“It’s alright,” I took her in my arms, “I don’t blame you.”

I didn’t. I still don’t think I ever could. Even though I didn’t exactly know what happened to her friend, I reckoned it was something gruesome.

I held her for some time in silence. A silence which was only broken by her sobbing and crying, and the occasional wispy sound from Valentina – who had meanwhile joined the hug, glowing a color which lay somewhere between her saddening blue tint, and her soothing purple. It was me who ended the seemingly everlasting silence:

“But… It doesn’t have to be this metaphor.”

“What…” She looked at me with a confused gaze, “what do you mean?”

“You told me The Book is very vague in its contents. Yes, it doesn’t care about the impact it has on the one reading it; yes, its message is, in essence, the truth – however painful this may be – but the true message of its content is always hidden beneath a false presumption we make at first glance.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand… Are you insisting this isn’t a metaphor for Laegyn?” Her sobbing started to lessen just a bit, but her confused look didn’t fade.

“I’m not, the story it presents might as well be a metaphor.” When she heard those words, her face contracted back to a natural position of someone being heartbroken. “But that doesn’t mean The Book thinks this is the fate of your love. To me, it seems like this is what The Book does: it feels our deepest feelings – be it from the past, present or future, even – of love, and puts them into a story which seems to be a blatantly obvious reference to said feelings. The Book of Love was made to break our hopes of love by these stories. From what I understand, The Book is always right in its predictions, but never in the obvious predictions. The true meaning of them is like love itself: hidden in plain sight.”

I was speaking to Val now, “Don’t you think so, Valentina?”

Valentina quickly faded to a warming, green color.

“You read The Book too, Valentina?” Chaele now asked.

She stayed with her green color for a couple more seconds, after which she returned back to her mix of blue and purple.

“But what is your suggestion for its meaning then?” The tears in her eyes had stopped flowing out.

“What if the death of the poor lamb is purely incidental to the story?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, what if the essence of the story is that the lamb never gave up on the chrysanthemums? She had a lot of awful experiences with the place – being almost bitten to death, for crying out loud – yet she always came back to it.”

“Yes, but to die in them.” She interrupted my reasoning.

“True. But like I said earlier: maybe her dying was put in there solely to make you convinced it was a metaphor for your friend. Maybe the true meaning of your love is that you will forever stay in it, if you are willing to keep fighting for it. In the end, the wolf went away, and the lamb stayed in the chrysanthemums; he didn’t drag her out of them.”

“That’s…” Though her eyes were still damp and red, a smile began to form around her lips again. I could see she tried to say something, either that she found it a great perspective to look at the story, or the opposite; but she couldn’t bring out the words. At last she uttered an enthusiastic “thank you” and hugged both me and Val closely to her.

“That really made me feel better.” Her lovely smile had returned.

“I know something that will make you feel even better.” I teased her.

“I’d like to see you try!” She laughed at the statement as if I was making a joke – which I wasn’t.

“We’re leaving.”

Her mouth retracted to a neutral stance and I saw her eyes widen. She was looking concerned.

“What? No. Please, you can’t go. Not now…”

“I think you misunderstood me. We aren’t leaving.” I said while pointing to myself and Val.

“We are.” I kept pointing, but this time with Chaele as a third person.

Her reaction was not what I expected: instead of her being enthusiastic to finally leave this monstrous place, she didn’t change the concerned look in her eyes – if anything, it worsened.

“No.” She clearly spoke, “I mustn’t.”

“Come on, Chaele!” I took her by her arm, “Come with us! Explore the world like you always wanted to! Escape Aeldrich’s reign once and for all!”

“I… I can’t, Kate. If I try to leave only once more without his permission, Aeldrich will murder me.” I could hear the same fear in her voice as the evening before.

“Aeldrich won’t kill you. He’ll…”

“Don’t think he won’t drain every last bit of Mortis out of my body.” She made a fist with her left hand. I could see from her face it still hurt, as it cramped due what I presumed to be a sudden shock of pain running through her hand. Her face quickly took a bitter stance, which masked the pain somewhat.

