Kayden wasn’t invited to the funeral. Why would he be? It wasn’t like he had known the man who had died last night.
Nevertheless, it was proper to show respects to the deceased, regardless of how much one might be familiar with them. Death was a tragedy. Even if one remained unaffected by it, the ragged wounds of grief it left stormed in everywhere, leaving trails that couldn’t be missed.
The people of Alderhelm, already downtrodden after the series of inexplicable hauntings, were now more dismayed than ever. Someone had finally died by the ghost’s hands. Someone had finally succumbed to the fatal danger of fear.
No one was safe any longer.
“Nyester was a good ol’ gramps, that’s for sure,” Vasco said.
He was holding his hat again, keeping his head down with a demure cast. His parents had bidden him wear to a black tunic instead of his regular everyday clothes. A little symbol of respect for the life of the dearly-departed villager.
“What did he do?” Kayden asked.
They were back in the tavern where he had conducted his investigations a day ago. It had never been busy. Now, it looked like Nyester had died right in front of the barkeep.
“Nothing,” Vasco said. “Retired, he always said. Could do whatever he wanted. What I wouldn’t do to have that kind o’ time on my hands…”
“Retired. From doing what before, exactly?”
“I think he was a herbalist or something like that? Not sure, honestly. The healer lady said she used to get a lot o’ her ingredients and the like from him.”
“Hmm.”
That wasn’t quite insightful. Though, Kayden suspected if there was something deeper going on, Nyester’s profession indubitably had something to do with it.
About an hour of idle conjectures later, Kayden’s main interviewee finally showed up.
“Apologies for keeping you waiting, young master,” the old village elder said. “I was a bit busy with …” He waved his hand vaguely at everything in general.
More than a bit busy going by his appearance. He looked like he was the one who had passed away before recalling that oh right, he was the head of Alderhelm. What would the poor, lost villagers do without him? So now he was back, a splotchy-skinned former-corpse dressed up in funereal garb and a cane to keep him propped upright.
Kayden drew a chair out for him. “Please, it’s no trouble at all. I should be the one apologizing for asking you to meet me, what with everything that’s been going on.”
The old man appeared too battered to muster even a minute affront at someone like Kayden performing a servant’s job. He just sighed. “It’s such an unfortunate state of affairs. If only I’d acted faster…”
“You couldn’t have done anything. In fact, I should be the one partially to blame, since I ought to have gotten to the bottom of whatever is going on here by now.” Kayden paused. That was enough of the blame-game. Time to delve into the real matters. “This Nyester. He was old, was he?”
“That he was,” the elder said. “I knew him since I was a wee lad too.”
Noted. That meant the heart attack wasn’t too surprising. Older folks were more susceptible to them. “He died close to the granary, right?”
“Correct.”
“Do you know if he had ever experienced any of the hauntings before?”
“I’m not sure…”
“He has,” Vasco said. “I heard him complaining about it the other day. Was cussing out the spooky lights and everything.”
Kayden tapped his note. “I need more specifics, Vasco. Which lights? The farm or the granary?”
The boy shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. He said something about cursed stores and that’s about it.”
That again wasn’t a lot to go on with. There were some more perfunctory questions that Kayden posed. How was Nyster’s health before his death? Did he have any family and friends who might know more about him? Had he any enmities or disputes in the village?
None of the answers were any more enlightening than what he had heard before. Kayden wasn’t going to get anything useful out of this posthumous interview of his.
The elder eventually took his leave. Busy man, the village elder. Running a village through the current crisis had to be straining him like a clothesline with armour hung up on it to dry. Hopefully, he wasn’t stretched too taut.
“What you goin’ to do now, master?” Vasco asked.
Kayden sighed a little, then got to his feet to pay the barkeep for hosting his informal interrogations once again. “I was hoping to do some fieldwork, but that would be rather insensitive right now. But we’ll see what happens later.”
----------------------------------------
Kayden headed out into the farmlands at night. The villagers hadn’t retreated to the cover of their homes after dusk had fallen. Not tonight. In honour of Nyester, the villagers were holding a vigil well into the evening.
