With the carriage utterly destroyed, Abeline and Harper had no choice but to fashion a makeshift cart from the remnants and hitch it to the increasingly indignant old hose; several well-placed spells were used to hold everything together, at least until they reached the phasmonia. The larger matter was that they were forced to ride the horse, who had decided to alternate between an easy trot and a crazed, hitching gallop.

Note to self, thought the professor, wincing and clutching the reins tighter, bring saddle next time.

To his great relief, the phasmonia had come into view in the distance, nestled between rolling hills. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to a graveyard, but rather looked like a derelict bird's nest. The houses were egg-shaped, as tradition dictated, and about half as tall as normal houses; the ground was an odd mixture of white gravel and whatever tufts of grass that had succeeded in encroaching on the sacred space. There were narrow roads in between the houses, barely large enough to constitute alleys. The one road large enough to ride on was a causeway that traveled through the phasmonia and out the other side.

Professor Moore had been to the phasmonia once before, but he still had the sense that his presence was somehow wrong, morally speaking. This was the territory of the Everine, the holy men who brought the dead home to rest in their afterlives. He knew that they were buried in the houses, deep below the surface, and that this phasmonia was the most concentrated collection of corpses in the country, but that was not what gave him pause.

"It's eerie, isn't it?" he whispered, not wanting to raise his voice. The horse's hooves clip-clopped along the gritty surface of the well-traveled causeway as they entered the phasmonia. "I mean, not eerie in a normal way, not in an 'aah! ghosts!' way...and I know that's silly, of course," he added quickly, afraid she would think less of him for voicing the thought aloud. "But it's a fight-or-flight feeling, somehow."

The sun had fully risen now, and the phasmonia was drenched in warm sunlight, reflecting off the bleached surfaces of the stone ghost houses. They were impossibly old, but still in good condition; presumably the Everine took care to keep them standing, lest the ghosts grow impatient with their shoddy lot. The entire phasmonia was very still, as though it were holding its breath, and the sharp smell in the air was similar to the one that occurs when rocks smash together.

I hate horses.

She knew very little about the creatures, aside from their value to humans as pack animals and the very sobering fact they could kill with a single kick. Through the short ride to the phasmonia, the healer had clung tightly to her colleague, terrified of being thrown. Visions of her own head cracked open like an egg crowded out all other thoughts, and she'd kept her eyes closed since the initial gallop.

"Tocks," she whispered, breaking her timorous silence, "You're only feeling that now?"

She risked opening one eye, and found the sacred complex to be much brighter than expected. The noon light dazzled her, and she blinked and squinted like a prisoner at the first glimpse of freedom. Her arms slipped from their hold of the professor's midsection, and her slow reluctance was most likely due to an acute fear of toppling off their bony perch.

"How does one dismount from these things, anyway?"

Bringing the horse (whom he had mentally christened Old Naggy) to a complete stop, the professor twisted around and helped Abeline down, which was slightly tricky given the lack of stirrups and pommels and cantles and all those helpful bits that horses probably hate. He then dismounted himself, in the process making himself look like he'd never seen a horse before in his life, let alone ridden one.

He dusted himself off, which always makes one look more at ease than one actually is. Oh, his entire lower half hated him, and his spinal column, too... At least the jarring motion of the horse had kept his mind fully occupied, wondering if he would in fact be able to sire children once the horse stopped running, and in lieu of thinking about other, less appropriate, things.

"We're going to have to contact someone to get back, I imagine," he said ruefully, rubbing his left trapezius muscle. "But let's worry about that later, shall we? The point is, we made it. And we've got the machine."

A bright smile made its way cautiously into his face. He felt excited despite his apprehension; finally, instead of slogging away inside his cramped little cellar, he would finally get to do some field work, some real scientific research. This was what he was meant to be doing, what he was born to do. Here they were, about to blaze a trail into the unknown - and what a picture he'd have to show his class next week, yes indeed!

"Well, you're the expert," he said, bowing to her as he began to unload the equipment. "Where do you think we should set up?"

"If I'm an expert," she said, gazing skyward for a few seconds too long, temporarily forgetting her train of thought. What began its journey as a self-depreciating jibe meandered and morphed into a hollow prayer, bleak as the mists from which they had emerged. "Alioe help us."

