Can You Hear Them, The Ghosts of Culloden?

The wind off Drumossie Moor had teeth.

Fergus MacDonald felt it even though he no longer should have. It cut through the long wool coat he’d borrowed from another century, threaded its way beneath the collar, whispered against skin that had not warmed itself since April of 1746. The wind carried the smell of peat and damp earth and old sorrow, and it stirred the coarse grass that bent and straightened again like penitents at prayer.

Culloden.

He had sworn—by God, by the saints, by the blood in his veins that was no longer blood—that he would never return here.

And yet his boots sank into the moor all the same.

Mac stopped at the edge of the field, where a low fence marked the boundary between what had once been chaos and what was now carefully tended remembrance. The modern plaques stood in neat rows, black stone with white lettering, names chiseled into permanence: Clan MacDonald, Clan Fraser, Clan Cameron. Names that had meant everything once. Names that had been screamed, prayed, sobbed into the mud.

His own name was not there.

No stone bore Fergus MacDonald, son of Alasdair. No marker said husband to Moira, father to Ewan. No one had carved Here lies a man who did not die.

Because there had been no body.

He exhaled out of habit, though no breath fogged the air.

“Aye,” he murmured to the empty field. “Still hiding from me, are ye?”

The grass did not answer. The dead never did.

He had not meant to die here.

That was the cruel joke of it. Fergus MacDonald had marched to Culloden believing—foolishly, ferociously—that he would come home again. He was not a young lad chasing glory. He was thirty-two years old, married, with a farm and a wife who sang while she worked and a bairn who had learned to laugh before he’d learned to speak.

Moira had held his face in her hands the night before he left, her thumbs rough from wool and work.

“Come back to me,” she had said, fierce as any Highland oath.

“I will,” he’d promised. “On my soul.”

He had meant it.

The battle itself had been chaos from the first cannon shot. Mud swallowed boots. Smoke choked lungs. Orders were lost to the wind. Fergus remembered the sound more than anything—the tearing thunder of artillery, the screams of men and horses, the wet thud of steel meeting flesh.

And then there had been pain.

Not the clean pain of a blade. Not the sharp finality of death. This had been different. A crushing blow to his side that dropped him to his knees, breath torn from his chest. He had tasted blood and peat and despair.

He remembered thinking, absurdly, Moira will scold me for tearing my coat.

He remembered trying to crawl.

And then—someone had knelt beside him.

The man had not worn tartan or red. His clothes were strange, older somehow, though that made no sense in the midst of battle. His face was lined, Roman in cast, sharp nose and hard mouth, eyes like polished onyx that reflected the firelight of cannon and musket.

“You will die here,” the man said calmly, as if commenting on the weather. His accent was strange, layered with centuries. Latin, Gaelic, something older still.

Fergus had laughed, blood bubbling at his lips. “Join the queue.”

The man had smiled.

“No,” he said. “You will not.”

The pain had grown worse. Fergus remembered hands—strong, unyielding—gripping his shoulders. He remembered teeth, impossibly sharp, sinking into his neck.

He remembered screaming.

And then he remembered nothing at all.

Mac walked now toward the center of the field, where the Jacobite line had broken. His feet carried him unerringly to the place where he had fallen, though the earth had shifted in the centuries since. He knew it anyway. He always had.

The grave that had never held him lay somewhere nearby.

He knelt and pressed his palm to the ground.

For a moment—just a heartbeat that no longer beat—he let himself remember waking.

He had clawed his way out of the earth three nights later, a feral thing driven by hunger and terror. The battlefield had been quiet then, the dead already stripped and buried, the wounded finished off or taken away. No one had seen him rise from the mud like a revenant from old wives’ tales.

No one had seen him flee into the hills.

The Redcoats had come to his farm a week later.

They had found no Fergus MacDonald. Only a widow and a bairn.

They burned the house anyway.

Mac squeezed his eyes shut.

He had learned of it months later, from a tinker who spoke of the clearances and reprisals with the numbness of someone who had seen too much. A farm near Inverness. A woman and child killed when they tried to flee. Another lesson, the man had said, in what it meant to defy the Crown.

