Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Richard nodded. "That's right. A man got in a fight with George Cypher, the man who raised me, the man I thought at the time was my father. This man who started the fight with my father knocked a lamp off the table, setting the house on fire. My brother and I were asleep in the back bedroom at the time. While the man dragged my father outside and was beating him, my mother raced in and pulled my brother and me from the burning house."

Richard cleared his throat with the pain that still haunted him. He remembered the quick smile of her relief that they were safe, and the last quick kiss she had given him on his forehead.

"After my mother was sure that we were safe, she ran back inside to save something — we never knew what. Her screams brought the man to his senses and he and my father tried to save her, but they couldn't… it was too late. They were driven back by the heat of the flames and could do nothing for her. Filled with guilt and revulsion at what he had caused, the man ran off sobbing that he was sorry.

"It was a terrible tragedy, especially because there was no one else in the house and nothing worth saving, nothing worth her life. My mother died for nothing."

Shota, standing silhouetted in the doorway, one hand resting against the doorframe, stared at him for what seemed an eternity. Richard waited silently. There was some kind of terrible significance evident in her posture, in her almond eyes. She finally spoke in a soft voice.

"Your mother was not the only one to die in that fire."

Richard felt goose bumps race up his legs and arms. Everything he had known for nearly his whole life seemed to be vaporized in an instant by the lightning strike of those words.

"What are you talking about? What do you mean?"

Shota shook her head sadly. "I swear on my life, Richard, I don't know anything else."

He stepped closer and grasped her arm, being careful not to grip it as hard as he easily could have under the sudden power of his burning need to understand why she would say such a thing.

"What do you mean, you don't know anything else? How can you say something so inconceivable and then just say that you don't know anything else? How can you say something like that about the death of my mother — and then just not know any more. That doesn't make sense. You must know something more."

Shota cupped a hand to the side of his face. "You did something for me the last time you came to Agaden Reach. You turned down my offer and said that I was worth more than to have someone against their will. You said that I deserved to have someone who would value me for who I am.

"As angry as I was with you at that moment, it made me think. No one has ever turned me down before, and you did it for the right reasons — because you cared about me, cared that I have what will make my life worthwhile. You cared enough to risk my wrath.

"When I assumed the likeness of your mother, that gift in some way influenced the flow of information coming to me. Because of that, just now as I was about to leave, that single thought came into my awareness: Your mother was not the only one to die in that fire.

"Like all things that I glean from the flow of events in time, it came to me as a kind of intuitive vision. I don't know what it means, and I don't know any more about it. I swear, Richard, I don't.

"Under ordinary circumstances I would not have revealed that small bit of information because it is so charged with possibilities and questions, but these are hardly ordinary circumstances. I thought you should know what came to me. I thought you should know every scrap of everything I know. Not all of what I learn from the flow of time is useful — that's why I don't always reveal to people isolated things like this. In this instance, however, I thought you should know it in case it comes to mean something to you, in case it might come to help you somehow."

Richard felt numb and confused. He wasn't sure that he believed it really meant what it sounded like it meant.

"Could it mean that she wasn't the only one to die because a part of us died with her that day? That our hearts would never be the same? Could it mean that she was not the only one to die in that fire in that sense?"

"I don't know, Richard, I really don't, but it could be. It may in that way be insignificant as far as being something that would actually help you now. I don't always know everything about what the flow of time reveals or if it is meaningful. It could be as you say and nothing more.

"I can only be a help if I relay information accurately, and so that is what I did. That is the exact way it came to me and in that precise concept: Your mother was not the only one to die in that fire."