhirdiad!” he said, his voice blaring loud and bright from an inconvenient speaker over Anna’s head. “My name is Sam, and I’m a local from hereabouts. I’m here to take you into the past, to a Fodlan so different but so very familiar, when dragons walked the earth and lords ruled from their drafty castles and the Lance of Ruin wasn’t just what your boyfriend called his—” He broke himself off with a half-cough, half-laugh, eyes bright in the long rearview mirror. “Anyway, buckle up - that’s metaphorical, by the way, this bus doesn’t have seatbelts - and listen close, as I tell you a story that begins right here in Fhirdiad…”

Anna listened to Sam the bus driver-slash-tour guide with a distant attentiveness. His voice was pleasant enough she didn’t have to really listen, and once they left Fhirdiad’s busy streets and urban sprawl behind and merged onto a highway heading north, it was easy for the motion of the bus to lull her into a doze. 

Mary, of course, was rapt the entire time Sam spoke - or wove a tale of regret, tragedy, and vengeance so colorfully it was as if he’d witnessed it - and when he quieted past the city she tried to debrief Anna. 

“Did you hear that, Annie?” she said. She held a tour map the same way most people held lottery tickets, scanning it for hidden details. “It looks like the first leg of the trip is about six hours…”

“Where are we stopping tonight?” Anna wondered. She rubbed her eyes and covered her mouth to hide the yawn splitting her jaws. (Staying up late trying to finish a documentary about Aillel’s mysterious origins with Ashton was probably not her best idea.)

“Oh, well, it looks like we’re spending both nights in Castle Fraldarius,” Mary told her, glancing between the map and the itinerary. “Today is getting there and a tour of the castle and grounds. Tomorrow we leave for Conand Tower and ‘if weather permits’ a day trip to Castle Gautier before a late night back at Castle Fraldarius.” Her elbow nudged Anna’s arm. “This is so exciting, isn’t it? Spending two nights in a haunted medieval castle…”

Anna privately thought the night she spent at the Derdriu Aquarium in elementary school was more pleasant, even surrounded with eerie shadows and giant fish tanks scattering light everywhere. At least then her mother had gone with her, never mind her eccentric second grade teacher who loved fish so much she was probably an ichthyologist in a past life.

At some point Mary dug into her new book - The Crossroads of History and Hauntings - while Anna pulled her feet up onto her seat and stared at the landscape outside the window, music blaring in her ears. She hummed along with the lyrics under her breath, even watching her reflection mouth the words. 

“Oh goodness…” Mary mumbled while reading, even bringing a shocked hand to her mouth. 

Anna glanced at her and wondered, “What’s wrong, Mary?”

“Nothing at all!” she said, a grin wiping away any trace of horror. “This chapter is just so interesting. I’m reading up on our points of interest!”

She hummed. “Which one are you reading about now?”

“Conand Tower,” Mary explained. “‘The Tower had been abandoned some centuries before the War of Reunification. Once garrisoned as an outpost to watch for incursions by the hostile Sreng tribes, it quickly became a den for brigands and bandits to ravage the countryside of both Gautier and Fraldarius. Foremost among these was Miklan, a scion of the former whose reasons for abandoning his house are shrouded in mystery.’”

A snort cut in before Mary could continue. They glanced up to see Sam the bus driver smiling in the rearview mirror. “That book has it wrong,” he said. “Miklan Gautier was disowned because...because…” He frowned, gaze faraway rather than on the road ahead, and admitted, “Man. I forgot what I was going to say.”

“I’m sure you’ll remember by that part of the tour, Sam,” Mary reassured him. 

“Sure will!” he agreed, but Anna thought he still sounded uncertain. 

Well, it didn’t really matter, and she half-listened as Mary summarized the rest of the passage on Conand Tower. “Supposedly he was slain by his own brother,” she confided. “He was sent by their father to bring him back, or else put a stop to his villainy. Unfortunately it didn’t work, but his angry, restless spirit haunts the tower to this day, calling for his own family’s blood…”

A shudder wracked Anna. She knew it wasn’t real, but the idea of family murdering family gripped her with a visceral horror powerful enough to turn her stomach, centuries in the past or not. Not that she was a stranger to feuding between family members, not after her parents’ nasty divorce.

“Oh, you might like this, Annie,” Mary said.

“Like what?” she said, relieved for the distraction from the gruesomeness of family infighting.

Mary pointed to a little boxed in passage on the open page titled “Haunting in the Sky”. “The title is a bit misleading since it’s just the Northern Lights,” she explained, “but it is fascinating that the Sreng tribes thought the lights were spirits of their deceased trapped between earth and the afterlife. Kind of backwards from other ghosts, isn’t it?”

Anna shrugged, but her interest piqued by something a little more...realistic than ghosts, she peered at the book to read the passage Mary indicated. “Aw, we’re not even likely to see them,” she couldn’t help whining. “What’s the point of going this far north out of Fhirdiad if we can’t see the Northern Lights?”

“Well, it is summer,” Mary pointed out with a comforting pat on her arm. “And apparently they’re hard to spot even when the nights are long.”

“Conditions have to be just right,” Anna mused, sighing as she remembered back to an old lecture on atmospheric sciences in college, when she thought she wanted to be a meteorologist. “Too bad.”

“Don’t worry,” Mary commented lightly, “I’m sure there will be something on the tour just for you to enjoy, Annie.”

The realization that she’d been a bit too sour struck her, and she said, “I’m sorry, Mary. This trip is for you. I’ll have fun just for that.”

“And I’ll protect you from the ghosts so you can!” Mary said far too cheerfully for someone speaking of ghosts. “I even brought a box of salt, just in case.”

Anna’s gaze drifted to her giant purse and decided she could believe it. “Hopefully you won’t need it,” she said, laughing.

“Worry not, Anna,” Sam piped in from his seat again. “No one’s actually been hurt by a ghost on this tour. Stepping on a loose nail or twisting an ankle on an ancient loose stone, on the other hand? Totally possible, hope you remembered to sign the waiver of liability when you registered for the tour.”

Anna opened her mouth to insist they did, only to realize that with her luck she would twist her ankle climbing up a dilapidated set of stairs in Conand Tower, or something.

“Say, Sam,” Mary said, “what’s your favorite part of the tour?”

“Why, excellent question, Miss Mary!” he said brightly. His reflection’s brow furrowed, as if he gave the question serious thought, before admitting, “You know what, I don’t know, but I can tell you my least favorite part is Castle Gautier. I get the weirdest deja vu there; never know what to make of it!”

“You mean worse than just because you lead tours there?” Anna wondered.

“It could be that!” he conceded. “But yeah, pretty different, because I don’t get the same feeling at Castle Fraldarius or even Conand Tower, which is super creepy in its own right. Luckily we don’t have to spend any nights there.” He shuddered. “Fhirdiad HQ considered it before they decided it would take too much renovating to make any part of it suitable for human habitation. That place is filthy.”

“Well, it is an ancient castle,” Mary said. “I wouldn’t think it’s been kept clean.”

“Fraldarius is in surprisingly good repair!” Sam told them. “And true, HQ had to renovate a wing to make it suitable for tours to spend the night and get the ‘experience’, and it’s even got running water! It’s just a more convenient halfway point than Gautier.”

Anna tapped her fingers against the window, more content to listen than join their conversation for the moment.

“You like history, do you, Miss Mary?” Sam asked.

“Oh I just enjoy ghost stories,” Mary said. “Isn’t history just a sort of ghost story?”

He chuckled and said, “I have never heard anyone say that before. But if it’s ghost stories you’re looking for, you’ll get plenty on this tour.”

“I already have!” she said. “I bought this wonderful book from the history museum in Fhirdiad…”

“Then what do you need me for?” Sam teased. “I should let you lead the tours, and I’ll just stick to driving.”

“Oh no I still want to hear it all from you,” Mary said, and unless Anna was mistaken she was actually flirting back with their tour guide.

“Then how can I possibly deprive you?” he said, laughing.

Anna rolled her eyes. Confusion still filled her - Mary almost always put off the men that paid her attention - but she shrugged it away. If she wanted to have a different sort of fun this weekend, Anna wasn’t about to stop her.

There probably was something unethical about it on Sam’s end. Surely the tour company had a rule against hitting on clients…

She slipped her phone from her purse and shot a quick text to Ashton. He replied less than two minutes later commiserating about her plight.

Is he cute though? he sent immediately after the first. Maybe he’s cute.

I guess so, Anna told him. He’s tall and has red hair and smiles a lot. Not really my type, but maybe he’s Mary’s!

