'We break promises, by volition or by accident, by fate or by circumstance.'


A promise stands in the room, a promise to keep a secret. Former friend, soldier and lover Thomas was good at keeping secrets. He isn't used to making someone promise themselves, to swear on their silver colors, not to tell. It takes some convincing.

"No one knows you are alive?"

"The people in this base know the fogland soldier, part of a cell of rebels in woods. I killed a lot of-" I only kill silver, not red. It is as wasteful as wrong to tell that to this silver royal. "I was good at fighting. I didn't care for their revolution. I just wanted the fight. Your brother knows I'm alive, there is no way he doesn't. I tried to shoot him or his mother in the capital. That is where the Guard found and retrieved me."

It's a lot to take in. He sees the thoughts race behind the blinking brown eyes and the mouth that twitches, and for a second the Ghost is prepared to run, because why ever would he have trust in this strange relationship build on the memory of someone that wants them both dead?

"Listen. If they knew, they'd lock me in, and I hate being confined in small spaces too long," he whispers in low cracks. It's a confiding silence. "Your brother left me to die, and he'll just kill me again if he sees me. I am not important to him anymore. He has other things in his mind. Don't tell them. Don't tell anyone."

Other things, it is a kind way to describe the current undertow of struggles for power and control in and outside the system of this nation.

"Then what do you want, Thomas?" Something in the Ghost feels numb and tingling again in some pain because the light keeps on playing tricks on him. He has to remind himself, as he reminded himself of Cameron's name and all the other small things, that this is real. That this is not the one his rifle aimed at up from a window.

What makes a good man, Thomas? What do you think?

What makes a man worth living? What makes a fight worth fighting for?

There is the memory of two creatures that resembled life once. Now, not so much.

He cannot shake the argument off, thoughts circling like the murder of crows over the battlefield. A murder of crows, a greedy hungry flurry of black feathers and keen eyes. A poetic way of saying he cannot escape them.

And so he does face them, this one time.

"I offer you my gun," The Ghost just speaks out his thin plans. "I know that the island won't stay inactive for too long. You just dismantled a prison, you can't stay for too long. People in charge have to work with it. The Colonel had to stand up now that you came back to Tuck with the corpse of a Queen and other things in your pocket. I don't want to stay here. So if you want me. I offer to go and if I can, I will shoot your brother in his face."

This time, this time he will not falter.

"Not here," The exiled prince decides. He has his own shadows and scars, like everyone in this life, but at least now, at this moment, he is convinced to take some of Thomas' too.

The Ghost only nods, and with one last look, he moves up and away. Away from the barrack that he used to sleep in, with the pillow that he used to keep the seashells and driftwood under. He moves away from wandering in fever dreams, from trying to gain some consciousness in weeks spend on a road, on a boat, on an island.

Another secret mission. Another suicide mission. Another trip toward a place he hates with a passion, a place that the Ghost of Thomas has the memory of a newborn child, faint, unrecognizable in the wakeup call that is the snow of the ashlands. The Choke is still just that, the end and the start of pain and blood.

"So the plan is to march in there and stop children to get killed, as well as breaking in the line at a point that your brother-" it burns the tip of his tongue, he doesn't say the name, he never will say the name out loud. "Never noticed? I am a dead man. I suppose it would be plausible to die where I survived first. Are we marching straight into the Choke to get shot? What is the destination?"

There is nothing Tiberias Calore can say to that, and he doesn't need to, because it is a silent joke that the Ghost of Thomas points at the sky, somehwere to a hideout of a red eyed soothsayer. "We pass Corvium first."

Traveling back to where he has started his life. Perhaps the world always has a strange sense of humor. After he told Cameron she would die there, now he returns himself, just a face hidden again, unrecognizable, just a small, non-factor in the big.

Thomas knew his way around superior officers. The fogland warrior didn't care for the adverse and opportunity of command as long as his gun could pump bullets into silver soldiers.

"I haven't been in Corvium for a very long time," the Ghost rasps back over. "I haven't been in the Choke a long time either."

At first, it seems like a tripwire trap to take him along as a volunteer. But they need people that are disguisable as younger. And he isn't too tall, too big, he is just a ghost, after all.

"He has his own wanted poster. They still pay a reward for his head, he is a sought after criminal for them."

That catches the attention of a few people, a few heads that he knows, like block letter crooked hand Cameron or the Lakelander in the distance.
Not the Colonel nor the other Farley show up around his perimeter, and he is glad he hasn't gotten to stand to attention to the Colonel again.
The Ghost curls his gloved fists into hands.

"He's not the only one that's easily recognizable," the exiled prince argues. "Give him a helmet, and no one will see his face."

He retrieves strangely assistance from the other side as well, with Bree Barrow.

"I can be very quiet." The Ghost attempt to assist in the matter. "I infiltrated the capital on my own."

It's an argument, but the deadpan delivery of his words makes everyone in the round startle.

In the end, it is about his injuries as well. The cracked ribs and faded bruises are a trajectory of nothings for the Ghost.

"I'm functional," he says. The iron gun sings in his fingers, the metal that is not worn out to his touch, a stranger, but they will be accustomed, there is enough to do that will bind them in blood and pain.

He repeats that sentence when everyone boards the big jet to leave Tuck. Functional, functional, functional.

His hands would cradle the gun, instead, they hold the helmet.