Mac had left that tinker alive.

He had not left the soldiers.

“Still brooding, are we?”

The voice came from behind him, dry and faintly amused.

Mac did not turn. He did not need to.

“I told ye never to follow me here,” he said.

Gaius Cassius stepped into view anyway, boots pristine despite the damp ground, dark coat hanging perfectly from his shoulders as though gravity itself deferred to him. He looked no older than he had the day he’d knelt in the mud beside Fergus’s dying body. Ancient Roman discipline wrapped in modern elegance.

“I didn’t follow you,” Gaius said. “I knew you’d come. Eventually.”

Mac rose to his feet slowly. He towered over most men, but Gaius had a way of making height irrelevant. His presence pressed in on the world, quiet and inexorable.

“Why now?” Mac demanded. “Three centuries, and ye choose now?”

Gaius’s eyes flicked to the memorial stones, the tourists in the distance snapping photos and murmuring solemnly.

“Because you are tired,” he said simply. “And tired creatures return to their wounds.”

Mac barked a humorless laugh. “You made me this.”

“Yes,” Gaius agreed. No apology. No denial. “And you survived.”

“Everyone else didna.”

“Survival is not a democracy.”

The words landed with the same cold finality they always did.

Mac turned away, jaw tight. “I didna ask for immortality. I didna ask to outlive my wife, my son, my clan.”

“No,” Gaius said softly. “You asked to live.”

Mac spun on him, eyes blazing. “I asked to go home.”

For the first time, something flickered behind Gaius’s eyes. Not guilt. Not regret. Calculation, perhaps—or recognition.

“You would not have survived the reprisals,” Gaius said. “Even as a man. The Crown would have found you.”

“They found them anyway!” Mac roared, voice carrying across the moor. A couple in the distance glanced over uneasily. “They burned my home. They butchered my family. And I wasna there.”

Silence stretched between them.

Then Gaius spoke, quieter now. “And so you learned what we all must. Power is the only shield that endures.”

Mac’s hands clenched. “That’s your answer to everything.”

“It has served me for two thousand years.”

“And what has it cost ye?”

Gaius studied him for a long moment. “Everything I could not afford to lose.”

Mac let out a bitter breath. “You’re building an army again, are ye not?”

A smile ghosted across Gaius’s lips. “Always.”

“You see Culloden and think opportunity,” Mac said. “I see graves.”

“You see weakness,” Gaius countered. “I see resolve forged in blood.”

Mac shook his head. “I’m no’ your soldier anymore.”

“I know,” Gaius said. “That is why I came.”

Mac frowned. “You said you didna follow me.”

“I didn’t,” Gaius replied. “I came to let you choose.”

The words hung there, strange and heavy.

“Choose what?”

Gaius gestured to the field. “You can remain bound to this place. To what was taken from you. Or you can stop pretending that grief is a virtue.”

Mac stared at him. “You’re asking me to forget.”

“No,” Gaius said. “I’m asking you to decide whether you will let the dead define the rest of your eternity.”

Mac looked down at the earth again. At the place where his body had never lain.

“I come here to remember who I was,” he said quietly.

“And each time,” Gaius said, “you leave more bitter than before.”

“That’s the cost.”

“No,” Gaius corrected. “That is the trap.”

Mac closed his eyes.

He saw Moira’s smile. Ewan’s tiny hand wrapped around his finger. The way the hearth smelled in winter. The sound of sheep in the early morning mist.

He saw fire.

He opened his eyes.

“I canna forgive ye,” he said to Gaius. “And I canna forgive myself.”

“I did not ask you to,” Gaius replied.

Mac met his gaze. “But I will no’ be your weapon again.”

Gaius inclined his head, a fraction of respect. “Then be something else.”

The wind howled across Culloden Moor, bending the grass low.

Mac turned away from the field at last.

He did not look back.

Not because it no longer hurt—but because, for the first time since he’d clawed his way from the earth, he understood something vital.

The grave that had never held him did not own him.

And neither did the man who had pulled him from death.