Ashton’s next message included a laughing emoji and a warning that she still ought to have fun. She smiled as she tucked her phone back into her purse, determined to follow his advice even if it involved more ghosts than she liked.

Anna dozed off about halfway to Castle Fraldarius. The air conditioning blasted her, and she tugged her cardigan closer and braced her head against the cool window. It didn’t make a very good pillow and it rattled with the motion of the bus hurtling down the highway, but she preferred it to a crick in her neck if she passed out sitting upright.

The landscape in this part of Fodlan wasn’t particularly inspiring. Open plains - much of it farmland - broken up by thick forest and the odd town. Fewer settlements reached this far north, and Anna imagined that even those might not have existed in the timeline of their haunted tour.

She counted mile markers and scanned license plates on passing cars, texting her favorite bumper stickers to Ashton. Eventually the road signs declared they were entering “Northern Territory”, the uninspired name of the chunk of Fodlan that often froze through winter.

Halfway between sleep and waking, she overheard another exchange between Mary and the bus driver:

“Ah, poor doomed House Fraldarius,” Sam was saying with a theatrical sigh. “Almost as tragic as the Blaiddyds, and probably because their fates were so closely tied to theirs.” Even a half-asleep Anna could hear the drama in his pause. “Their demise in the twelfth century at least had a touch of romance to it. Makes it a little bittersweet too.”

“Oh really?” A smile laced Mary’s voice. “Won’t you tell me more, Sam?”

“Afraid I can’t just yet, Miss Mary,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to spoil such an exciting part of our tour.”

Mary nodded off at some point too, her head propped on Anna’s shoulder. Carefully so she wouldn’t wake her, she tugged her book from her lap so it wouldn’t fall in her sleep.

She’d left it open to a chapter dedicated to the late “once-great” House Fraldarius. A stylishly rendered illustration of a white shield took up the center of the page, wrapped in text that read:

Relic of the Past: One of the Lost Relics constructed by the Ten Elites was the Aegis Shield of House Fraldarius. Unfortunately this is but an artist’s rendition of the fabled artifact, thought lost when the Church of Seiros annihilated Arianrhod. The last scion of House Fraldarius supposedly carried it into battle defending the city, but as fantastical as the Lost Relics were, even the Aegis Shield could not shield him from Arianrhod’s same fate.

An odd weight settled over Anna’s chest, her heart heavy with it. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to read another word, especially not about the family line dying out in the twelfth century, so she swallowed the weird lump in her throat and snapped the book shut.

The bus slowed as it pulled off the highway; it distracted her from her random gloom and made it easier to push it away to look out the window in time to spy a brown sign with a simple two-towered fort symbol and reading “Castle Fraldarius - 6 miles”. 

“So we’re almost there already,” she mused. Guessing Mary would want to be awake for the moment of arrival, she nudged her as gently as she could. “Wake up, Mary. We’ll be there soon.”

She jerked awake, abruptly enough Anna felt a little guilty, but the confusion on her face melted into pure, wakeful delight. “Oh my goodness we’re so close!” she exclaimed without a hint of exhaustion in her voice.

“Sure are,” she agreed, smiling. “You want to switch seats with me?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that to you,” Mary said.

“But don’t you want to spot the castle first?” Anna said, frowning.

“Oh, but—all right,” she said far quicker than she’d expected.

One quick shuffle that incited a mild scolding from Sam later, Mary practically bounced in the window seat while Anna did her best to look over her shoulder. She hadn’t realized her view from the aisle seat would be so impeded, and she almost regretted making the suggestion.

Almost. It was worth Mary’s giddiness, and she could always look through the windshield.

Sam tuned in through the speakers, “Good afternoon, medieval ghosthunters! If you look ahead to your left, you might spot a nice little rocky hill. As soon as we drive around it you’ll catch your first magnificent glimpse of our first destination!”

Anna’s heart skipped a beat. Despite her reluctance to visit anything haunted, Mary had swept her up in her excitement. Anticipation made her tense, and she eschewed the window to lean into the aisle and stare ahead through the windshield.

An air of tense excitement filled the bus, the rest of the passengers listening and watching and waiting and bracing themselves. Perhaps they’d come from Fhirdiad and had grown up looking up at the old castle at its center like Anna, or perhaps they’d come from Enbarr, or Derdriu, or somewhere even further flung. Either way everyone held their breath.

Mary’s squeal preceded the towers of a large castle rising from behind tall, crumbling walls. Anna’s breath caught as it all came into view, impressed with its scale and soundness despite herself, and letting Sam’s explanation of its architecture and origins wash over her.

“...the same Elites that defied the doomed Church of Seiros and eventually inspired the Flame Emperor built this and about a dozen castles scattered across Fodlan, including Castle Gautier. This one isn’t as well-preserved as the relatively newer Fort Merceus - a very popular tourist destination! - but its history is deeper and, should I say, more haunting.

“The castle fell into disrepair from the thirteenth century,” Sam continued, sounding as if he recited some scripted fact, “after the fall of the family. A Fodlan controlled by a new Adrestian government didn’t have a need for castles, which were as symbolic of the nobility’s power as they were practical for defense, and so it was abandoned after the War of Reunification until, centuries later, some enterprising folks decided it would make the perfect tourist destination to uplift the poor, cold, depressed northern reaches of Fodlan.”

“Who haunts it?” someone - perhaps a ghost enthusiast like Mary - called from the back.

“I am glad you asked!” Sam said. “Any number of ghosts have been sighted in Castle Fraldarius, from the Elite herself - the great falcon knight Fraldarius - to Kyphon, an original rebel against the Adrestian Empire, to the last duke and his heir both killed in the War of Reunification. Unfortunately this last pair seems suspect, for neither of their bodies could be recovered from the ruins of Arianrhod to be interred at home…”

He lowered his voice and trailed off in what Anna suspected was meant to be a dramatic manner, but he tactfully deflected every new question that sprang up from his passengers by reminding them they would soon take a tour of the place and might catch a glimpse of a couple ghosts for themselves.

“My nephew went on this tour a few years ago,” one old lady sitting across the aisle confided in Anna unprompted. “He claimed he saw one ghost.”

“Oh?” Anna kept the thought that this tour probably wasn’t great for the elderly’s hearts to herself. “What did it look like?”

“It was a young man,” she said with a conspiratorial wink, “but he was quite bloody. Looks like ghosts that die violently keep their wounds.”

She only just repressed a shudder and wondered if it was too late to refund her own ticket. Mary loved this, she could probably still have fun without her, especially if her instinct that she was at least somewhat receptive to Sam’s advances proved correct.

Gravel crunched under the bus’s wheels as they left a paved road behind. Sam suggested they all hold onto the seat in front of them, and to keep from slipping into the aisle Anna gripped the bottom of her seat. The road was so rough her teeth rattled in her skull, and she probably wouldn’t have wished such an awful road on her worst rival from school.

But it didn’t last long. Soon enough the castle went from “distant ruin” to “nearby monstrosity”, first little more than the size of her fist in the windshield to dominating the view ahead. The bus rumbled across a bridge, and Sam cheerfully announced, “We’re driving over the moat now. It’s a miracle there’s still a little water left in it, though I wouldn’t recommend swimming. Who knows what parasites hang out there…”

Anna’s nose wrinkled in disgust. She glanced sideways at Mary, who hated bugs even more than she did, but she still stared raptly out the window, her hands and face pressed against the glass like a child peeking into a pet store.

“Once upon a time, if we’d been invaders who somehow got across this little drawbridge,” Sam explained, “a portcullis would’ve come crashing down on us. Fortunately for us it’s all corroded away, so we can invade with impunity just fine!”

Anna didn’t think the castle very much worth invading, giant scrap of history or not, but she kept that thought to herself. Sam’s words at least painted a fanciful picture if not an appealing one.

At last the bus slowed to a halt at the bottom of a wide set of stairs that led up into the dark depths of the ruin. Passengers rustled with impatience, and Anna tugged her cardigan closer as she strapped her purse over her shoulder. Mary somehow fit her new book into her own physics-defying purse.

Sam announced over the speakers, “Welcome to the estimable moldering ruin we call Castle Fraldarius! It may not look like much these days, but this castle was once the most noble seat of dukes! The family that made its home here was well-known for its military might, especially in defense of Faerghus before the War of Reunification brought both to ruin.

“Now, who’s ready for the haunted tour?” The sound system turned off with a click, and Sam bolted upright and down the steps outside the bus.