The memory of deceased old man had turned into the spirit of bravery that had possessed the villagers. No threat of any ghost would be sending them scurrying this night.
Kayden watched the lantern lights glimmering in the village. He had seen them before of course, their general look already impressed upon his mind. But he wanted to remember their exact appearance.
Because he was about to face a different set of lights soon enough.
Kayden turned around. He smiled. There. He had been waiting for nearly an hour. Finally, the strange glimmers that the villagers had complained about at the edge of the farms had come into being.
Just as the villagers had said, they were distant. At the very edge of the farms. Over half a league from where Kayden stood. No problem. Nothing was stopping him from reaching them.
As he walked towards them, he noted how they were different from the lanterns the villagers used. Those were bright yellow. These haunting lights had an unmistakeable ethereal quality about them. Shimmering white, but with a faint pearlescence about them, as though there was a lens of some sort that was having a prismatic effect.
Well, Kayden would find out when he reached the source of the lights.
Which turned out to be taking longer than he had been expecting. The lights weren’t getting closer at the rate Kayden had foreseen. He frowned. Were they… getting more distant from him? He stopped for a second. Had the light-bearer spotted him and was now retreating?
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Shaking his head, Kayden continued walking after the strange illumination in the distance. Those lights were supposed to be scary. How were they expected to terrify him if they remained so distant? The ghost might just be right. This was the work of amateurs who really didn’t want to be found out.
Oh well. They weren’t going to outpace a cultivator, that was for certain. If humans were supposed to be persistence hunters, then Kayden was a persistence obliterator.
“Why do you walk away from the village?”
The voice startled Kayden a little, though the familiarity rapidly eased up his tension. He turned with a brief smile. Ah, there she was. His ghostly companion, in all her gleaming, resplendent glory, like a divine spirit who had come down to the realm of mortals and couldn’t help but outshine everything.
“It appears clearing your name is taking me out of the village,” Kayden said. He looked back to point at the distant glimmering lights, but they were gone. He frowned. “Or… they were.”
“Something wrong?”
“The lights disappeared. You didn’t see them?”
“Before, I think, yes. I used to think someone was just out braving the night for a stroll in the chill, calming air.” She raised a dainty hand to her chin, considering. “Perhaps I should have tried scaring them at some point.”
That would have been convenient. Scaring the scarers. “Fat chance of that now…”
“Ah, don’t be too disappointed. I’ll make sure not to bother you tomorrow night so you can hunt down these pesky flatterers of mine.”
“Flatterers?”
“Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, no?”
Kayden opened his mouth to reply and found he had no proper words.
“Now.” The ghost’s robes swished in an almost hypnotic way as she floated in closer. “What can you offer me in recompense for my disappointment?”
“What, pray tell, do you have to be disappointed by?” He smirked. “It’s not my fault if you’re getting distracted by me from one of your hauntings.” His good humour fell a bit. “Though, I’d suggest giving it a rest for tonight after…”
The ghost’s face dimmed a bit as well. Then she brightened again. “I didn’t mean my hauntings. When I saw you walking in your current direction, I thought you were headed out to investigate the site of my supposed death. But it looks like you were simply chasing some silly lights, my flowery little moth.”
Kayden ignored her teasing moniker. “Your death site?” He turned around to look out into the darkness. “Are you claiming that you died somewhere around here?”
“A little farther off, yes, but in the same general direction.”
“Interesting.”
Kayden walked off. The ghost followed, his personal beacon of light to keep the night at bay. She didn’t know the exact location of her death, unfortunately. So it was that Kayden ended up needing to grope out in the darkness and scour the entire outskirts of the village in this general area.
“Why haven’t you visited and tried to find your site of death before?” he asked.
The question was pointless. He knew why. She had been afraid of severing her connection to the mortal realm by discovering the cause of her death. It was only recent experiences with the village and Kayden himself that had shifted her priorities to a need to uncover the truth.
“I was hoping some delightfully upstanding—and pleasantly smelling—stranger would arrive and show me the truth that I was afraid of,” she said.
Kayden snorted. “Of course. Maybe I’ll write a poem about my experiences and read it out to you.”
