Tears in the Rain

After millennia, he remembers only one moment from his actual life: the ending.

He remembers the sounds of arrows flying overhead, and worse, the wet thuds when they found flesh. He remembers the screams of the dying, men and beast alike. He remembers the coppery tang of blood on his lips. And, of course, he remembers the moment of shock — and then horror — of not being able to feel his legs.

As his heart pumps blood out of his body instead of through it, he remembers looking at the clear blue sky and wondering if this is all there was to life.

The next memory he has is is impossible, of course: any memory a person has after they die is impossible. And yet, he recalls the sense of standing in the village of Leuctra like it were yesterday. It’s another battlefield, another battle, and he remembers the soldiers arrayed against each other, swords and shields ready.

He was a good soldier in his short life, and he acts on his good training, instinctually; as his army charges forward, he does too, though he has no weapon in his hands. When the lines clash and he passes through the enemy, he falls.

The rest of it passes in a haze. Men scream and fight, charge and die, and he remembers very little of it, except that every time he tries to touch something, he simply passes through them.

At the end, when the dust settles and the bodies are taken away, he accepts that he, too, should be amongst them. It is not Tartarus, nor is it Elysium, and he sees none of the Gods that he has been taught of; it is simply the world, and he is a shade.

His first breakthrough is twelve years later. He remembers, with vivid detail, the gleaming armor made of bronze and iron, the polished weapons, the sigils of the eagle and the lion rampant, the stoic and worried faces of the men about to changed forever.

He stands int he middle of the field and watches as the lines clash. There is a moment when he sees a younger soldier - a kid, really, even younger than he was when he died - about to be skewered by a grizzled veteran. He doesn’t remember which side he should be supporting, but he knows - he feels - the certainty of the young man’s death. And when he reaches out to nudge the veteran’s blade it aside, it moves. Just a little, just enough to miss. He is just as astonished as the veteran, who is frozen in surprise for long enough that the young man somehow lands a lucky hit on him, a glancing blow that nevertheless forces him to disengage.

After he recovers, he tries again and again to influence another action, but it seems like he’s back to his incorporeal self. But he is not dissuaded: he knows with absolute certainty that there is some way of changing the world; he just needs to figure out how.

The next hundred, then two hundred, then five hundred years pass as he uses every battle to train, try, and test himself. He finds himself on deserts and plains, on triremes and man-of-wars, between armies and navies of almost every continent. Over the half a millennia, he hones his ability. He comes to understand that it is a subtle art: he can’t cause a platoon to stop firing; he doesn’t have the ability to act on more than one person. But what he can do is turn aside - or make true - a single blade or arrow, a bullet or cannon.

And as he trains, one life at a time, he learns that there are many battles - and some wars - that are won or lost on the thrust of a single blade or the shot of a single bullet.

This, he thinks, must be the reason that he is still on wandering. There must be some battle to change, some war to win, a history that must be changed, and he must learn to do so.

On a day in May, he puts two thousand years of practice into effect. He waits with the 18th Infantry Regiment, having watched a daring general split his forces and attack the opposing army successfully in the last few days. He can tell that the officer is a gifted strategist, and he can tell that the war will go poorly for the other side because of the skill of this one man. And because of the cause, he knows that this must be the moment.

The general is returning to a friendly camp, and he takes this moment to put his learnings to use. Under the cover of darkness, he waits, and the general returns to camp from a personal reconnaissance trip. A sentry calls out.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

He does the one thing to bring chaos into what would otherwise be an orderly identification: before the general’s staff can respond, he fires one of the sentry’s rifles. The other sentries fire as well, believing that it is the enemy upon them, and even though there are protests of friendly fire, a second volley is fired, and the general is struck three times.

Eight days later, the general dies, and the war changes. Two years later, the north wins, and history, the ghost believes, is changed.

And yet, there is no horn, no shout, no celebration of the gods. He continues to linger, and starts to wonder if Tartarus was ill-defined, and that being an observer of humanity without any reason was an untold of punishment.

It is a hundred years later when something at last snaps him out of his despair. He sees unarmed protestors calling out an unjust war and standing against a row of guns, and he summons something within him that has laid dormant for decades to save at least one life. He can’t save them all, of course, but he pushes at least one gun aside.

This time, afterwards, he feels a warmth, as if he’s rested by a small fire. He’s felt warmth before, but never so clearly. He’s never been so certain. In pursuit of that warmth, he has a new goal: no longer is he trying to affect battles and wars, but instead, to protect the weak from those who would do them violence.

His new battlefield is far different than the ones he’s been used to: he finds himself rescuing a child in the street, and stopping a doctor’s scalpel from slipping, and stopping a mugging from becoming lethal. Of course, he is new to these battlefields, and has much to learn.

And he has nothing but time.