Everyone began filing out. Anna, shoved aside by an unsteady old man in a hurry to leave, tapped her fingers against her thighs while waiting her turn.

Mary practically quivered with excitement, her grin wide as she took turns glancing out her window or turning towards her to say, “We’re here!”

Eventually they grabbed their duffels from the overhead compartments and filed out with everyone else, gathering in a small semi-circle at the base of the stairs.

Anna clutched her duffel’s strap as she gazed up and around, taking in the scale of the ruin. Crumbling mildewed stones, dark corners that made her step a little closer to the tour group, sprigs of green dandelions and other weeds pushing between cracks in the walls and steps…

The tour company’s blue, tower-emblazoned flag flapped from a turret, pushed around by a silent breeze. Aside from the bus and the tour group themselves, it was an eerie splash of modernity amid all this dark, ancient stone.

Rather than leading them up the stairs - “Perfectly good stairs, mind you.” - Sam led the group around the castle - the “central keep”, he called it, where the family and most of their staff would’ve lived in its heyday - towards a small wooden door set in the base. A sign swung from the door reading “Tourist Lodgings This Way”.

Sam called the narrow hallway lined with doors the servants’ quarters, now something more of a hostel for the tour groups. It was far from a five-star hotel, but Anna reasoned that so long as the bathrooms had hot water and the wing had electrical lights, she couldn’t complain - her first-year college dorm had probably been much worse.

Anna and Mary dropped off their belongings in a small bedroom with their names written on a placard outside in chalk. A set of bunk beds took up most of the space, and Mary immediately claimed the top bunk.

Anna frowned and said, “I wanted the top bunk…”

“What if you need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night?” Mary wondered. “This ladder doesn’t seem very steady…”

She opened her mouth to retort before realizing Mary had a point and she probably was a bit too clumsy to manage a rickety ladder in the dark. So she scowled even as Mary giggled and grabbed her arm to tug her out of the room and back towards the meeting place.

The hall was quiet as they stepped into it, aside from the shutting of doors behind others and the rustling of low voices. Anticipation made Anna walk a little faster as she followed Mary.

“...ette.”

Something whispered in her ear, a soft male voice. Her heart skipped a beat, and she jerked her head around to glance over her shoulder but found no one behind her.

Her hand curled into a tense fist as a chill crept over her and her heart raced, less like she walked down a short hallway and more as if she’d run the whole way from Fhirdiad. Her lips parted, about to call out to ask if someone had been talking to her, but—

“Annie?”

A squeak escaped her as she spun around and found Mary frowning at her, her brow furrowed with concern. “W-what?”

“Oh, Annie, are you all right?” she wondered. “You’re so pale...you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Anna’s mouth worked, dry and useless for a long heartbeat until she could clear her throat and force a fake laugh. “W-well, look where we are, Mary!” she said. “Maybe I did see a ghost!” 

Or hear a ghost...

Oh. No. She probably imagined that voice, right?

Mary offered her a smile with a teasing edge. “Maybe you did!” she agreed. “Next time you see it, make sure you don’t keep it to yourself!”

Her face warmed, but she said, “I guess I should! Better we’re both scared than only one of us.”

“That’s the spirit!” Mary said. “Get it? Spirit? Woooooooooo....”

Her good humor eased Anna’s tension, enough that she managed to giggle with her, and they were both grinning as they met up with Sam and the rest of the tour group.

She could almost forget about the odd voice as Sam began the tour, lost in his explanations - peppered with copious flirtatious remarks to every woman, single or married or young or old, in the group - and her own eyes roving over her surroundings. 

A faded metal plaque in a crumbling, blackened arrow slit marked it as a cannon’s target sometime in the thirteenth century when northern rebels rallying around a young man claiming to be a Blaiddyd prince took shelter in the castle. Decorative swords set in glass cases against a display called “The Wall of Weapons: Reproduction” spoke of history driven by war.

“Really,” Sam said, “any number of ghosts could be lurking around every corner in a castle this old. Imagine the countless prisoners of war that died down below in the dungeons, returning to haunt their captors…”

He didn’t actually take them into the dungeons - too unstable and often flooded, depending on the season - but he showed them a barred door with signage marking it as the point of descent.

It was more than enough for Anna, who wasn’t convinced the chill she felt rising from its depths through the bars was just a figment of her overactive imagination.

She was most interested in the library, though the room itself was so small she frowned and couldn’t help blurting, “Is that it?”

“Well, this library did belong to a family that valued the art of war over the art of learning,” Sam explained with a slight smile as if he understood her consternation, “which is to say nothing of the time period valuing war over learning too! Not enlightened folks like you and I, these Fraldariuses, even if they could probably afford more books than your average noble house.”

At least Sam painted a vivid picture of the whole castle, his colorful - sometimes too colorful - descriptions populating the shadowed corridors with a scrambling staff, with soldiers drilling in the courtyards, with nobles ruling and politicking in the halls. His stories brought the ghosts to life, and Anna could almost imagine what the castle looked and felt like before it had been lost and abandoned and besieged.

It didn’t help that around every corner, out of her periphery, a hint of movement kept catching her eye. And when she turned her head to investigate, she found nothing.

The skin on the back of her neck prickled like she sat taking an important exam with her teacher standing right behind her, like someone watched her, waiting for her to do something. Her heart beat a little faster, and when it happened as it grew darker outside one of the narrow arrow slits and Sam finally led them into a once-parlor now-exhibit, she spun on her heel and turned to face whatever it was.

Her heart jumped into her throat, but nothing moved.

Anna’s eyes narrowed. “I know you’re there…” she mumbled under her breath. Her fingers found the mace she had tucked into her purse, even as she knew it wouldn’t work on a ghost.

It couldn’t be a ghost. There was no way. The promises of the “haunted” tour and Mary’s and Sam’s stories were preying on her imagination, that was all.

That was why no one else seemed to be reacting to whatever it was she sensed...right?

A gasp escaped her when a shadow shifted down the corridor. She popped the cap off her mace and stepped back, drawing breath into her lungs and prepared to—

“Annie, are you coming?”

Anna yelped. Her eyes pinched shut as she spun around and raised her mace and...recognized Mary’s voice.

She cracked one eye open and found her staring at her with wide eyes.

“I-I’m so sorry!” Anna blurted as she fumbled to replace the mace’s cap and stuff the canister back into her purse. “I don’t know what—I’m just really tense! It felt like someone was watching me, so I just—well, I guess mace wouldn’t do much good against a ghost anyway.” She giggled again, though it sounded nervous and shaky to her own ears.

“Are you all right, Annie?” Mary wondered. “Are you tired? Do you want me to walk you back to our room?”

“N-no!” she said, waving her hands. “I want to see what’s in there. I bet it’s better lit and less creepy than this hallway.”

“If you’re sure,” said Mary, though her frown seemed skeptical. Still, she blessedly didn’t argue as the two of them walked through the arched doorway into the exhibit.

Sam’s face turned towards them, distracted from his conversation with one of the little old ladies in the tour group. “Everything all right out there, ladies?” he asked. His gaze snapped to Anna and he smirked. “See a ghost?”

“No!” she retorted with more venom than she meant. But all the...eeriness rattled her. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans and decided learning from the exhibit would be the best method to distract herself.

Unfortunately Sam sought her out.

Anna tried to focus on the plaque describing a fifteenth century artist’s fanciful rendition of the Elite Fraldarius astride her horned Pegasus. If she ignored him, maybe he would leave her alone, even if it led to him hitting on Mary, but he leaned against the pole separating them from the displays, his arms crossed.

Waiting for her.

“Seriously, Anna,” he said without preamble, “think you saw a ghost?”

“There’s no such thing,” she insisted, rolling her eyes. Feign nonchalance, it would be fine. Anna preferred to confront her problems, but here she didn’t even know what her problem was, much less how to go about solving it.

“Normally I would agree with you,” Sam said, “but there is something about these old castles…”

Anna gave up the portrait of Fraldarius in favor of investigating the next display.

“Ah, Loog and Kyphon,” Sam said without her invitation. “Historians always insist that because they both eventually married and ‘produced heirs’ it means they can’t have possibly had a little something—Anna?”

Apparently shooting him a withering glare would shut him up, but it wouldn’t convince him to leave her to her thoughts.

“You know,” he said, straightening and resting his hands on his hips, “I’m always surprised at how well-preserved this piece is. They were the original rebels, and the kingdom Loog founded lasted centuries until the War of Reunification.”

“Don’t you find this castle creepy?” Anna asked.

Sam blinked, looking surprised she’d finally said anything. “Uh...why do you ask?”

