The Ghost General

Chapter1;The Strange At The Door

Everen Mercer had been gone for eight years. He had been living in a world that mostly consisted of dust and gunpowder and sand. His boots were full of sand and his teeth were gritty. His soul was tired.

He had been sleeping in tents with canvas walls and starry ceilings. The only thing between him and death was his ability to pull a trigger and a lot of luck. He had spent eight years being someone else entirely.

Now he stood on the mat of his own house. His hand hovered over the doorbell like it was a bomb trigger. He had imagined this moment many times. He had thought about it in the dark of his bunker where he was mostly surrounded by maps and reports and computers. He had thought about this day after missions, when the adrenaline was over. He was left feeling empty and tired.

He had thought about it in his nightmares, the ones where he watched his daughter grow up through a fogged window he could never quite reach. In those dreams Nerissa always smiled when she opened the door. She always threw her arms around him. She always whispered that she had been waiting, that she had never stopped believing he would come back.

He had been a soldier long enough to know that dreams and reality are very different. He pressed the doorbell. The sound echoed through the house like a gunshot in a room. He straightened his posture, pulled at the collar of his leather jacket and tried to remember how to be a civilian.

He tried to remember how to be a husband. He tried to remember how to be a father. He had no idea if he still knew how to be any of those things.

From inside, he heard footsteps. They were slow and careful. It didn't feel like the steps of someone who was excited to know who was at the door. These were the footsteps of someone who had learned to be careful about what was on the side of the door. The lock turned, the knob twisted.

Then Nerissa was standing there and he forgot how to breathe. She looked different and… slightly older. The girl he had married had edges and a smile that could light up a room. The woman in front of him had cheekbones and dark circles under her eyes and a mouth set in a line that said she had learned to live without surprises.

Nerissa had learned to live without hope. She had learned to live without him. For a moment neither of them spoke. The world quieted around them. A bird chirped somewhere in the distance. He thought it was a silly sound because how could the world keep going when his entire universe was falling apart in front of him?

Nerissa's face changed with emotions. Shock, disbelief something that might have been joy for a second before it was replaced by anger. Then her face was cold and indifferent and that was the end of it. "You should have called,” she said, her voice cold.

The words hit him like shrapnel. Her voice was thin and low, but it was loud enough to cause maximum damage.

“I wanted to surprise you,” Everen said, and his voice came out rough from disuse. He'd been talking to soldiers for eight years, shouting orders and delivering briefings and occasionally screaming at God in the aftermath of all his fights and everything. He'd forgotten how to speak in the normal way people speak.

Nerissa's eyes flicked over him…her eyes dragging over the worn jacket, the washed jeans, the duffel bag that was probably the only thing he owned in the world. She saw a man who had come back with nothing. A man who had left everything behind and apparently hadn't found anything worth picking up along the way.

“Surprise,” she echoed, her voice flat and…just there.

Everen opened his mouth to say something… anything, but then a voice called out from inside the house, and the world tilted sideways.

“Nerissa? Who is it?”

It was a deep voice that sounded comfortable. It was a man's voice.

Everen watched as her face changed with different emotions… guilt… or worry? Before he could think much about it, a man appeared behind her in the hallway. He was tall, and broad shouldered. He was wearing an expensive suit. His hair was perfectly styled, his smile warm and his composure relaxed as if he belonged there and he owned the place.

“Oh I'm sorry,” the man said, coming forward, stretching out his hand. “I didn't realsiee you were expecting company,” he smiled and Everen. “I'm Leontis Ardin. A friend of the family.”

Everen Mercers hand moved on its own shaking the one offered to him. He felt the grip, and the practiced warmth that was emitting from this man, he saw the calculating look in Leontis's eyes that said he was sizing up his competition and finding it lacking.

“I'm Everen,” he said. “Nerissa’s husband.”