The Girl with the block letters- Cameron Cole- hides herself well in the background. She prefers the kind of quiet the Ghost can appreciate. So he straps in the seat next to her and another, one that shifts in changes and shapes, faces that blur until they fit her skin like the scales of some exotic reptile. It could be worrisome if the Ghost knew to worry. He only knows that the shaped shifts aren't hurting him.

"This is Just Thomas," Cameron says after the Ghost keeps staring at the shifting form, until, with a final swoop, a much younger version of a the face that was held before shows, a wrong face, a face that is stolen. "This is Nanny."

"Hello." That is all the Ghost answers before turning back. "They say you can silence powers." He doesn't dance around the subject.

Her eyes take in his disheveled form, all the scars, but not bothered or repulsed. "Yes?"

"It is a handy gift. To break them into pieces. To mute them. I am Red. Just Red." He clarifies. He receives a brow knitting together. The seatbelt cuts into his jacket. It is always the clothes of some faction, some sort of war striped funeral gown. The helmet weighs too much in his arm. "And you wanted to go to the Choke alone. Now we can die together down there."

"I'm not gonna die. But if you want to, feel free," She scowls and turns her head away.

"So far, it never worked out for me," The Ghost whispers back. No talk afterward. A few scrambled words to the shapeshifter, a few to the Lakelander. A few guarded words to Bree Barrow, just a tip of it, as long as his sister is not the thing he constantly guards like a bone a dog. Thomas used to be a son and brother, he remembers the fragments of family and caring for them. Wanting to protect them.

He stares at Mare Barrow and wonders what would happen to Jon's precious visions if he walks over right tests the words in his head staring at her silent form, the defiant sitting form of a girl younger than him, with the power to conjure a force of nature.

Hello Miss Barrow, my name is Thomas, and I used to be a friend and a lover, until that boy I loved killed me, and his mother made sure to silence me. you may know him, he wears a crown now. Now we are both here, isn't that strange? I promise I will kill him for you.

At one point, he uncorks himself from the station in the back and walks slowly, like a sleepwalker, over the middle plank into the cockpit. He doesn't sit down next to the piloting burner. He leans on the back of the seat. It doesn't feel like it is his to take, and he doesn't feel to stay anyway. So instead, all he does is watch with light interest.

"You must feel out of place," the Ghost whispers. "I can relate."

The light from the blinking instruments lulls them into a cocoon of a too bright stroboscope, a fluttering wingspan of too many functions and warnings that may be flaring up at any moment. "I see that. Your face isn't the only thing that got-"

"Ruined. Disfigured. Taken?" The Ghost offers watching the hands with the small scars and silver metal on wrists. "We all have our burdens to bear. I appreciate you sharing mine right now. And if I perish fighting, it may be best for all of us."

"Do you want to die, Thomas?"

The world rushes below the jet, a fall that may murder them if it comes now.

The Ghost of Thomas forces his sight into the tired spectrum of brown and black that is Tiberias Calore's hair and eyes, studying his curved mouth. "Do you want to live like this? If this war comes, what's going to come for you? Someone like me doesn't need to plan a future. I'm not alive. You are."

Again, it is a question with too little time to answer. He could take the seat and stay. But he doesn't want to. So he sits back and straps in , closes his eyes and tries to calm himself.

Everything around him screams, delivering doom, he will be in the front, and he will die- die- the screams are shouts of dying man, they are the sounds of families, soldiers in trenches, they are everything he knows, except the damn crows-

The clapping and shouts inside the jet are just as loud as the screams in his memory, and the sudden movement makes him jerk painfully upwards, ready for an attack. It is Nanny's hand on his arm that stops him.

"Riots," she says.

"More dead," the Ghost answers.

Nothing else is to say or do until the world falls apart and reforms in another death.

The explosion and the impact shudder through his freshly healed bones. It rips a hole inside the jet and waddles it together like a scorned hand does with a paper.

Every face is a blur.

With a split second, his body turns soft, melts like skin under flames did so many years ago, rolls together as it did on the top of the bridge in Archeon. It screams in pain but survives the sudden impact of the metal and the fall. Trapped in between a ripped off coatwing and more corpses, Thomas only remains a protective ball of yarned muscles and clothes. The helmet is gone.

His face is buried in the rubble. He just lies in the metal cradle and dreams. Blood forms a red pool underneath his brow, drips over his eye, scratched, cut, forsaken-

The feeling is awfully familiar by now.

There's a question in the room, and it stands high and tall like the metal that buries his ribcage.

It is the question of lying still or standing up to do anything. It's a question of staying face down in the mud or standing up to do what he promised to do, to fight and to kill.

An iron friend made of a shower of bullets stands no chance against the row of metal benders, a knife is a joke told by a drunk man at a gallow, and his own body feels crushed beside the maimed body of a man.

No ash rains from the sky tonight.

He holds his breath a moment. Waits for his inner walls to crumble and break. He cannot feel his feet. His body screams to him in garbled instincts. They are wires that bypass the deadman switch of his emotions. His fingers bury into the ground littered with blood, skin, burned parts of the Blackrun. They tell him to stay silent and breathe low, to lie between the dead, to not move. They listen to the voices shouting, and they listen to the footsteps vibrating in the ground around him.

He wants to stand up and fight, glorious strife of a spark, taking as many as he can. Instead, he blacks out. He only wakes up when hands start to dig him out of the dirt.