“You’re a tour guide,” she said. “Obviously you’re here often, and you said yourself that you don’t like the...aura in Castle Gautier. So why is this your job? You seem smart, you could probably do anything.”

“Why, thank you for the compliment,” he said with a too-wide smile. “You’re the last person on this tour I expected to pay me one.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed.

He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “Truth be told,” he explained, “I’m not sure myself, because creepy this castle definitely is. The first time I visited this castle - and the other two legs of the tour - I was the one being guided. It was a high school field trip, actually, but I probably spent more time making out with my girlfriend at the time than paying attention to the tour guide.”

She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “And yet you were inspired.”

“And yet I was inspired.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “There is something about these old castles though...I just think it would be a shame for us to forget them and those that once called them home. Ones who might still call them home, even. So many records from before the War of Reunification were lost or destroyed, but losing a castle is pretty nearly impossible.” He patted the wall, an oddly affectionate smile on his lips.

Anna returned it despite herself. “You talk about it like it’s a family member,” she said.

“More like a friend,” he said with a wink. “Can’t choose your family, but you can your friends.”

Her eyes drifted to Mary chatting with a middle-aged couple as she thought of her parents’ disaster of a marriage. Her phone buzzed in her purse, with a message from her mother or from Ashton or maybe from one of her coworkers.

“I guess that’s true enough,” she said. “Still, I can’t imagine ever really getting comfortable here.”

“Well, it is a ruin,” Sam pointed out. “Just because the guest hall has running water and power and gets cleaned doesn’t mean it’s ‘comfortable’.”

“It’s not about physical comfort,” Anna argued. She glanced from the old, faded tapestry that supposedly portrayed Kyphon of House Fraldarius kneeling and swearing fealty to newly crowned King Loog (the subjects looked more like two blue-clad...potatoes, even if one of them did wear a crown) towards the exhibit exit. A shiver traveled up her spine, and she admitted, “I’m beginning to think the castle really is haunted.”

“It’s pretty much expected for something this old and that’s seen so much,” Sam said. When she stared at him, he said, “What, did you really think it was all exaggerated for tourists like your cheerful horror enthusiast friend?”

“Yes!” Anna blurted. “Some people like being spooked!”

“Not you then?” he said, raising a red eyebrow.

“No, not me!”

“That’s unfortunate,” Sam said. “I really do try to make sure everyone enjoys the tour, but if you don’t like a little spookiness...well.”

“Reassuring,” she mumbled. She rubbed her arms then said, “I’m going to check out the rest of the exhibit.”

He gestured to the next one with a sweep of his arm. “Have fun while you can,” he said, tone ominous in a way she tried to shove from her mind.

And try as she might, Anna couldn’t distract herself from their conversation, even as she replied to a text from her mother - Yes we arrived safely I’ll call you tomorrow - and scrutinized every bit of legible written word in the exhibit. She eyed dulled swords and a bronze sculpture of an armored man on a horse - one duke of Fraldarius or another - before pausing in front of one.

The Royal Shield’s Sword, read the plaque. Supposedly wielded by Glenn Fraldarius, the firstborn son of the last appointed duke, who was killed in battle defending a teenage Blaiddyd prince. Official records indicate that his body was so mutilated by the enemy to have been unrecognizable, and his sword was the only thing of his returned home for burial.

Anna’s stomach turned with nausea, even before she skimmed the last words on the plaque:

Gruesome as his end was, it might’ve been kinder than his father’s and brother’s, dead when the Church annihilated Arianrhod in the War of Reunification.

Her eyes burned when she blinked, but she swallowed around the lump suddenly sticking in her throat and turned her back to the old sword.

And faced a glass case displaying old, yellowed, smoke-stained fragile letters.

Love and War: Letters from Felix Fraldarius to an unknown woman in Fhirdiad during the War of Reunification, recovered after its razing. Careful reconstruction of the remains suggests sender and recipient were betrothed. Excerpts reproduced on the stand below.

Anna barely gave it a second thought. She reached for the laminated booklet on the stand in front of the case, her mouth dry and heart beating like it never did when she read a romance novel, and began flipping through it.

Leagues away and I still feel as if there’s a tether linking me to you, she read in the first letter, trying to pull me back. It’s almost like I’m your captive, but as if you handed me the shackles and I locked them on my own damn ankle.

I hate it here in Arianrhod, another letter read. I grow restless waiting for the Empire to attack where they’re not likely, so far from the frontlines closer to the Alliance. I keep telling my old man I could better serve elsewhere, but he insists my “place” is here. At least he agrees I shouldn’t be so eager to throw my life away, and I don’t doubt you worry enough when I should be the one worrying about you.

And still the third said, I’d walk all the way to Fhirdiad without resting if it meant hearing your voice again and marrying you as soon as I arrived. Why should we wait till the end of the war the way everyone from my father to I—— insists?

Our spies claim the Empire marches for Fhirdiad, she read in the letter dated last. I know you intend to defend the city, I know you’re the best mage in the Kingdom or the Church, but please, A———, be safe.

Anna closed the booklet with an odd, hollow feeling in her chest as if something had gouged out her heart and hadn’t thought to replace it with anything else. Her pulse pounded, and even as she tore her gaze from the display and the faded, slanting handwriting on the yellowed parchment, it felt like she’d just shut an old, well-loved but bittersweet book that she hadn’t read since childhood.

Surely she’d remember reading something like this? Maybe once she came across something online, or in a history textbook in school, or even in a novel that took inspiration from the era…

“Pretty sad, isn’t it?” Sam cut in.

Anna sucked in a breath, but for once she was grateful for the interruption distracting her from her strange thoughts and stranger feelings.

“Supposedly Felix Fraldarius carried a little token from his lovely mystery fiancee,” he explained with his hands clasped neatly behind his back, “but just like the rest of his remains, it was never found. He couldn’t be buried here, but some say he haunts the castle waiting for his bride to come home…” He trailed off with obvious melodrama and shot an appraising glance towards Anna. “This is usually where softhearted ladies say ‘oh no, poor guy!’”

“A token?” she said instead. “Was it a ring?”

Sam shrugged. “Engagement rings weren’t really commonplace in the twelfth century,” he said. “Diamonds, as it turns out, have not always been forever.”

Mary probably would’ve appreciated his joke, but Anna could only frown at the display of old letters. She twirled a few loose strands of her orange hair around a finger and asked, “Was it a lock of her hair?”

Sam’s lips parted before his eyes narrowed with something like suspicion. “How did you know?” he asked. “Are you secretly an expert?”

She opened her mouth to insist she’d read it in the laminated booklet, or in a textbook, or in a novel, or online, only to realize she didn’t know how she knew. “I don’t remember,” she lied.

“Well, common enough practice in those days,” Sam said. “You leave your fiancee or wife or lover, she gives you a bit of her hair so you’ll remember her. Also it was normal to keep your baby’s first hair clipping, but I think that one’s still done these days if you’re a sentimental parent.”

Anna barely heard his explanation, too...well, not exactly troubled, but definitely confused.

It was going to be a long night

It was a long night, and not just because she slept on a thin mattress in a small bedroom that reminded her of her first-year college dorm. Wind whistled through the castle, violent and loud as if in the midst of an oncoming storm.

Anna lay awake staring up at the dark ceiling, counting the ticking of a distant clock rather than sheep. She tried rolling over, flipping her flat lump of a pillow to use the cool side, reciting the elements on the periodic table until she lost track (somewhere in the fourth period thanks to those pesky transition metals), even tugging her laptop from her bag and plucking away at next week’s lesson notes until her eyes burned from staring at the screen in the dark.

Eventually she gave up and, despite a voice in her head warning her it was a bad idea and reminding her they had an early morning, threw her blankets aside, stuffed her feet into her sturdy gym shoes and tugged her cardigan over her pajamas and her mace canister and phone into a pocket, and crept out of her room.

Mary, as dead to the world as a ghost in the top bunk, didn’t even stir.

It felt a bit like stepping into a motel hallway in the middle of the night, with all the doors lining it and the flickering of dull lightbulbs. The only things missing were the ugly patterned carpet, a tipsy couple stumbling into a room, and the hum of a vending machine.

Her heart beating against her ribs provided enough of a steady soundtrack for the night along with her shuffling footsteps and shallow breathing. “One foot in front of the other,” Anna murmured.

She didn’t know where she was going, only that when she couldn’t sleep, walking often helped settle her mind and body.