The word hung in the air between them. Husband. It felt like a lie even though it was true. It felt like claiming something that had already been taken by someone

Leonti's smile never wavered. “Ah, that Everen,” he said. “I've heard much about you.” There was something underneath the politeness, something that said he had heard what he was supposed to hear. “Well come in come in you must be tired from your journey.”

He stepped back gesturing like he was the one who decided who was welcome in this house. Like he was the one who had put down roots here while he was there fighting. Nerissa moved aside and he stepped over the threshold of his own home.

The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was different. Before he had left, the house always smelled like cinnamon and sugar, because Nerissa almost always baked jn tge kitchen. Now it smelled like perfume and fancy candles and everything that screamed “someone else lives here now.”

The second thing he noticed was the photos. There had been a wall in the hallway at the entrance that he had built it himself which was a display of the family pictures that Nerissa had curated with love. Their wedding photo, the hospital picture of Niva's birth, the three of them at the park at the beach at Christmas at Easter and many others that he had slightly forgotten.

Now there were different photos. Nerissa and Leontis at a restaurant smiling at the camera, Niva with Leontis at her birthday party, her little face covered in cake. Eleanor surrounded by her grandchildren, who were not Everen Mercer's children.

Every single photo of him was gone. His books too that he used to put on a shelf on that side of the wall. His life was erased from the walls like it had never even existed in the first place. His chest tightened, his throat closing up, but he did not say anything. He was a soldier, trained to withstand pain and keep moving without shaking.

He followed Nerissa into the living room. Eleanor sat there on the armchair that had always been his favourite, the one made with original leather and a comfortable seat that had shaped into his body shape over the years. She was knitting something passive aggressively, and any time Eleanor was furiously knitting, she was didn't want to give anybody attention.

Her eyes flicked uo when he entered, and if Nerissa's reaction had been one of indifference, Eleanor's own was of pure anger.

“Well,” she said aggressively in a tone of someone who just discovered a rat in her kitchen. “Look what the cat dragged.”

He had been ambushed in three countries. He had been shot at, stabbed at, and once had a knife thrown at his head from a very close up range. He had looked death in the face many times that they had become old acquaintances.

But, nothing, absolutely nothing had ever made Everen Mercer's blood run cold like the sight of Eleanor's expression. “Eleanor,” he greeted, his voice cold, flat, careful and measured. the voice he used when he was meeting a senior for the first time. “It's good to see you.”

“Liar,” she said pleasantly. “But we won't hold that against you will we? You've always been good at saying what people want to hear. Just not so good at doing what they need you to do,” The words were a knife slipped between his ribs with precision.

He did not flinch tho. He had learned to take hits without reacting. It was how he had survived. It was also when he was starting to realize how he had lost his family.

“Mom,” Nerissa said, but there was no real heat in her voice.

“No, no it's fine,” Eleanor said, not looking up from her knitting. “I'm sure he has a good reason for disappearing for eight years. I'm sure he was doing something important.” She paused, her needles clicking. “Something that was definitely more important than his daughter's first steps, her first words, her first day of school….Her—”

“Mom!” Nerissa said, her voice sharper this time. “Not now.”

“Well when then?” Eleanor set down her knitting things and fixed her eyes on him, with a stare that could have stripped paint. “When would you like me to welcome the husband who never sent a penny never called, never visited, never—”

But the words drifted into his ears as confusion washed over him.

“But I sent letters,” he said quietly in confusion.

The words came out before he could even stop them. He had not meant to say anything. He had meant to stand and take it like a soldier to weather the storm until he could find a moment alone with Nerissa to explain in private to talk to her about what was going on.

“Excuse me?” Eleanor's eyebrows rose. “What did you say?”

“I said I sent letters.” Everen's voice was steadier now. “Every month. Money, too. Care packages… everything. I sent everything I had.”

He wasn't looking at Eleanor. He was looking at Nerissa, watching her face, waiting for something. Maybe recognition or understanding… anything.

But Nerissa's face remained a blank wall. She stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said slowly.

