simon ‘ghost’ riley

The bell rings three times.

Sound falls out of the sky in hollow, shivering waves, rolling over wheat fields, birch trees and the low stone houses that have watched this same ritual repeat itself for longer than anyone bothers to count. The sun hangs low and gluttonous, heavy with light, spilling it all over the white linen bodies moving toward the hill.

Simon walks among them.

He’s bare-foot on the packed dirt path, robe brushing his ankles, fingers pressed neatly around the leather cord that binds his hymnbook. He matches the cadence of everyone else’s steps without thinking. Left, right. Left, right. The air smells like crushed herbs and old smoke, like the inside of the Temple, like childhood.

Ahead of him, {{user}} walks.

The fabric of their robe is the same as his, but it clings differently, the curve of their shoulders tilted in a way he knows too well. He’s always been good at reading their posture; has been doing it since they were small, since the days they’d kneel side by side on the stone floor and copy scripture until ink stained their fingertips and bled into the whorls of their skin.

Their hands are empty. Everyone else carries something—flowers, candles, braided ropes. They carry nothing. Their fingers twitch.

They’re shaking.

He stares at the back of their neck where the rope of the hood ties off in a neat bow. A few strands of hair have slipped loose, dark against the pale cloth. He remembers braiding that hair once, clumsy fingers learning the pattern while they both hid behind the smokehouse during a thunderstorm. They’d been ten. The thunder had sounded like God clearing His throat.

“Brother Simon.”

He jolts. An Elder to his left nods toward the hill. “You will stand with the Inner Ring today,” he says, voice smooth as milk. “Our Lady has chosen you.”

His spine straightens. Pride slips in, startling and warm, softening the edges of something that had been quietly grinding inside his chest all afternoon.

“Of course,” he says.

His voice is steady. Good. He tightens his grip on the hymnbook, knuckles whitening around leather gone shiny with years of use. Chosen. The word tastes clean. Righteous. Holy.

It does not taste like fear.

On the hill, the altar waits.

It used to be just a rock—he remembers that, or thinks he does. Now it’s something else entirely: polished so often it gleams, ringed by carved symbols he’s traced with his own hands a hundred times. There are garlands of wildflowers wound around its edges; their petals are already starting to droop under the weight of the sun.

The whole valley is gathered. White robes blot the hillside, bright and terrible as a colony of mushrooms growing from a dead tree. Children fidget at the front, their small faces radiant with the particular excitement that comes from not understanding what they’re watching. The Elders stand closest to the altar, crowns of woven birch branches perched on silver hair.

Simon spots them again near the front.

They’re standing too straight, hands clasped, shoulders locked. Their eyes are fixed on the figure already waiting at the altar’s base.

It’s Eli.

Of course it’s Eli.

Eli, with the laugh that always came too loud during evening chores. Eli, who once smuggled them both a bruised apple he’d stolen from the storage cellar, splitting it neatly with a dull knife so they could each have a half. Eli, who’d sat between them during sermons and tapped nervous rhythms against his knees whenever the High Father started to speak about fire.

Simon feels an old, familiar shift inside him. Something like grief. Something like relief.

He volunteered, he reminds himself. They always do.

The High Father steps forward, arms outstretched. His robe is heavier than the others, embroidered with gold thread that flashes whenever he moves.

“Children,” he calls, voice ringing out over the crowd. “Today, we honor the Covenant.”

A murmur passes through the congregation—a ripple, a shiver. Fingers tighten around candles. Heads bow.

Simon doesn’t bow. Not yet. His eyes go back to them as the crowd begins the Response.

“We give what is owed,” everyone whispers. “We offer what is necessary.”

He remembers the first time he saw them cry.

He’d been seven. They were six—small, serious, with ink on their chin from falling asleep over their scripture slate. It had been after a Purification; their parents had been chosen to join the work teams in the outer fields. It should have been an honor. Everyone said so. Still, they’d sat behind the Temple afterward, back pressed to the stone, shoulders shaking silently as the sky bruised itself into evening. He hadn’t known what to do, so he’d sat down beside them and pressed his own small shoulder against theirs until their breathing evened out.

No one ever told on him for missing evening prayer that night. He’s always taken that as a sign. As proof that some things are so right even God looks away to give you privacy.

Now he takes one small step closer, until he can feel the tremor running through them travel from their body into his.

Their hand hangs by their side, fingers curled. He lets his own brush against it. A whisper of contact. Barely there.

“It’s all right,” he says softly, voice lost in the chant that’s building around them. “You know this. You’ve always known this.”

Eli is kneeling now at the altar, hands lashed in front of him with a braided cord. He’s smiling. Of course he’s smiling, the idiot. Flowers have been tucked into the collar of his robe, their stems slick with sap. He looks like a groom.

The chant swells.

Simon hears the words but doesn’t listen to them. He doesn’t need to. They live in his bones.

He leans closer.

“They chose him,” Simon says, low enough that it’s barely sound. “Out of everyone, they chose him. Our Lady doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Look at him,” Simon murmurs. “He’s—”

He stops himself before he says happy. The word feels wrong, too small. Eli looks… surrendered. Like a rope finally slackening after years of being pulled taut.

The High Father raises his hands; the chanting cuts off mid-syllable, dropping into silence so sudden Simon’s ears ring.

“My children,” the High Father says. “Today we return one of our own.”

He gestures, and the Inner Ring moves.

Simon is part of it now. He steps forward, leaving them behind. The emptiness at his side feels like a missing limb. Four other young men and women join him, forming a loose semicircle around the altar. Their faces are blank, serene. They have been preparing for this moment their whole lives—breathing the same air, swallowing the same doctrine, seeing the same pictures in their dreams.

A boy passes Simon a torch. The flame wavers, thin and uncertain in the bright afternoon.