Then she reached the end of the hallway, to the door that led up a narrow staircase into the castle proper, where Sam warned them they could easily get lost without him, especially without electrical lights. But still too wired to sleep, Anna pushed through anyway.

The cool draft hit her first, even before the door behind her swung shut and plunged her into darkness. Her heart leapt into her throat, but she resisted the urge to speed up or walk backwards, blinking so her eyes would adjust. Light from outside filtered in through gaps in the wall, windows and broken arrow slits, and it was enough for Anna to see the contours of the corridor.

She stumbled over her shoe laces, a gasp escaping her, so she braced her hand against the wall to walk. She wouldn’t go far, she told herself, humming nervously. A few paces and she would turn around again before she could get lost. She’d seen enough of this castle to last her a lifetime.

“Ann...ette?”

Anna froze, her fingers curling into fists against the wall as her blood rushed past her ears. A voice again, the same one as before, reached her. She stared ahead, her eyes wide and unable to tear them away from a flicker of motion in the shadows stretching across the corridor.

And then a young man practically materialized before her, wearing the sort of fur-lined coat she only ever saw in movies. His hand twitched, drawing her gaze, and she saw it resting on the hilt of a sword.

A sword...Anna wracked her brain. Was some part of the tour a reenactment of some kind and she’d forgotten? Was this an actor she’d caught mid-rehearsal?

But then he stepped closer.

Something brown caked his dark hair, red and more brown streaked across one pale cheek, red staining his teal and white coat, and his abdomen—

A gasp escaped Anna, and she stumbled towards him without thinking even as her stomach roiled with nausea. “Y-you’re hurt!” she exclaimed, panic fluttering in her belly She fumbled in her pajama pants pocket for her phone. “H-hold on, sit down and rest! I’ll call someone, my friend is a nurse, she can—”

“I don’t need your worry now, Annette.”

His low rasp of a voice made her freeze all over again and sent a shiver down her spine. Why was it...had she heard it before?

“But you’re injured!” she insisted, her thumb hovering over her phone’s touchscreen. For now she would ignore that he called her by the wrong name, and ignore why he thought he knew it at all. “You’re c-covered in blood! You need help, I—”

She sucked in a breath when he walked across the beam of light streaming in through an arrow slit. It passed right through him, his body - blood-stained and dirt-streaked clothes and all - translucent. And he made no noise when he walked, no sword scraping against stone, no footsteps.

Anna’s skin prickled, worse as he passed through the light and approached her. “G-ghost,” she realized. She swapped her phone for her canister of mace, uncapping it as her heart beat an uneven, syncopated rhythm against her ribs.

The man - ghost - glanced at the mace when she raised it. “What is that?” he wondered.

“What’s—don’t come any closer!” she snapped. Her knees shook with fright, but she kept her ground (she’d probably fall the instant she tried to run). “I-I have mace!”

The ghost frowned, the expression almost comical, as he stared past the mace canister in her hands towards her. “Where?” he asked. “You’re a mage, so since when do you—”

Anna squeezed her eyes shut, raised the canister pointed away from her, and pushed the button.

The pepper spray hissed. She gritted her teeth at the sting when a few drops touched her hands before releasing the button and cracking her eyes open.

The ghost stood only a yard away from her, close enough she recoiled with her breath in her throat, his arms crossed and his eerie yellow eyes on the can. “Is that...how magic works now?”

Anna’s jaw dropped, right before heat rushed to her face, embarrassed she thought pepper spray could actually hurt a ghost. She gnashed her teeth and stuffed the canister back into her pocket but didn’t dare relax. “Do not come closer,” she warned him.

The ghost’s lips parted, and his brow furrowed. “Annette—”

“That is not my name!” she snapped.

“I....” He seemed to wilt, his eyes downcast, and if she wasn’t still on edge she might’ve dwelt on the tug of sympathy in her chest. “Of course it’s not. Sylvain isn’t Sylvain anymore either…”

“Who…?” Anna’s eyes narrowed.

“You don’t remember me,” the ghost guessed.

“O-obviously!” she retorted. “You look like you died...centuries ago!”

The ghost rested a hand over his wounded abdomen, but Anna couldn’t look for long without feeling sick. “I know,” he said. “But I’m still here...I didn’t even die here.”

“W-where did you die?” Anna dared to ask.

His eyes slipped shut as if in memory. “Arianrhod,” he said. He angled his head to glance over his shoulder, deeper into the castle and affording her a view of what she might’ve thought a sharp, handsome profile if it wasn’t so...gruesome. “Apparently it didn’t outlast me long.”

“N-no,” she said as she began to put the pieces together, “it didn’t. The Church destroyed it during the War of Reunification.”

The ghost jerked his face around to stare at her. “The Church were our allies,” he said. “They wouldn’t have…”

Anna shrugged, unsure what to tell him; she was no historian. But some of the tension eased from her spine, and she felt a little steadier on her feet. The ghost wouldn’t harm her - she wasn’t sure he even could, sword or no - and she didn’t know how to fight him off either.

“A-are you in pain?” she asked. It was just a concern anyone should have for a stranger, she told herself.

He crossed his arms and shook his head. “I’m dead,” he reminded her, as if she needed it. “My injuries no longer bother me.”

Her mouth dried when his gaze flicked to her again, something intense in it, like he knew her - or thought he did. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked in a low voice.

“You...I never had the chance to bring you here myself,” he mused. His gloved fingers curled into a fist, and he snorted. “I never even thought about it much before I died. Now it’s all I can think about.”

“Who...do you think I am?” Anna asked.

The ghost actually flinched, his eyes wide on her face. She thought his chest might’ve shifted with a breath, but why a ghost would need to breathe she didn’t know. 

“You—do you want to know who I think you are?” she said when he let the silence stretch too long.

“I...yes,” he whispered.

Anna opened her mouth to tell him, only to pause, because it was just too...ridiculous, insane, nonsensical. But she already spoke to a ghost; what did something a little more impossible matter?

“Felix Fraldarius?”

Now he wouldn’t look at her, his jaw tight. When he stood like that, she noticed how unnaturally still he could be, how no one alive could be so motionless.

She stepped a little closer to him, her footsteps oddly loud in the deafening silence of the corridor. Her shadow moved with her, and the ghost - Felix Fraldarius, a man dead for centuries - looked at her.

“You sound just like her,” he said, his eyes fluttering shut. “You look like her too.”

“Y-your betrothed,” she guessed. “The one you wrote those letters to in—in Fhirdiad.”

He nodded and raised his hand, reaching towards her - as if to touch her.

Anna’s breath caught, her gaze on his fingers. A curiosity came over her - and she wondered what would happen if he did try to touch her. Her mace had done nothing, and the light passed through him without distorting like it would through glass.

But she didn’t want to find out.

She jerked away and pretended she didn’t see the hurt flickering over his face. “I’m not who you want me to be, Felix,” she said.

Then she spun around and fled.

Anna regretted her whole existence when she woke minutes before her phone’s alarm went off. She needed to drag herself out of her bunk bed and crawl to the shower down the hall, but instead she burrowed deeper into her blankets and groaned.

It had all been a dream, right? Some bizarre nightmare where a ghost claiming that she looked like his long-dead fiancee approached her and talked to her? Like it wasn’t bad enough for her overburdened nerves that his guts literally spilled out of a gash in his abdomen.

Logic dictated that she’d imagined the whole thing; maybe she’d been sleepwalking and forgot!

“Ugh…” She rolled onto her back and covered her face with her pillow.

Then she remembered that Mary was probably relying on her to wake her up too, so she swung her legs out of bed.

Anna couldn’t so easily dismiss the ghost - Felix Fraldarius? Her imagination really fixated on him, didn’t it? Stupid haunted tour - as she rifled through her duffel for a change of clothes. Her mind kept drifting back to him, occupying her, making her clumsier than usual. As she stood her phone slipped through her fingers, and she winced before it even struck the ground.

“Nooooo,” she whimpered, bending over to pick it up.

“Annie?” The bunk beds’ frame creaked, and when Anna glanced up Mary was peeking down at her, blinking and with her short dirty blonde hair a rat’s nest.

“I just dropped my phone,” she told her, raising it. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“That’s okay,” she said. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, a grin blooming across her face. “I’m too excited to try sleeping anymore anyway. I bet Conand Tower will be much creepier than Castle Fraldarius too!”

Oh, perfect, just what she needed - another castle of ghosts to follow her and insist she was their fiancee.

“Are you all right, Annie?” Mary wondered.