And then Everen saw it. Saw the flicker in Eleanor's eyes. The brief moment of triumph that was quickly masked by... by something else. Something almost like panic.

“Shame! Shame on you for even lying, you incapable man! How dare you come in here and lie?!”

That look of panic told him. Eleanor had done something.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

He didn't care about her rants. He opened his mouth to demand answers and to force the truth into the light, to—

“Daddy?”

The voice was small and uncertain. It hit Everen like a bullet to the heart. He turned, and there she was.

Niva was standing in the doorway of the living room. She was small, so small, with dark hair braided in pigtails and eyes that looked exactly like Nerissa's. She was clutching a stuffed rabbit with one ear slightly chewed, the same stuffed rabbit Everen had bought her for her first birthday, the one she'd refused to sleep without.

She was staring at him like he was a ghost.

Because that's what he was. A man who had existed in her memory. Maybe Eleanor had managed to erase him from there too.

“Hey kiddo,” Everen said, his voice cracking on the last word. “I'm home.”

Niva did not move. She did not smile. She just stared at him with those brown eyes trying to figure out if the stranger in her living room was someone she should be scared of.

“Daddy?” she said again. This time it was a question. Like she was testing the word seeing if it still fit. “Is it really you?”

Everen knelt down, ignoring the pain in his knees, the arthritis that came from years of crouching in foxholes, the scar tissue that pulled tight whenever he moved a certain way.

“Yeah baby,” he said. “It's me. I'm here.”

Niva took a step forward. Then another.. Then she was running, crashing into him with all the force her small body could muster her arms wrapped around his neck her face buried in his shoulder.

He held her. He held her like she was the thing keeping him tethered to the earth.. Maybe she was.

“You…you are a bad daddy,” she said slowly like she was remembering the words, like she was repeating.

For Everen, it felt like the world crashed and collapsed around him. He knew he had made mistakes and he knew he had not been there for Niva. But this was… this was more than he could handle.

“I know i haven't been there for you and I'm so sorry, my love,” he grabbed his daughter tight ad if to shake her to reality. “I—”

“Everen.” Nerissa's voice sounded from behind him, her voice cold. He looked up. She was staring at him with something that might have been pity or might have been disgust.

“Niva needs to go to bed. It's been a long day.” She looked at their daughter. “Niva say goodnight.”

Niva pulled back from Everen. Her face was a storm of emotions she was too young to understand.

“Goodnight Daddy. Even if you were bad, i still miss you,” she said and the word was hollow and empty, different from the way she'd said it just moments ago.

Everen watched her walk away. She paused at the doorway and looked back at him.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” she asked.

There was much hope in that question and fear.

Everen looked at Nerissa. He looked at Leontis, who was watching the scene with the expression of a man who was already planning his next move. He looked at Eleanor, who was pretending to be absorbed in her knitting.

“Of course,” he said, the lie tasting like ash in his mouth.

He did not know if he'd be here tomorrow. He did not know what was going to happen tonight.

But he knew one thing. He was going to fight for his family. Niva disappeared up the stairs and the house fell silent.

Then Leontis cleared his throat.

“I hope you don't mind,” he said, “but I was actually in the middle of showing Niva how to do her math homework when you arrived. She's been struggling with fractions. I promised her I'd help her get caught up before her test tomorrow.”

He smiled that fake warm smile.

Everen felt his blood churn inside of him.

“I'm sure you understand,” Leontis continued. “It's important for her to have stability. Especially now. With all the changes happening.”

The words hung there like an accusation or a warning… he couldn't tell.

Stability. Changes. Her test tomorrow.

Everen had missed many tests. He had missed many everything.

He watched Leontis walk toward the stairs, confident and comfortable like he owned the house. Like he owned the family. Like he owned everything Everen had ever loved.

Then Leontis paused at the bottom of the steps and turned back.

“Oh one more thing,” he said. “I've been meaning to tell you. In sixty days, Niva would legally become my daughter.”