“Don’t think he has a conscience somewhere hidden deep beneath his robe. There’s a reason as to why we are called Sasplasyol in Startalk: ‘They who cannot differentiate good from evil’. He is not afraid to murder, and it won’t ever bother him one bit.”

“He can’t drain you if you don’t come back.”

“Do you really think he won’t go looking for me? From the first moment he notices I am gone, he’ll send out Necromancers to retrieve me, and if they fail to do so, he’ll come after me himself.”

“Chaele, listen…”

“No.” She interrupted me briefly. She was slowly calming down. “If I leave I will be living in constant fear of bumping into Aeldrich, with no means of defending myself. That’s a life not worthy of the name; it’s not worth living if living means running away from the inevitable.”

I wanted to say something, but then I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway: I wouldn’t be able to convince her in any way.

“I guess you’re right then…” I hated admitting it, “But would you at least care to help us?” Chaele got a smile around her lips again.

“If I don’t want to, will you stay here?” She tried her hardest to keep us here.

“You know I can’t do that, Chaele. Orders of ‘The Lord’.” I joked.

“It was worth a shot at least…”

“But what’s your answer? Will you help us or not?”

“After all you’ve done for me, it’d be my pleasure to do something in return.”

She hadn’t even fully said the sentence when Val began glowing bright yellow again.

“What do you need?”

“Do you happen to have any Essentia Imbued Crystals around here? I kind of obliterated my Water Essentia Crystal trying to save you yesterday.”

“Hang on.”

She began searching in the drawer of her bedside table. I saw her take out a small notebook with a quill, a pair of broken glasses, a silver necklace with an inscription in something resembling ancient runes which I couldn’t read.

“Here we go.”

She held a small, faintly reflective, black stone in her burned hand and a round piece of light blue tinted glass with shimmering iron edges in her right hand.

“What are those?” Both the objects tickled my curiosity, as well as Val’s – seeing how she was now glowing with a faint gray in her yellow shine, a rare color for her to have, but I assumed it was her expressing curiosity.

“This one,” Chaele put forward her right hand, “is an Aetherunicae Fenestram, an ‘Ethereal Window’.”

“It looks like that thing to measure the Essentia stored in something…” It reminded me of the object Feldir had used to determine Val was floating behind me.

“Because this is in essence an Essentiograph. But this one is imbued with Forbidden Magiks and Mortis Essentia.”

“What’s the difference?”

-“Why don’t you take a look yourselves?” She carefully handed me the small glass.

I was already freaked out by this Ethereal Window from the moment I could see it better, lying in Chaele’s hand. When looking through the blue glass I saw the piece of her hand underneath it was gone. I quickly learned this wasn’t just the case for organic matter, because when she placed it on my own hand, that also disappeared into thin air. Or was The Subject made of organic matter? I can’t actually remember…

I took the thing between thumb and index finger, and brought it close to my right eye – or well… where my right eye used to be, anyway – while closing my left. My whole vision was now focused through the blue tinted glass.

The tent was now hulled in the light blue hue of the glass, but nothing significantly had changed – apart from Chaele just having vanished. When I looked to my left I also noticed how my wispy companion was no longer floating there with me.

“How peculiar…” I mumbled.

I looked around in the tent. Someone was sitting on Chaele’s bed: another Necromancer of which I couldn’t see the face due to their hood covering it. This time, the shadow casted was more darkening than before, to the point where I couldn’t even see a mouth in the black shadows. They weren’t doing anything specific, just looking at an empty picture frame. The hands holding the frame were pitch black and unhealthily thin, and there wasn’t any sign of bones or bone-like structure to be seen.

“Hello there…” I tried starting a conversation, but the Necromancer didn’t pay any attention to me, they kept staring at the frame.

I tried putting my hand on their shoulder, but to no extent: I couldn’t even see where my hand was; I couldn’t see anything of my entire body actually.

I saw a bright light coming from behind me: it was very light blue, and had a strength of a dozen candles burning together. Turning around revealed a figure, seemingly female and made of pure light, standing in the opening of the tent. It almost looked like she was made of a billion fireflies bound together, each shining with the color of an icy, wintery blue. She was long and skinny. The shape of her body bared an ever so slight resemblance of an hourglass, and on her back she wore a longbow made of a translucent, white crystal. However, I didn’t see any arrows or a quiver to store them. She didn’t have any facial features: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no mouth; much like The Subject.