Anna hesitated to tell her about her...late-night encounter. Her friend would get a kick out of it, she was sure, but she didn’t know if she would receive the appropriate amount of sympathy. Or she could get too much sympathy and ruin the rest of the trip for Mary.

Neither option was particularly appealing.

“I’m fine,” she eventually lied. “Just didn’t sleep well since it’s an unfamiliar bed.”

“Did you break your phone?”

“No, I think it’s fine,” she said. Anna swiped her sleeve over the unblemished but fingerprint-smudged screen. “These things are indestructible. If my body was this tough, it wouldn’t hurt every time I stubbed my toe or bumped my elbow.”

Still, she frowned at her reflection in the dark screen and wondered what exactly the ghost had seen in her that she couldn’t.

One quick breakfast of pre-packaged muffins and miniature cereal boxes later and the tour group again boarded the bus to the chorus of Sam’s cheerful inquiries if anyone spotted any ghosts overnight. A few people told him they had, a fearful glee in their voices as they spoke of long cloaks trailing over the ground, of creaking hinges in doors, of flickering lightbulbs and metal scraping against stone.

“And she looked just like the lady in the portrait!” one old woman exclaimed as the bus rolled down the highway. “Long dress, bloody wound over her chest like she’d just been stabbed…”

“Horrifying,” Mary said with a shudder Anna didn’t believe for a moment.

Still, she tried to tune out the speculation, except where she thought a description matched...her ghost. But none of them mentioned anything about a pale young man with blood in his dark hair and viscera spilling from his abdomen, and she doubted any of this bunch would be able to hold back if they had seen him.

I think I saw a ghost, she texted Ashton.

He replied within seconds, WAHT!!

Anna smiled at the typo even as she typed out a response, I swear! I tried to mace him ;_;

Oh noooo, Ashton’s reply read before he sent another. Was it scary? Did he try to possess you?

Nooooo! Anna assured him. I mean it was a little scary but—

Her fingers froze halfway through her second message, and she deleted it and rewrote, It was a little scary but I felt a little sorry for him.

Aw. Not a friendly ghost but a sad one?

A bit, she admitted. She’d taken the aisle seat this time, so craned her neck to stare towards the end of the bus, as if looking back towards Castle Fraldarius and seeking one of its last masters.

To Ashton she typed and sent, We say ghosts are scary, but maybe they’re just lonely because all their friends are dead but didn’t “stay”.

His speedy reply said, Now you sound like Mary.

Anna laughed but slipped her phone back into her pocket as the bus slowed and she spotted a dilapidated tower rising ahead of them.

The land around Conand Tower was overgrown with trees, but none rose as high as the tower itself. Squat but tall, Anna could imagine how many stairs it would take to get to the top.

“Oh dear,” Mary said with a sigh. “If only we didn’t have to climb so many stairs…”

The view of the countryside from the top of Conand Tower almost made the ordeal of the muscles in her legs burning and turning into jelly halfway up and listening to Sam recount bloody skirmishes between garrison knights and Sreng warriors - and how whichever knight was in command of the tower wouldn’t have let the land around it grow nearly so wild lest the enemy hide among the trees.

Camera bulbs flashed as her fellow tourists took pictures, and even Anna and Mary asked Sam to take a photo of them together. “Lovely,” he said as he returned Mary’s phone to her with a wink.

“Better make sure he didn’t put his number in there while you weren’t paying attention,” Anna commented as she turned back to the forest and the open valley beyond it.

Mary giggled and quite plainly admitted, “I don’t think I’d mind.”

She stared at her. “Really?”

“What can I say?” she said, shrugging. “He’s not too bad to look at.”

Anna’s nose wrinkled, though she could concede that much.

“Believe it or not,” Sam himself called out to everyone, “the roof of this tower was once the site of a small battle. When Miklan Gautier and his band of brigands holed up in Conand Tower, they were driven all the way to the roof before Gautier was finally slain and the survivors surrendered.” He leaned against the roof’s crenellations. “Now that bastard is a spooky vengeful ghost if there ever was one…”

One of the old ladies in the group chided him for his language, which made him chuckle and offer an apology before he waved for the group to follow him back down the many stairs.

“Next destination: Castle Gautier!” he declared.

Anna didn’t miss the faintest grimace that crossed his face; he didn’t turn away from them quickly enough.

Castle Gautier proved only almost as creepy as Castle Fraldarius. For one, Anna spied no hint of motion from the corner of her eye that she couldn’t immediately explain as one of the tour group skulking nearby or a flag flapping in the breeze. For another it wasn’t in as good repair, which Sam explained as an “unfortunate” side effect of being even just a hundred or so miles further north.

“Winter here must’ve been hell,” he remarked.

“Isn’t hell supposed to be hot?” Anna asked.

“You make a fine point, Miss Anna,” he retorted cheerfully, “so if Aillel is a hot hell, this is probably a cold one. There’s a reason we don’t do this tour in winter.”

For his part, Sam didn’t seem as chipper here and even seemed to rush them from one part of the castle to the other, often glancing over his shoulder as if he saw things moving from his periphery. When she mentioned it to Mary, she frowned and agreed she wasn’t imagining it.

“Are you all right, Sam?” Mary asked, approaching their tour guide once they stepped inside an exhibit similar to the one in Castle Fraldarius. Anna lurked close enough to eavesdrop, pretending to examine a replica of the Lance of Ruin.

“Oh, I’m just fine, Mary,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

“Working as a guide for three days in a row and driving a bus for so many hours must be hard work,” she noted.

“It pays the bills,” Sam said. He stuffed his hands into his pocket and shrugged. “I like it just fine too, so that doesn’t hurt, and I get to meet sweet ladies like you…”

Mary raised an eyebrow, and Anna knew from personal experience she was fixing him with her best “I don’t believe you” look.

“Gautier gives me the creeps,” he confessed in a lower voice, almost too low for her to hear. “Every time I set foot here I feel like someone’s yelling at me. 

“I haven’t heard anything,” Mary said, the volume of her voice matching his.

“It’s probably just the ghosts,” Sam said. “My running theory is that they’re only really visible to people they know - or think they know, maybe.”

Anna’s heart skipped a beat. Was that why…

“What a curious theory,” Mary said, sounding further away than just across the exhibit.

“Guess it does sound a bit dumb!” Sam said with a laugh. “Still, thanks for listening, Mary. Is it weird that I—hmm.”

“What?” she prompted. “Is what weird? I won’t judge you.”

“Nah, you’ll just think I’m hitting on you,” he said, “and, well, I wouldn’t blame you for it.”

Mary giggled. “Now you’ve made me even more curious. Tell me.”

“I feel like we’ve met before,” Sam explained. “Like, before yesterday. Isn’t that weird? I’m not even sure how to explain it, just—”

“No, I…” Mary trailed off with an air of uncertainty Anna had never heard from her before. “I think I know what you mean, Sam.”

And that was probably her cue to give them a bit of privacy, or however much they could have inside the busy exhibit. Anna slipped away till she was out of earshot and hoped that the odd twist in her chest wasn’t envy.

The tour bus rolled up to Castle Fraldarius hours later. The sun painted the sky and clouds a violent bloody red, and the castle’s towers cast long, dark shadows over the bus and gravel path as Anna followed Mary out of the bus.

She tugged her cardigan tighter around herself and shivered. Summer it might’ve been, but the nights were cool and...creepy.

Her back ached from the long bus ride and from all those stairs in Conand Tower, and her pulse thumped in her temple, which she blamed on a long exhausting day on the heels of a sleepless night. Though Mary spoke animatedly about the tour, Anna couldn’t do much more than nod, hum, and yawn.

“Poor thing,” Mary said. “You look so tired.”

“Any chance you have a painkiller in your giant purse, Mary?” Anna wondered.

“Oh, I think I have some ibuprofen,” she said, already beginning to rifle through it.

Anna grabbed her arm to make sure she didn’t barrel into a wall as they trooped after the rest of the tour group into the small dining room for dinner. The entire time she couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder, watching, waiting, half-expecting the ghost to be lurking around the last corner.

She never saw him, and that left a disappointed knot she couldn’t explain in her stomach.

She had run away from him; she couldn’t blame him if he got the hint and kept out of her sight.

So after lying down on the bottom bunk in her and Mary’s room and pretending to go to sleep, she decided she would seek him out and...apologize for her curtness with him the night before. Or something. He was probably lonely, she reasoned, and even if she couldn’t help looking like his old fiancee she could be polite and not leave him with a poor impression of her.

He wouldn’t hurt her, and so long as she didn’t look at his wounds he wouldn’t frighten her either. What would be the harm?

