Then, I saw her.
A flicker. A shift in the corner of my vision.
I turned, too drunk to react with speed, my vision blurred.
And there she was.
Zara.
She stepped from the shadows like a whisper given form. Pale. Still. Timeless.
My throat constricted. I couldn’t bring myself to look directly into her face. My heart pounded, and a cold sweat formed at the nape of my neck.
A hallucination.
A ghost.
Gods, let it be real.
“Balthazar… sweetheart,” she said, her voice so familiar that it gutted me. “You look miserable.”
“I am,” I choked out, barely able to form the words. I reached for the half-empty decanter of bourbon sitting atop the walnut cabinet and took a long, burning swallow. “My life is empty. A wasteland. A void.”
I staggered, weaving on my feet. I threw out a hand to brace myself against the wall.
“Listen to me,” I muttered, laughing bitterly through a throat thick with tears. “I’m talking to a ghost. A ghost! Ha! What a fool I’ve become.”
Drool slipped from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it with my hand, my vision swimming.
And still… she remained.
Zara stood in the pale candlelight, not a shimmer, not a whisper—but real enough to haunt me.
“You miss what we had,” she said softly, her voice brushing against the raw edges of my soul. “I do, too. I know you think of the children.”
I waved my hands through the air, as if conjuring the past.
“Their hair… like gold threads in the sun,” I whispered. “Their smiles. Their laughter. The way they ran to me when I came home from a raid—arms open, faces lit up like I was their entire world.”
A foolish, broken smile tugged at my lips.
“Yet you’ve never gone back,” she said, her voice like a caress upon my fevered brow.
“True.” My voice caught in my throat, barely audible. I swayed where I stood, unmoored, my mind swimming through memory and alcohol. “But maybe… maybe I still could. Maybe if I go back far enough, I can stop it. Save them. Reclaim it all.”
I turned to her, desperate to believe my own lie.
But the words died in my throat.
Her expression was soft and mournful. She reached out and touched my back—lightly, lovingly—like she used to. The tenderness in her eyes was unbearable.
“If only it were that easy, my love,” she whispered.
And then—like breath on glass—she was gone.
No sound. No flash. Just vanished.
An inhuman cry tore from my chest. The bottle slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor, shards of glass catching the dim light as bourbon bled into the expensive rug beneath me.