“Who are…?” I tried to say, but mid-sentence she started moving in my general direction.

When she entered the tent, the Necromancer on the bed stood up, placing the picture frame on their bed again. I saw them having a conversation of some sort, yet I didn’t hear any sounds. The only thing I heard was “Kate?”

It was a faintly familiar voice, coming from far away.

“Kate!”

My arm was pushed down, breaking my line of sight through the Ethereal Window, returning to the non-blue-tinted world. It was Chaele who was calling my name. The lady made of light was gone, and so were the Necromancer and the picture frame. I now saw Valentina was floating in front of my face. I was standing – well, hovering I guess – in Chaele’s untidy tent again.

“What was…?” I tried making a full sentence, but my brain was too busy trying to make sense of it all.

“The Aetherunicae Fenestram is a direct window to The Ethereal Plane, Kate.”

“What?” I genuinely didn’t understand what she was saying.

“It gives you an exact and live view inside The Ethereal Plane. But like a window usually acts: you can only see, not interact with anything directly... Well, except in some cases…”

“That was the Ethereal Plane? From what I saw – which, admittedly, was basically nothing – it was just a copy of this tent.”

-“Well, I can assure you The Plane isn’t just my tent.” Chaele joked, “But yes: in essence it is just a straight copy of The Lands, albeit with some minor adjustments, like the absence of The Tree of Life.”

“That’s underwhelming…” I was sincerely disappointed at that explanation. I expected The Ethereal Plane to be something like an endless realm of plains, or a kingdom on clouds, or… anything mystical or mysterious, something epic, something to actually write home about…

“Do you happen to know who those figures were?”

“Which figures?”

“A Necromancer and a shiny blue female spirit… thing.”

“‘a Necromancer’… You can’t be any less specific, can you?” She said sarcastically.

“Maybe giving a description would be easier if you Necromancers didn’t wear a hood all the time…” I responded with a slightly more cynical tone than her.

“Fair point.” She admitted, “But I don’t know, no. Haven’t seen any female blue shiny spirits yet either through the Fenestram.”

“But what’s the practical use of The Window if you can only look through it? Isn’t the Essentiograph objectively more useful then?”

“That’s what I meant with: ‘except in some cases’. Essentia has strange properties in its interaction with the environment, and after several millions of years in which Essentia has existed, we’re still not quite sure what its laws are. What I’m trying to get at, is that Essentia can flow through a dimensional one-way door, like an Ethereal Window. Even stranger is that it can go both ways: Essentia can go through to the other side – like you can see to the other side – but, unlike sight, Essentia can also flow from The Plane to The Lands.”

“So I could in theory set anything in The Ethereal Plane on fire?”

“Not so fast, you little pyromaniac!” Chaele laughed. “There are still The Laws of The Ethereal Spirits. They forbid any use of Essentia on The Plane, excluding Mortis.”

“So you use The Ethereal Plane as a primary source of Mortis Essentia, without having to slaughter innocent creatures?” I put two and two together.

“Exactly.”

“Except when you’re Aeldrich?”

“Except when you’re Aeldrich.”

“And what’s this thing?” I pointed at the reflective, black rock lying on top of the bandages that covered her torn open flesh.

“It’s an Essentia Crystal.”

“It’s not even a crystal…” I said unbelievingly. “It’s just a rock…”

“That’s because it’s stored Mortis Essentia. Crystals are too fragile to contain high amounts of Mortis. See, it’s a highly unstable type of Essentia. Rocks are tough enough to contain them and not be obliterated instantly.”

“Why still call them Essentia ‘Crystals’ then?”

“Why call a wingless fly still a ‘fly’, and not a ‘walk’?” Her voice sounded slightly annoyed due to that question.

“Fair enough.”

“Anyway,” she resumed the original conversation, “I want you to have these.” She also handed me over the black Essentia Rock. “Both of them.”

“Thanks Chaele!” I gratefully said to her.

“You’re welcome.”