It was an echo of the last night but with a little more purpose. She didn’t bother with her mace this time and tied her shoes so she wouldn’t trip over the laces before sneaking into the hallway.

When Anna emerged into the castle corridor, she paused, ears peeled for the slightest hint of sound. “Who you gonna call,” she half-sang under her breath. “Ghost Felix…” Her heart skipped a beat, and her stomach quivered with nerves as she took another step.

“Felix?” she whisper-shouted. “Are you there? I-I wanted to—well, um, we’re leaving tomorrow, so I wanted to…” She trailed off at a flicker of a shadow ahead of her.

Seeing him materialize a second time didn’t fail to send a tremor of fear down her spine, but she tilted her chin back as the bloodied apparition approached her, his steps fluid and silent.

Anna’s breath caught as she looked him up and down, taking in the unhealed, unbandaged wounds that didn’t bother him. But why should they if he was dead?

His eyes narrowed falling on her. “You ran away last time,” he reminded her.

She twisted the hem of her cardigan between her hands and stared down at the stone between them. “I know,” she said. “I just...I wanted to apologize for that. It was rude of me, and I, um, I didn’t realize that you were probably just lonely.”

“Lonely?” he echoed. When her gaze snapped up to him, he scoffed and turned his face away from her. “I don’t lack for ghostly company. Perhaps you’ve noticed the others.”

“N-no,” Anna admitted, “just you.”

Felix hummed, his lips pressed together.

“You don’t approach everyone, do you?” she wondered.

He shook his head.

“W-why me then?” she pressed. “Is it just because I look like your betrothed?”

“It’s more than that,” he said in a low voice she had to strain to hear. “I...seeing you, hearing you, it’s like I’ve seen a ghost.”

“You’re the ghost here, Felix,” Anna pointed out.

A sardonic little smile curved his lips, making her wonder what it would take for him to really smile. “You should know what I meant,” he grumbled.

“I guess I do,” she said, shrugging. She took a step towards him, and when he neither tensed nor backed away, she took another.

If she extended a hand towards him, her fingertips should brush the buckle of the worn leather pauldron crossing his chest. But she curled her fingers into a fist and kept it at her side.

“W-what—” She cut herself off, uncertain if he would welcome a probing question, before licking her lips and asking anyway, “What keeps you here?”

Felix frowned, his brow furrowed with confusion or something like that. “What…?”

“D-do you have any regrets from life?” Anna said. “I-isn’t that why the dead linger? I mean, apparently legends from your day had something to say about that, so maybe you have a regret you need to let go of to...pass on.”

“Pass on?”

“Die for real,” she said.

Felix lifted a gloved hand and stared at it. “I am dead for true, Ann—” He broke off, grimacing. “I am dead,” he repeated without attempting to say her name.

“But you’re still...here,” she said, her hand waving for emphasis. “Do you really still want to be here?”

He crossed his arms, eyes on the ground. “When I was alive, I...the last thing I wanted was to die, or for my friends...to die.” His hand braced against his chest, as if pained. “Yet I died, and I’m the only one still here.”

“A-are you sure?” Anna blurted. When his eyes widened, she said, “You—you’ve talked to Sam—I mean, the tour guide, haven’t you? You thought he was someone else you knew?”

He didn’t answer her, but he didn’t need to. The way his lips twisted in a grimace and he turned away from her told her everything. Sympathy tugged at her, sharp and painful.

“I don’t know how or when my friends and my—when Annette died,” Felix confessed. “I don’t even know how long it’s been since I’ve died. I just know that I wasn’t there when—” He cut off again, pain written all over his bloodied, incorporeal face. “I know we lost the war,” he said, “but I always cared less about that than the others.”

Anna guessed he meant his friends, perhaps including the fiancee in Fhirdiad he wrote to before his death. “I...y-you know,” she said, “she could’ve survived the razing of Fhirdiad. Any of your friends could’ve lived after the war! You don’t know if they died in battle like you or in bed at an old age surrounded by their children and grandchildren.”

Felix snorted. “Ingrid was in Arianrhod with me,” he said. “Even if she’d survived the battle, she wouldn’t have its destruction. I witnessed my father die before I fell too. And Sylvain and the boar…no. Everyone died. It would be foolish to think otherwise.”

“And you couldn’t even accompany them into death,” Anna mused.

He flinched, his eyes sharp and glaring on her, but she didn’t quail. “It’s more than a resemblance,” he muttered, so low she wasn’t sure he meant for her to hear. “What are you now?”

“E-excuse me?” she stuttered.

“You were—Annette was a mage and a scholar,” Felix explained, “brighter and kinder than me. What are—what are you?”

Anna stared at him, stunned; was this ghost asking after her profession? “Oh, um, I’m a teacher,” she said once she recovered from her shock. “I teach middle school math and science.”

He nodded, as if he’d expected as much - and maybe he had, if he saw so much of his fiancee in her. It unnerved her, but she would...let him. She didn’t know what else she could do for him, or if she should do anything for him at all.

“What’s a ‘middle school’?” Felix asked then.

“Oh, it’s, uh...ha,” she laughed. “It’s a school for early adolescents! I guess you didn’t have middle schools specifically in y-your time, huh?”

“I suppose not,” he conceded. He met her eyes for just a second, but there was something probing in his gaze that brought heat rushing to her cheeks.

Even before he wondered, “Do you—do you still sing?”

“What?” Her eyes widened, but for some reason her heartbeat quickened as if he’d asked her something more personal like “what’s your worst fear?” or “what’s your credit card number?” Her mouth dried, but she cleared her throat and said, “What do you mean?”

“Do you...sing?” Felix repeated in a tone that suggested he wouldn’t be explaining himself.

Anna crossed her arms. “I-I guess so?” she said. “I was in chorus in high school and college, but I don’t really perform anymore…” She tapped her fingers against her cheek, humming. “I sing in the car when I’m driving, if that counts?”

His lips parted, as if he wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She smiled and hoped it didn’t look as nervous as she felt, not that she should be nervous, not—

“Would you sing for me?”

And now Anna knew she imagined things, because if encountering the same wounded, unhappy ghost two nights in a row was real, that ghost asking her to sing for him couldn’t be.

“I—no!” she blurted. “I-I can’t just sing on demand, Felix!”

“Oh. I...of course not.” He cleared his throat and turned his face, but she didn’t miss the damn pout on his lips.

It would not affect her. It could not affect. She would not let it affect her.

“I just hoped I might hear you—her sing one more time.”

Anna’s chest tightened, and before she could give her mouth permission it shaped the word, “Fine. I’ll...sing. Do you—do you have any requests?”

His gaze flew to her, something wild and hopeful in it that made her heart skip a beat, and despite the blood on his face, despite the fact she knew he was dead and a mere apparition and damaged and rude, she could...almost imagine falling in love with him.

Almost.

“Anything,” he said.

Anna nodded. Her heart beat unsteadily against her ribs as she leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the stone floor, never mind she was probably getting dirt or grime on her pajama pants. Felix sat beside her a foot or so away, his legs crossed and hands on the ground and eyes on her until she asked him to glance away, looking...almost relaxed.

Lucky him.

She sucked in a breath and sang an old nursery rhyme, “Living in a land that’s dark and blinded by the frigid c-cold…” Like Fraldarius, maybe. “Creeping through the loneliness for ages untold…” Felix didn’t know how long he’d been dead, did he? Her gaze snapped to his, her breath catching, but despite the rush of embarrassment at having someone so...focused on her, her voice strengthened as she continued:

“In your heart you’re desperate for the sweet embrace of light, pushing through and crawling with all of your might…”

Anna’s fingers crept towards his as she trailed off, and she watched with fascination - with an awful disappointment - as her hand passed through his until all she touched was cold stone. She withdrew, clasping her hands in her lap, and stuttered, “Th-that’s the song. It’s an old nursery rhyme, I-I hope it’s not too silly—”

She cut herself off when Felix’s hand hovered over her knee.

Anna glanced up, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Felix?” she whispered. “Was it—was it that bad? Did I insult her memory or something?”

He shook his head with a vehemence that startled her. “No, it was...perfect.” His eyes slipped shut, and he sighed. “Thank you.”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t know what else to say, how to argue how he could think it perfect when he sounded so unhappy, except—

He began to fade.

His edges fuzzed like a blurry picture, the vivid crimson of blood streaking his face and staining his coat dulling to rust. The blues in his clothes went next, and the yellow of his eyes clouding as if with cataracts.

