Stefan was taken past the courtyard and into the mansion at the far end, then down a flight of stairs and pushed inside a narrow room in the cellar. It was empty, smelled of mold, and had a small window with iron bars as the only light source.

With no further explanation, the guards closed the door and locked it. He heard their steps fade in the distance and everything became quiet.

Trying not to give up and despair, Stefan began looking through every crack and crevice in the room, but found nothing to help him escape. What happened to medieval constructions having secret passages? Was he really just going to stay here?

At last, he spotted a small floor drainage near the back wall and got to his knees to examine it. There was nothing there that could help him, she he got up, but had to hold on to the wall when a sudden stab of pain went through his head. His vision blurred and dark spots flickered in front of his eyes. He fell on his knees and, as quickly as it had come, the horrible headache went away.

He was left panting on the floor, afraid to get up again in case another movement caused the pain to come back. In the end, he laid down on the cold stone floor and decided to rest for a moment before trying to find an escape; whether he liked it or not, he had time.

******

Rosario liked to think of herself as someone who wasn’t easily disturbed, or who could at least snap out of it fast enough. But been thrown down a trapdoor into a cellar where a monster plant awaited, where two good people lay now dead, and then suddenly being standing in some sort of lucid dream together with the person who caused all that misfortune, was too much and she felt paralyzed.

“Let me share some of my sight with you,” said the mayor as he extended his hand.

Instantly, the stone floor covered in water disappeared and the white sky was replaced by a dreamlike, almost ghostly version of a city. It took Rosario a moment to realize she was still in the keep’s cellar, but now all the physical barriers around her were transparent. She recognized the semi-translucent shapes of the walls of the keep, with their outlines traced as iridescent thin lines. She noticed the plants from the garden in the courtyard, the greenhouses and the vegetation inside, the castle wall behind, and then the shapes of the many houses from the town of Spiez. The outlines she saw, however, were not static. Besides the shimmering colors, there was a constant movement, and some lines gave the impression of being made of moving ants, while other larger shapes moved around more freely.

Not used to seeing so many elements overlapping at once, Rosario was overwhelmed and looked down at her feet to avoid feeling dizzy.

Bill Cornwell went to stand by her side. “You are now looking at the world through the presence of living beings,” he said solemnly.

She didn’t understand his words at first, and carefully looked again at the outline of the castle wall; only then did she realize that what gave the wall its shape was the moss, algae and small plants growing on the rocks. The moving shapes in the distance then had to be the town’s people, animals, and plants.

Rosario hesitated for a moment and turned around towards the monster plant and the two bodies below it. Unlike everything else, the creature seemed as solid as her and the mayor and, with relief, she saw that the bodies of Noah and Emilia were visible too. However, they weren’t as clearly defined and looked transparent, although not as faint as the other objects around. Did that mean they were alive but dying?

The mayor noticed her distress. “Don’t worry, the two of them are fine. Just taking a nap.”

“But they need help! Don’t let them die there!”

Bill Cornwell gave her a puzzled look, but quickly understood her confusion. “Oh no, the fact that you see them like that doesn’t mean their life is fading. That is their true aspect, as beings who can’t fully step into the Convergence,” he paused and looked at them. “Such a shame for two talented individuals to be so limited.”

She looked at them again, noting they were also covered in those small critters she had found over her skin when waking up. The little creatures seemed as physical as she, the mayor, and the monster plant.

“Once the parasitic offshoot is nested in place, they will wake up and I will make sure they are safe, so don’t worry about it,” the mayor continued. “Now come, there is a lot you still need to learn” He now pointed across the courtyard: the garden, the greenhouses, and the mansion at the opposite end all looked ghostly, but inside the manor Rosario distinguished a clear shape.

“Stefan!” she tried to run, but Cornwell placed a hand on her shoulder.

“No need to. Just focus.” He said and took a step forward. They transported there in an instant and were now in the hall that led to the basement room where Stefan had been imprisoned. Rosario ran past the transparent door and to her protegee’s side, who was just getting up after inspecting the drainage on the floor.

“Can you see me? Stefan, it’s me!” she said and tried to reach for him, yet her hands went right through the boy, who now raised his hands to his temples and collapsed to the floor, as if suffering intense pain.

Rosario gasped and immediately went back. Only then did Stefan calm down and laid on the floor.

“You probably understand it now,” said the mayor before she could open her mouth. “I’ve been trying to reach you since you arrived in the region two days ago. I hoped to communicate with you, to see if you were aware of your abilities,” he sighed, disappointed. “But you weren’t. I had to get physically close to you and force your consciousness to see the Convergence. This boy and his sister also seem to have potential, but they’re even farther away from your level. Perhaps with some time, they could be made to see as well.”

It seemed to Rosario that Cornwell had wanted to talk about this for a long time, but she was only partly paying attention to his monologue. She was frantically looking around for Franziska. If she understood the mayor’s words correctly, she should be as clearly visible as Stefan. Yet the overlapping of half-transparent structures from the town and the ghostly movements of people made it impossible for her to distinguish anything clearly. She then looked back at Stefan, still resting on the floor, and while doing so, she caught a glimpse of a ghostly human figure standing in a room nearby; it looked like a man sitting at a desk and writing. While the body was almost fully transparent, there was something very distinguishable near the neck. She recognized it as one of the small maggots on the monster plant below the keep, the ones the mayor had called offshoots.

“What’s wrong with this person? Why is that thing here?”

“The plant you saw in the cellar, and the one you killed at the power facility, are from a very particular species from this region. It can produce little parasites that are meant to infest animals to help it feed and disperse its seeds. Maybe you have heard of the tropical fungus that infects ants and makes them hang off tree leaves while it uses the ants’ bodies as substrate to propagate itself. But I digress. You see, one problem that beings who aren’t attuned to the Convergence have is that you can’t control them.”

“Control?”

“Correct. If you’re not part of the Convergence, I cannot reach you. But mutated life forms, on the other hand, are a part of the Convergence.”

He made a movement with his hand, and the person in the other room got up and started moving upstairs, then two flights of stairs more until he reached the balcony that overlooked the courtyard. The mayor invited Rosario to follow him, and once they stood behind him, after another movement of the mayor’s hand, the man stepped on the handrail.

“Stop!” screamed Rosario. The mayor halted the last movement of his hand and the man stood still. “I understand now. You are controlling people through the parasite.”

“Very good,” he praised her.

While Rosario couldn’t hear a sound of what happened in the physical world, she understood from his body language that the man had regained control of himself and managed to climb down, looking shocked.

“So… Emilia and Noah are unconscious because the parasite is anchoring into them now, is that it?” the mayor nodded. “Did you order the people at the power facility to attack us yesterday?”

“I’m afraid that was an oversight on my part,” he sounded apologetic now. “I had some people plant another paractus there so I could keep an eye out for unwanted guests, but other than that, I let the plant do its regular life cycle.” He shook his head. “When you attacked the plant, it triggered its survival mechanism, and when I tried to stop infested humans, it caused a confusion in their nervous system. I tried to control you to get you out of the ordeal, but it only caused to you pass out. I’m glad your student reacted so well to the situation and you could escape unharmed. I deeply apologize for the inconvenience.”

Rosario felt disgusted, but bringing it up would not help.

“You had those people there to hide the monster forest, is that it?”

“You are once again correct.”

“Why?”

“I’m just getting to that.”

The mayor put a hand on Rosario’s shoulder, and pointed towards the west, where the mountains that marked the entrance to the Valley of the Simme were visible in the distance. In a blink, they were now standing in the clearing where Rosario and the kids camped the day before, near the entrance of the road tunnel where they found the red crystals.

*****