No divine aid would be forthcoming, of course. She doubted Alioe even existed, let alone cared. The cynical healer would more readily believe the gods were against them; the day certainly seemed to be cursed thus far. Twice already she had nearly died (admittedly once due to her own stupidity, but that was beside the point), long before they had even reached the phasmonia...

"Over there." Though phrased as a command, the fear sneaking into her voice shaped her words into something resembling a clandestine suggestion. She pointed fluidly to a spot near the head of the avenue, close, but not too close, to one of the funereal domes.

Her jittery nervousness was long gone, overpowered by the calm, business-like terror of a cat-burglar mid-heist. She was indeed a thief, trespassing on a private sanctum most assuredly not her own, and intent on leaving with more than she had come.

Normally, Abeline respected laws and their intents, for she adored order. The dream of a functioning, benevolent society, reliable and useful as any clock, taunted her pessimistic, suspicious mind. The ideal acted like a mournful guiding light, radiating desperate regulation into nearly every thought and action. But today was an exception.

The wall between herself and the Everine was primarily her own invention, but, nevertheless, crossing it to walk their world was not within the natural order. Despite the personal dissonance resulting from her secular feet treading on sacred ground, she needed to be there. Perhaps not her, specifically, but someone needed to do the work. The facts had to be known, the reality understood, and the knowledge disseminated as soon as possible.

That she may have been the closest living thing to a ghost expert on all of Vita was largely irrelevant. So, too, was her thrilled, smug satisfaction at spearheading a genuine scientific venture.. and her pattering delight at having ingenious, wonderful, bedeviling Harper by her side.

You're the boss, Harper's chipper inner self replied, or rather it would have; he self-corrected, as Abeline would have found that condescending. He wondered immediately why he had been censoring himself all day. It was the most curious thing; although he had been strangely more open around her than any living person in the last fifteen years, he still felt like he was putting his foot in his mouth on a regular basis, like he couldn't say what he wanted without offending her in some way. To Harper, Abeline's embarrassment looked a lot like indignation.

"I don't think we're likely to attract anything by our mere presence," he said, mainly talking aloud to fill up the silence as they trudged forward; he made a point of securing Old Naggy to a nearby stump. "But I've never been here before. I don't know if they stay in their houses...or...go on visits, or walks, or anything. They could have a teashop here for all I know."

There was a bleached and ancient tree beside a cluster of small houses, and Harper obediently set up his camera equipment, pausing occasionally to request help; she knew half the additions better than he did.

"Here's a thought," he remarked after a while. "I've read that ghosts imprint...their strongest memories decide where they appear. Why is it that they appear here, then? I've read that there's some sort of Everine spell that binds them here, to keep them out of the public eye, but I've no idea what sort of magic that could possibly be. Seems almost...supernatural."

His tone gave away a carefully practiced measure of polite skepticism. Used to dealing with religious zealots, Harper had learned long ago to avoid criticizing the Everine outright. There was very little he did not understand about the nature of magic, and nothing about Everine magic made any sense; they could cast out ghosts from a body, with varying degrees of success, and cast Everspells, which made even less sense than that. Binding ghosts was just another spell that struck Harper as impossibly ludicrous.

"Supernatural?" The bespectacled woman looked up from her work, an impish grin peeking out briefly. "Harper, you of all people should know the supernatural does not exist."

Dividing her attention between him and the device, fingers deftly manipulating iron and silver, she continued airily, "It's simply a term bandied about by the intellectually lazy for that which they do not understand. Nothing is beyond nature, for nature encompasses all of reality. If it.. hrmph.." A gear had been jammed by a stray twig, and she gingerly wrested the scraggly bit of wood free. "If it exists, or if it occurs, it is natural. The mysterious only consists of things we don't yet know a clock's hand about." The healer grinned again, tossing the offending plant matter away.

"I don't think the Everine are truly binding the ghosts, but if they are, then they just happen to know something we don't," she shrugged casually. The familiarity of machinery on her fingertips had made her momentarily forget her reticence regarding the monks, as well as her present, solemn location. She might've been comfortably back in her father's basement workshop, although it was never this well-lit or this.. large.