Felix bolted upright and stared down at his legs, growing more transparent by the instant, and at his hands. “I’m…”

Anna stood with him, her heart heavy in her chest, uncertain as she was, not knowing what to do. “Are you—is this—are you going?” she said, her voice pitching high with her anxiety.

His face and body all melted away in patches, until she could see through him entirely. A gaping hole of nothingness in his chest grew wider, and another in his cheek. His gaze met hers.

A lump stuck in her throat, but she smiled.

The corner of Felix’s mouth twitched into what might’ve been a smile of his own. He shut his eyes.

When next Anna blinked, he was gone.

And she was alone in a creepy castle, exhausted and with an ache in her chest. Heartbreak, she realized, for all she’d been acquainted with the ghost for twenty-four hours and spoken to him far less.

For all she felt she’d known him much longer.

Anna clutched at her cardigan, right over her heavy heart. The corners of her eyes burned, and despite the pain she smiled for something like relief flooding her.

There would be one less ghost haunting Castle Fraldarius from now on, but her heart felt emptier too.

She would be fine. She would return to her room and collapse in her bunk and maybe sleep for a few hours before waking exhausted and explaining most of it to a sympathetic Mary on the bus ride back home. Maybe Sam would wink and ask her if a ghost kept her up all night, and she would pretend to laugh, and his smile would turn sympathetic as if he knew and understood.

But for now Anna lingered in the dark corridor, buried her face in her hands, and cried.

One year later

Anna hated driving to the Fhirdiad National Airport far more than she hated driving away from it after dropping her mother off at her terminal. It had been a pleasant enough visit (even if her mother kept insisting it was “inappropriate” that she lived with a man she had no romantic interest in) and she was sad to see it end and her mother leaving to return home. So she turned off her car’s awful air conditioning, rolled down her window to feel the wind tug at her hair, and raised the volume on her stereo to hear her music over the roaring of both wind and highway.

Her fingers drummed against the steering wheel as she wove through traffic. She knew she was prone to rushing on the way back to her apartment in downtown Fhirdiad, and this late in the afternoon...well, she was no stranger to rush hour.

There was a reason she woke up at stupid o’clock to get to school. Maybe she should move close enough she could walk or bike…

She didn’t relax until her car rumbled down the exit, even if she had to press hard on the brakes to stop at the white line. She stared around, waiting for the traffic light to shift to green, grinning at a little boy in the backseat of the car next to hers.

He just stared back, as if he couldn’t believe someone stared at him at all.

Anna stuck her tongue out at him.

His jaw dropped in shock, and she laughed...though her humor evaporated when the driver - his mother, probably - shot her a dirty look.

On her way home, Anna detoured to her favorite coffee shop only a few blocks from her and Ashton’s apartment. After driving so long in a single day, she could stand to treat herself to an iced tea and a chocolate cupcake that was almost as delectable as Mary’s.

Unfortunately she didn’t see Mary so often these days. Work kept them both busy, and even when she invited Anna over she always felt like a third wheel hanging out with both her and Sam. Maybe they should set something up soon, Anna, Mary, and Ashton, just like it used to be. They could go bowling, or for a picnic in the park, or attempt to cook a gourmet dinner for three and hope it proved less disastrous than last time.

Anna pumped her fist in triumph when her eyes caught a parking spot open just a block away from the coffee shop. Still singing along with her music, she somehow, carefully maneuvered her dinky little car into the spot, grateful that her dad had seen fit to teach her how to parallel park before he decided she didn’t need him anymore.

Her car shuddered as she turned the key in the ignition. Her stereo blared before cutting off when she opened her door.

Anna sang, “Oh, the dog days are over, the dog days are—”

Something struck her door, nearly slamming it back shut on her, and she heard something drop to the pavement outside.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed. What if the collision scratched the paint or worse? She couldn’t afford to pay for body work on her car! She cracked the door back open and slid out, her heart pounding as her gaze fell to a man lying crumpled on the ground, rubbing his head as he pushed himself up and groaned.

“A-are you okay?” Anna said. “Oh no oh no oh no. Are you—do I need to drive you to the ER? I can—please don’t sue me!”

The man rolled over, the dark knot of his hair looking flat and smooshed, but ignored her. “Damn…” he hissed, before blinking up at her.

Yellow eyes met hers, familiar in more than just color.

Her heart dropped, or lifted, or skipped a beat. She blurted, “Felix?!”

His eyes narrowed. “I...who?” He sat up and winced as he touched his shoulder. “That’s not my name.”

“I—oh,” she said. Her cheeks flushed, but she managed a smile and said, “Of course not. We’ve never met.” And he was certainly never a ghost haunting a castle over a hundred miles north of here. “How would I know your name?”

The dark-haired man just stared at her. His eyes at least seemed more focused now, as if the pain or stunning from his fall faded. “I...hmm.”

“What?” Anna offered him a hand. “Do you...um, need a hand?”

His mouth opened to make some snarky retort, she didn’t doubt, but then he sighed and grasped her hand.

He wore leather (fake or real, she couldn’t tell) biking gloves, but his hand felt warm and strong around hers. She heaved and tugged him to his feet, and his other hand balanced against the side of her car.

Anna let go before holding on for longer than necessary could get weird. But her stomach flipped when he glanced at her before bending over and righting a fallen bicycle she hadn’t even noticed.

She wasn’t an expert on bicycles by any means, but his looked sturdy and...expensive.

“Are you hurt?” Anna asked.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I-I can give you a ride to wherever you’re going,” she said. “I know we’re strangers, and, um, stranger danger, but I promise I’m not a serial killer trying to kidnap you.”

His eyebrow quirked. “I don’t doubt you,” he said, “but really, I’m fine.”

He did a poor job hiding a wince when he stretched his shoulders, broad even under his jacket.

It really...was Felix, somehow, even if he went by a different name.

“Well...it is my fault you took a tumble,” Anna insisted. 

“Not really,” he said. “I got—I was distracted. I should’ve paid better attention.”

Were his cheeks pink? Was he blushing?

He looked cute blushing and not quite looking at her…

“Can I make it up to you somehow?” she wondered. “There is a coffee shop here. I can buy you coffee?” And this time she couldn’t confess to a little ulterior motive.

Maybe her mother’s comments about her perpetual singlehood - not for lack of dates so much as lack of second dates - were beginning to get to her, or maybe watching Mary and Sam in their honeymoon phase left her as envious as she was happy for her long-time friend.

Or maybe she just wanted to get on this careless cyclist’s good side to make sure he didn’t sue her.

His lips parted in surprise as he glanced at her again, before he said, “S-sure. Coffee sounds...nice.”

A grin pushed at Anna’s lips, excitement thrumming within her. She locked her car and waved towards the sidewalk, all but bouncing on her feet. “Then let’s go!” She had to keep herself from skipping ahead of him, far too giddy considering she’d just hit him with her car door.

When he hesitated, disappointment threatened. She turned to face him, a question on her lips, only for him to point to her car and say, “Aren’t you going to close your window?”

Heat flooded her cheeks. She cleared her throat in a feeble attempt to dispel her embarrassment before doubling back.

The man waited for her with his arms crossed, and when she smiled at him he glanced away and scratched at his ear before he led the way to the coffee shop, wheeling his bike beside him.

In the end Anna swallowed her trepidation, ignoring the rapid beating of her heart, and dug through her purse for her phone. “W-what’s your name anyway?” she asked. “So I don’t save your number as ‘guy I slammed my car door into’.”

His eyes widened with obvious surprise, but the slight smile stretching his lips made her stomach flip. Their fingers brushed when he took her phone and when he handed it back after typing his name into it.

“I’ll, um, see you then?” he said.

“Anna,” she said. “My name’s Anna.”

“Anna,” he tried, as if the name was a foreign word rather than agonizingly common.

She liked the way he said it, careful and deliberate.

Her name, and no one else’s.

“Are you sure you don’t want a ride?” she wondered while watching him unlock his bike from the rack.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “My bike wouldn’t fit in your microscopic car.”

“My car is not microscopic!” Anna retorted, indignant despite herself. “It’s adorable.”

His eyebrow quirked, and the expression was so familiar she had to stifle a gasp. “Sure,” he said, that single word dripping skepticism.

He mounted his bicycle and didn’t spare her much more than a glance and one last goodbye before riding away. Anna watched him go, feet frozen to the sidewalk and her legs shaking with adrenaline as if she’d been the one who rode a bike into an open car door.

He wasn’t Felix, and she wasn’t Annette, but now, with the future stretching before her and her phone with his number and name programmed into it burning a hole in her purse, she knew they could be something.