His fingers curl around the wooden handle.

Steady, he thinks. This is nothing. This is everything.

He’s never sure.

From here he can see Eli’s face more clearly. There’s sweat on his upper lip. His eyes lock with Simon’s, and for a split second, something raw slices through the haze of sanctity between them.

Fear.

It’s there and gone in a heartbeat, but Simon sees it. Of course he does. He’s always seen the things he wasn’t supposed to.

He feels the faintest crack in the smooth shell of his certainty. A tiny, hairline fracture.

It’s normal, he tells himself sharply, fingers tightening around the torch. Even the faithful flinch. Even Christ begged in the garden. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

The High Father begins to speak the old words then, the ones Simon knows but will never fully understand. They pour over him, heavy and sweet, like honey left in the sun too long. The crowd responds at the appropriate places, a chorus of devotion, a wall of sound.

Simon steps forward.

His body knows what to do. He’s watched this same motion played out so many times that his muscles carry him without his mind’s consent. He feels like a shadow of himself as he hands his torch to the High Father, who touches its flame to the kindling at the base of the altar.

The wood catches greedily.

Smoke curls upward, pale and fragile at first, then darker. The flowers on the altar edge begin to wilt, petals curling in on themselves as if in prayer. Eli’s smile flickers, his jaw tightening, but he doesn’t pull away when two of the Inner Ring members place steadying hands on his shoulders.

Simon doesn’t look at the knife.

He knows it’s there, resting on the stone, hilt wrapped in white cloth. He’s cleaned it before, watched the Elders polish it until it gleamed like water, like a promise. He knows it will rise soon, that the High Father will lift it high enough for the sun to catch the blade, for everyone to see.

He keeps his eyes on Eli’s face instead.

“If he had not been chosen,” Simon says suddenly, voice low, meant only for the person standing somewhere behind his left shoulder, “he would have grown old here.”

He doesn’t know why he’s speaking. This isn’t part of the ritual. But the words keep coming, rough-edged and earnest.

“He would’ve bent his back in the fields until it broke. He would’ve watched his hands turn into his father’s. He would’ve wondered why Our Lady never looked his way.” Simon swallows. His throat feels lined with ash. “This is… It’s mercy.”

The High Father’s hand closes around the knife.

Simon’s vision tunnels. The sky blurs. The smell of smoke thickens, clogging his lungs. For one wild moment, he is five again, his father’s silhouette haloed by flames, the world reduced to orange and black and the wet, animal sound of people crying in ways they will later call singing.

His fingers twitch at his sides.

Don’t move, he orders himself, teeth grinding. Don’t you dare move.

He hears the High Father speak the final words, the ones that seal this whole thing in place, make it holy instead of horrifying.

“Go, child of the Covenant,” the High Father intones. “Go and soften the heart of God.”

The knife lifts.

Time folds in on itself.

Somewhere, a child starts wailing, high and fracturing. A mother hushes them with a hand over their mouth. The crowd sways forward, as if pulled by strings. The smoke curls, obscuring the altar for a heartbeat.

Simon doesn’t watch the knife fall.

He turns instead.

He turns and finds them.

Their face is pale, eyes too wide, irises blown dark. There’s a smear of something on their cheek—ash, or dirt, or maybe the memory of the last time they touched Eli’s face. Their hands shake at their sides, fingers opening and closing like they’re trying to grasp something that isn’t there.

Behind them, the crowd is already beginning to murmur again, voices picking up in a low chant as the first real plume of acrid smoke rises from the altar. The ritual is moving forward without them. Without him.

He steps in close, so close that his robe brushes theirs, thin fabric whispering against itself. For a second he just stands there, breathing with them, matching the frantic rhythm of their chest with his own.

He reaches up and cups the back of their neck, fingers warm against their damp skin. It’s an intimate touch, too intimate for the middle of a ceremony, but that’s always been their secret: that they were allowed to find each other in the spaces between rules.

“Look at me,” he says quietly.

He slides his hand to their jaw, thumb resting just below their ear, and gently turns their face toward his. Their eyes dart everywhere but his—over his shoulder, past his ear, down at his mouth.

There’s a faint, distant roar behind them, the sound of fire finding more to eat.

“You know what they would say,” Simon murmurs. His voice is softer than he feels. “If you’re going to cry, do it for the right reasons.”

“They would say,” he continues, and he can hear the cadence of the Elders in his own mouth now, the pattern of their teachings, “that your sorrow isn’t for him. It’s for you. For the part of you that still holds on to what Our Lady is asking you to let go.”

He watches the words hit. Watches the way their throat works around them, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing.

His thumb strokes back and forth along their jaw. A small, grounding motion.

“He’s not gone,” Simon says. “He’s just… ahead.” His lips twitch in something that isn’t quite a smile. “He’s doing the hard part for us. We stay. We sow and reap and bleed in smaller ways. He gets to be first.”

A crack of something sharp splits the air, and someone in the crowd gasps. The smoke thickens. The chanting swells to cover the sound, to swallow it whole.

Simon feels them flinch under his hand, their skin suddenly hot.

He leans in until his forehead almost touches theirs.

“This is how we keep everyone safe,” he whispers. “This is how the rains come. How the fields stay green. How the fever doesn’t take the babies.” His voice dips, fierce and urgent. “You and I, we know what it’s like when the fields go dry. When the fever comes. We’ve seen what happens when there isn’t enough.”

Behind them, the fire roars.

The High Father cries out a final blessing, and the crowd answers. The sound is huge, a tidal wave of voices crashing over the hillside. Children clap. Women raise their hands. Men thump their fists against their chests, robes billowing with the movement.

Simon straightens.

He lets go of their wrist with a reluctant little squeeze, like he’s handing them back to the moment.

“Breathe. Watch,” he says under his breath.