After a confused pause, which mainly consisted of blinking at distant trees, she added in a hushed voice, "At any rate, we can figure this out-- or if not us, someone else will in the future." Abeline smiled to him, patting the contraption encouragingly. "Have faith."

She might not have considered herself a Good Circlist, whatever that was, but she did have her beliefs, and recent experiences with ghosts had only sharpened them. The universe was staggeringly vast and dark, and known science a mere candle flame. And though the light it shed was infinitesimal, science was by its very nature restless. It would not stagnate in a miasma of tradition and ritual; it would grow to illuminate an ever-increasing fraction of existence.

And she and Harper were about to fan that flame.

They waited.

Hours passed by, seeming like days; nothing stirred in the bleak round houses, so uncomfortably low, some not any higher than Harper's neck. He might have felt like a giant were it not for the tree behind him. As they waited the rain began again, cloaking the bright sky in dark mottled greys and blues, and Harper produced an umbrella, which he sacrificed to cover the camera. It grew darker, and he began to wonder if they should light a lamp.

"The worst part of science, I declare, is the waiting," he said grumpily. He was struggling with the oilskin tarp, trying to set up some sort of cover on the branches above them. "Not the wet or the mud or the ravenous ghosts. Those I have no quarrel with. But waiting...a body could go mad."

To pass the time, the healer had taken to walking short distances, viewing the pasmonia from various angles. Not once did she enter a house, or even encroach within ten feet of one. Thus, as she paced the grounds, she had to jink at odd angles, creating a bizarre jumble of footprints in the gravel. When the fresh rain began to fall, the record of her passage, a cypher of her unvoiced thoughts, washed away like so many wasted moments.

"It occurs to me," Abeline said, strolling to shelter under the tree, "that they may be waiting." She adjusted her hood, glancing vaguely eastward.

"The pair in the garden have never been sighted during the day, as far as I know. Perhaps they're nocturnal." She frowned, not quite happy with her use of biological terminology. All the evidence suggested they were not dealing with conventional creatures.

"Should've thought of that," she mumbled, blaming herself for the lack of supplies, tents and foresight.

"Why would they be?" asked Harper while hanging one end of the tarp over a branch and leaned back against the tree. He didn't mind getting wet in the course of a scientific investigation, but the equipment was unique and therefore priceless. It wouldn't do to risk it getting wet.

"Perhaps the moon's ley lines have something to do with it," he mused. "Gravity might affect them. Or perhaps they're simply more likely to encounter a single person at night, whereas during the day people travel mainly in groups."

"They are cunning hunters, that much we do know." She grinned, a predatory element gleaming on her canines (or it would have, if the evening light were not so dim).

"Although," she mused, head tilted with her swerving thoughts, "I'm not so sure about the groups thing. There is a small minority of Brunnholders who by choice or otherwise travel without company. I, for example, am usually alone at any hour-- when I'm not at the Infirmary, that is. It's rather rare for me to have company." The healer glanced up at the professor (strikingly tall and bewitching in the shadow of dusk), paused as if stunned, then thoughtful, then amused. "Rarer still, actually pleasant company."

She looked away, inhaling the ironically brisk and invigorating air of the phasmonia. There may have been a small smile toying at her lips. "Yes, indeed, this is turning out to be a rather extraordinary day."

Pleasant company! It was very nearly a compliment, and although she had not been stingy about them, most had seemed to fall under the category of respectful sycophancies. He was terrible at distinguishing sincerity from flattery, but he knew what words meant, and company was a different word from colleague altogether.

"Rare?" he repeated, against his better judgment. He grinned playfully. "What, with all the lovely individuals at Brunnhold? I find that difficult to be-"

A very odd shadow had fallen over the road behind the healer.

It was colorful, as though light was passing through it somehow, but nothing seemed to cause it - or was there something there? He blinked several times, losing his train of thought completely. Yes, something in the air - he couldn't decide if it was several miles away or several yards. It was small and had a denseness not usually associated with things that seem to jump in and out of vision.

Inhaling sharply, Harper carefully moved towards the camera spectra. The umbrella's fabric stayed, thankfully, silent as he removed it. The air shimmered and shuddered, not unlike the picture in his early trial runs of the motion picture. He mouthed "Look!" to Abeline and gestured over her shoulder.

