“Sometimes the things we forget are the ghosts that come to us, again and again, to haunt us in the back of our minds and on the edge of sleep. But more often, I think, we are haunted by the things we remember. Memories of loss, memories of death, or memories of things beyond our comprehension.
“After a time, the Gods fell into slumber, they say. Now the world is ripe for haunting.
“I have a ghost, and her name is Sheila.
“She enters this tale the way she entered my life. A mystery unsolved, something remembered or forgotten but still unknown.”
Bastok Markets wears the murk of Gustaberg nightfall like a cloak. No more do the vendors cry their wares to the heavens; their kiosks are full of shadow and empty in the darkness. Those few people who walk the streets go about their business bundled in heavy cloaks and furs, for the night is chilly. Some few carry lanterns with them, and even an occasional torch can be seen, lit and passing quickly under the eyes of the moon.
Kaska sits outside the Goldsmith’s Guild, the light of a vent throwing yellow bars across his face, warming him against the bitter chill that has fallen over Bastok. His only company is the inner clink of hammers on fine metal, and the whirl-and-cast sound of a nearby fisherwoman-her name is Poccorina, and she never speaks, so he doesn’t bother talking.
It has been days since he went to Valkurm with Lejanta, and nothing since then has changed; jobs are still few and far between. He is hungry, tired, broke, and slowly freezing. But there would be work tomorrow, if he could just make it through the night. Something about the Quadav and their Fetich idols. It was an important job, he’d come to understand; he’d been recommended by Chief Cid and had been asked to join the party.
Little good it does him now; he sits and waits for night to pass, staring at his reflection in a puddle, remembering…remembering San d’Oria, where the Elvaan tried to raise him as one of their own…
A boot comes down in the puddle, disturbing the canvas of his recollections.
“You there,” says a rough female voice.
Kaska looks up to see Ardea, the doorguard of the Guild standing over him, one hand on her hip. “We don’t allow loitering here. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”
Kaska sighs dejectedly.
I guess I should go get ready, he thinks to himself, rising. “I was just borrowing the fire.”
“People pay a lot for that fire, you know?” said Ardea. But clearly, her question was rhetorical. “Come back when you have money.”
“Maybe I will,” said Kaska, smirking and tipping her a pissoffish salute.
At this, the door guard stepped back inside the Guild, for the chill had become dreadful, and slammed the door so hard a puff of dust blew out from the frame.
Feeling replete in his vagrancy, the adventurer turned to the empty street, and seeing no one, left for the stairs leading up to Firewater Circle.
Here he found life, albeit questionable, encamped around the great memorial fountain.
It seemed funny to him, that the testament to Bastok’s wealth would be a haven for every kind of bazaar; craftsman selling tools, alchemists peddling their cloakside apothecaries, all manner of weapons and armor traders; many offering chunks of ore they dug from the earth with their own hands. There were people of every shape and size here, huddled under the street lamps and together around the circle, telling their stories by words or simply letting their appearance speak volumes.
Eventually Kaska found a Mithran trader named Sakuyuki sitting on the steps leading out to market gate. He was drawn to her by the smell of food, and found her with a picnic basket full of delicacies; roast apples and melon pies, raw dough and baked goods. He was interested in none of these. Instead he paid for two mithkabobs, leaving himself completely out of money, and was satisfied with his purchase. In the shadow of the Auction House, he’d saved a righteous amount of gil.
It was thanks to adventurers like the ones spread across Firewater in the dark and cold that Kaska could afford to go on, and he would feel an eternal debt to them.
It was for their vagrancy and undercutting that President Karst was always threatening to place a curfew on the Markets zones and have everyone found loitering arrested, but his threats had materialized into no stern action; Bastok needed its adventurers, and to the President’s dismay, they understood this.
Kaska was thinking these self-satisfied thoughts when he caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye.
A shadow amongst shadows, she slipped out from between the armor shop and the general store. She paused for a moment in the moonlight, and Kaska dropped his meal, his hands no longer supporting the nerve to hold his fingers shut.
She was wearing the petasos of a sorceress, cloaked in a strangely padded coat with vertically striped pants that seemed alien to any kind of fashion in Vana’diel. He could see the line of her ear, long and pointed, and then she lowered her head and the shadows consumed her face, leaving nothing but a pair of orbs glowing where her eyes should have been.
He stood, stunned, thinking it’s her, she’s really here when the wind picked up, and a cloud moved across the moon.
She turned, not walking, but drifting toward the West Gate, and if the guards saw her they said nor did anything, for once the moon was swallowed up, so was she, and the spell over his limbs was broken.
Kaska raced for the gate, and through it, passing under the mountain in a tunnel of torchlight and bursting through to the gray-purple nightscape of South Gustaberg.
The wind howled over the empty, barren hills, and somewhere on Vomp Hill, he heard an otherworldly cry. Of his ghost, of the woman who had come to him again and again at the edge of dreams, there was no sign.