"Difficult to be.. what..?" She trailed off, watching him like an owl might watch a broken pendulum. He was staring, wasn't he? But not at her. Of course not. Behind her.

Behind her!

An arctic tsunami crashed into her nerves, drowning her mind in a flurry of silence. For one timeless moment, she drifted in the undertow, her sense of self lost to wild, primal fear. Later, she might think she understood deer and mice, and indeed all prey animals of Vita, far better than a civilized galdori should. Later, she might think she was more alive then than she ever had been in the whole of her twenty-three years. However, in that moment, she was only aware of one freezing, overpowering will to vanish.

But she was not alone.

Her friend, her ally, her-- her instincts knew exactly what he was and what they intended him to be, even though she in any other circumstance would never presume, never dare--

She turned to look away from him, to dodge the hungry lens of the machine's eye, and to fix her gaze on the scintillating, mesmerizing gateway to mystery appearing not far from them. So very close!

The little healer shifted to the professor's side, her field flaring protectively. She knew she couldn't hold a candle to his magical prowess, but she was familiar with a few defensive techniques, and he was occupied. While he readied to peer through the camera, she peered into the twilight, wary of the possibility of other ghosts manifesting nearby.

Harper touched his hand to the generating assembly, and the machine hummed and sputtered to life, albeit quietly due to the modifications they had made; as he siphoned electricity into the globe, its mechanisms ticked and the shutter began to flash. The professor silently co-cast the other spell that made the camera function - a tiny pinprick of light inside the bulb. It was covered by a black cloth, but Abeline knew it was there. The camera was working, without cranking or pedaling or any source of power besides a handful of simple spells.

He did not take his eye off the figure. When one describes something as ghostly they tended to mean "possessing an eerie quality", but that hardly described the phenomenon before them. There was nothing unnatural about this ghost, not like the tortured presences of the non-beings of the crypts and the garden, which ached with wrongness. This ghost seemed calm, and was unhurried as it - she - approached them.

Harper moved in front of Abeline without thinking, backing them both up. He knew enough to be wary of ghosts, however nonthreatening they might seem. But despite his trepidations he was instantly fascinated. A sensation had appeared, escaping his notice until it was quite strong, and it felt oddly familiar.

"Can you feel it, Abeline?" he whispered. "The...nothingness? Oh, I wish I had my MAT...it's beautiful!"

"It is, isn't it...?" She whispered, peeking around Harper's spare frame. Thus far, she had only viewed the nothingness as a threat. The other ghosts she encountered felt like a blight, an aggressive cancer on the body of Vita. She came to the phasmonia in large part to seek a cure for this disease. But the spirit before them seemed to be benign.

"Be careful," she warned, still whispering, trying to shrug off the serene feeling that was seeping into her. "From what I've read, they can manipulate sight and sound, and they know people as well as the mona do. They can hypnotize and disorient their prey with visions of their greatest desires..."

Despite her words, her caution and fear were dispersing. Her field began to relax, drifting gently like morning mist from a still lake.

"Do not surrender," she told the professor, though, truthfully, the healer was as transfixed as he. Behind thick glasses, her dark pupils were wide as black holes, pulling in every detail as if by gravity. She almost reveled in it, but a lingering trepidation demanded a chain be formed back to reality. While she watched the approaching ghost, her hand lightly touched on his... though who was the anchor and who the lost remained uncertain to her.

"Do not let go." Please...

It was that small gesture that drew the professor out of his dreamlike trance; without a second thought he closed his fingers around hers and held on tightly. Brunnhold and decorum seemed miles away.

The spirit refracted light oddly. The camera spectra would doubtless have difficulty picking it up, but the rapid negative production was clearly working. He heard the spin of the spool and the clicking of the internal mechanisms and knew it was working.

When the ghost grew close enough, they could make out a face; it was an old woman, face plastered in beatific love, her wispy white hair making her seem unreal, though she was solid enough to cast a shadow. Harper noticed with a lurch of his stomach that her feet did not quite touch the ground. That would prove to the board of Chairs, at least, that this was no cheap pantomime acted out for the benefit of funding...

"She's so small," he breathed. The ghost was no more than three feet, proportional, like a miniature human. The air felt drained of all power and resonance; a dull chill spread over them, but it was not menacing in the way usually described in ghost memoirs. Harper postulated that most accounts of ghosts were exaggerated for effect. They were fearful, for sure, with their ability to inhabit your lifeline, but he had prepared. His field radiated outward, spreading over the empty space, and he closed his eyes, exploring the sensation of nothingness like an explorer taking chart of a new expanse of land or sea.

The large eyes of the old woman's ghost were empty; she had been blind in life. When she turned or moved, there were gaps in the image; Abeline noticed her clothing fell in overly simplistic folds, as if it was not really moving or made of fabric, and that the wisps in her hair did not move with the breeze that swept through the phasmonia. She moved like a paper cutout against a flat surface.

His hand was so warm.. or were her hands that cold? Patients always complained about her cold hands, and it was rapidly becoming a chilly night.. At least he didn't seem to mind.

He didn't?

A ripple in her field -- quiet, subtle -- not from a monic breeze, but from a tiny, frightened thought diving back to her secret depths. The ripple became a shudder as her field suddenly contracted.

She ought to be ashamed. The professor was intensely preoccupied with the study, and she was.. she was taking advantage of that, wasn't she?

As much as she wanted to feel guilty, she couldn't. There were mitigating circumstances, such as, for example, holes in existence that could gobble them up at any second. They were on a dangerous expedition. The contact was a necessary precaution. So what if she liked-- besides she didn't have time to be ashamed. There was a ghost.

The ghost was right there.

Right.

Abeline blinked at the impossibly flat image. How did that.. what were the physics.. why did the mona...? Like bats in a cave, questions flew about wildly in her head. Questions that could not be answered in this preliminary study. She'd have to somehow get one of those ghosts in a lab and dissect-- Damn! She may be sentient!

The healer gasped, her veins freezing in social mortification as she realized she may be in the presence of not one, but two other people.

"Harper.. what if she...?" Involuntarily, she gripped his hand tighter, racking her brain for polite methods for greeting elderly women. Elderly dead women.

She bent forward at the hip, stiffly. It might have resembled a bow, were her wary, penetrating gaze not locked on the otherwordly recipient.

The ghost shuddered in and out of visibility, as though blown by a strong wind. As she approached the camera's light, she appeared thin and watery.

Her mouth opened and formed a few words before the sound followed several seconds later. It was gibberish at first, a mumbled slew of syllables that held no significance in Estuan. In her research, Abeline had heard numerous accounts of this phenomenon; it generally indicated that the ghost was a weak one, one who had not formed a significant mental memory at her time of death. Out of the miasma of noise came a few recognizable words - "shift" and "suds" and "jockey", "meddling" and "summer". They might have been blips of meaning struggling through the nonsense, or simply more nonsense.

"What's she saying?" whispered Harper.

The camera whirred and clicked. The two scientists had no idea if it was successfully recording what they were seeing, but Harper clung to hope like a rag, imagining all of his questions answered.

"I can't tell." A quiet confession of ignorance, almost drowned out by the soft patter of Loshis rain. Her words were not quiet for her own benefit, but for the ghost's. She wouldn't want to scare it away. Not unless it became a clear threat, and she was starting to seriously doubt it would...

Abeline slowly withdrew from her bow, attention fully trained on the flickering apparition. Without looking, she began to retrieve her notebook and a pen. The action required both hands, and her grip slipped from his distractedly, like a sleep-walking ferret retiring to its burrow, or, perhaps, like an absent-minded young scientist misplacing a left sock.

Her pen was soon scratching on the fast-soaking paper. The nonsense string of words which blended in sound also bled together on the page, mixing into an illegible abstraction of ink and Hulali's tears. She hunched over her notes in a vain attempt to protect them, and it was then that her brain chose to remind her that she had, quite recently no less, been holding hands with... with...

"I'll try getting closer." A guilty blush warmed her cheeks as she turned to a fresh, albeit slightly damp, page. After one step forward, she paused.

"If anything happens," she told her colleague, trailing off as she stared at the near-hypnotic thing. She took another half-rapt step, and her breath illuminated an ephemeral path in the cool night air. "...take the camera and run."

"Abeline, perhaps...that's...not..."

Harper stammered as he watched her inch closer and closer to the oncoming phantasm, who was moving with the unearthly pauses of some nightmare vision. He sucked in a breath.

The ghost raised her - its - arm, with a jerky movement better known to puppets than people, seemingly pointing at Abeline, or to a space just above her head. It was aware of her, to some degree; at least that is what the camera would say. It was recording both of them now. A wild, sudden urge made Harper wish to leap madly into the shot, immortalizing himself along with Abeline and the ghost like a strange family spectragram.

It plummeted forward.

"Back! Back!" he cried, reaching out instinctively for her at the ghost surged towards them, mouth open and eyes empty as dry wells. Light erupted from his hands as he cast a shell of blazing energy towards the thing, unsure if it would have any effect.

The sound that occurred then should never have been heard; it was a wailing, a sound so hideously forlorn that the crypts themselves would have shrank in fear from it. It was a dread call of misery, a cry that echoed across the dead oceans of the underworld and pitted itself deep in Harper's stomach.

More wailing, and he cast and cast, the shell in front of them flickering as the ghost beat her incorporeal body against it. It stung him as the ghost raked her fingers across the spell. The click of the camera echoed the mad beating of his heart, but the roar of adrenaline could not drown out the sound of that screaming cry.

Well, that backfired.

It's strange, what one will think of in these moments. It's never anything useful. Just a life, poorly lived, flashing like an abridged filmography of a novel no one would bother to read.

Wind-up dolls, a mother and baby boy, playing in their gilded home...

Oak barrels in a Glorenn cellar, a pair of teal eyes gleaming mischievously in the darkness...

A tall man leaning on a tree in twilight...

Finally, the ghost's approach, the way it flickered when it neared the camera's light...

Light.

Without another thought, Abeline uttered the monite for Lumination, begging that the light be bright as day. It was a gamble -- if her guess was wrong, she'd be wasting essential time and energy. She closed her eyes and hoped.

The scream stuttered and spat like bacon fat in a cast-iron pan.

There was an expulsion of energy, possibly from the spell, possibly from the ghost. Harper made a split-second decision and clung to the camera, protecting the film casing as the wind tore past them; he turned to see Abeline silhouetted against a blaze as complete as day, still and calm as she cast.

Beautiful.

And then, of course, he was blinded, and spots of multicolored circles clouded his vision when he looked sharply away. The wind that had swept roughly across the clearing dissipated in a breath of dust and debris, and the rain resumed - had he been keeping it off with his shield? - pattering to the ground as though nothing had happened.

It was gone. Nothing remained but the click-click-click of the camera spectra.

For an unknown number of clicks, no thoughts occured. Her mind was a timeless blank, no past or future, free of guilt, free of fear. Utterly free.

She opened her eyes. The phasmonia was lifeless again, bathed in the mona's light. The white domes shone as placidly has they had at noon.

Only the rain was new. And the sun was far away.

Harper was clutching that camera of his. Didn't he know none of it mattered? The ghosts, the passives, the wars... Transient things... All of it would pass, all in the time it takes a star to blink.

She went to him, reaching a hand toward his shoulder.. but no. Past him. Her fingers, trembling, settled on the camera, and the act steadied the quaking nerves the serene healer was only dimly aware of.

Harper spoke first, after enough time had passed that his ears had cleared of their ringing and his heart had slowed to a steady thud.

"That was brilliant!" he exclaimed, turning slowly to smile at her. "My gods! She was photosensitive! I think we need to get out of here while we still can!"

The last sentence was delivered along with a twinge of reality - it was nearly night, and there would be more ghosts to come. Excited as he was, he did not want to risk his life - not when he had actual footage of an actual ghost, not when he finally had evidence of a connection between the nexus and ghosts.

(Not when a pretty girl had just held his hand.)

"Of course," she said distantly; her brow furrowed as if she were trying to remember something. Anything.

This would be when another screening of her life should play out, but the mind was never so accommodating. Instead, memories seeped back in, a silent and slow trickle, until a whole sea lapped at every bay and inlet.

"Ah." Abeline caught a glimpse of his bright, golden eyes. How they glittered in the light!

... Her light...?

"Ye-- ohdeargods. Yes! Let's leave at once!"

Before she was temped to try another.. rather foolhardy..

Tucking back a strand of loose hair, she quickly leaned on the machine, as much to help the professor carry it as to stave off an enthralling, excruciating, and altogether hopeless hope.