“A florist and a poet. I suppose that makes sense. Poets oft use flowery language.”
At that, Kayden laughed.
It was a bit of a shame the ghost couldn’t guide him to her exact location of death. She only felt it as some sort of integral sensation, one that couldn’t really be deciphered to provide something as concrete as an exact location or coordinate.
So, Kayden ended up relying on his own spiritual senses. He had long suspected that the ghost was someone of note when she had died. Perhaps even a powerful cultivator in her own right. What else could create a spirit with this much power held back like a dam against an ocean?
As such, her death had likely left some sort of signature in the tapestry of spiritual energy around the village. Something he could investigate through his spiritual sight and potentially use.
Except, it turned out the whole tapestry was twisted and marred in their locale. It staggered him for a second. The whole makeup of spiritual energy in the area was wrong. Like someone had sprayed oil across its canvas and burned off bits and pieces all over the area, leaving gaps with nothing and unharmed areas where the tapestry had been bent out of shape by the heat.
“I have no idea what might have caused such a thing,” the ghost said once Kayden had described his findings. “But it sounds like something I could be capable of, as a supremely powerful being, yes.”
Kayden rolled his eyes. Thankfully, he landed on a way to discover the exact location of her death soon enough. Investigating the voids themselves led him to finding out the spot where they all coalesced to form one giant area devoid or any spiritual energy whatsoever, except for one strange anomaly.
It looked like the spiritual energy in the locale that had survived whatever had occurred here, even in a bent and twisted shape, was attempting to thread their way through the voids to reach a single location.
A location where there should have been a body.
“I can feel it,” the ghost said. Her voice had changed. No longer light and capering, she was now hushed. Serious. “It was here. It was certainly here.”
“Here that you… passed away?” Kayden asked.
She nodded.
“Do you remember anything beyond that?”
The ghost shook her head. Her eyes were fixed on one specific spot, where the trails of spiritual energy infiltrating into the void seemed to be connecting.
Kayden looked around, trying to see if there was any sort of clue or anything of the sort that could better guide them towards what exactly had occurred here. There wasn’t much. No signs of any scuffles, no splash of blood or any trails. Nothing. If she had died here, someone had likely collected her corpse and removed all traces of it from the area.
But for all that Kayden could discover nothing, the ghost was having an entirely different experience.
She was starting to glow brighter again, turning more and more radiant with every passing moment. Her face was luminous as a sun now, the stars in her cosmic hair now shining with the brilliance of diamonds catching moonbeams.
“I can feel…” She didn’t finish her sentence.
“What is it?” Kayden asked.
“I’m… close to finding something.”
Her eye had screwed shut. Her whole body had tensed. She raised her arm, gliding upwards and extending as though she was reaching for something.
“I…” Her voice hitched, then her eyes snapped open. A supernova flared in her gaze. “I’ve found my name. Mierin. That’s my name. Was my name. Mierin.”
Kayden smiled as she turned to face him. The look of awed wonder on her face made him stare at her.
“I’m glad you found your name,” he said. “Mierin.”
She blinked. Smiled. Something of her regular sharpness returned. “I like how say it…” She frowned. “I realize I’ve never asked for your name.”
“Kayden Feronil. You can call me Kayden, Mierin.”
“Kayden.” She made a show of enunciating it clearly, then grinned a little. “It’s sweet. Like you.”
Kayden froze, which was a terrible way of putting it since a heated flush had turned his face into an oven. He was pretty certain if he tried to speak now, he’d stutter and make a fool of himself.
Curses. Kayden was practiced in this. He had flirted with the beauties back home. Why in the world had he started to feel like some innocent youngling fumbling through his first case of decidedly troubling infatuation?
“Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find anything else,” Mierin said. She was looking around, as though to land on a clue just like Kayden had sought a moment ago. “It also appears the little connection I felt has disappeared.”
Kayden took a refreshing breath. Mierin’s change in subject was easier to deal with than her earlier statement.
He looked around with his spiritual sight. Ah, that explained it. The little threads of twisted spiritual energy he had observed coming into the area had vanished. He wondered if Mierin had somehow used them up to regain a fraction of her memory. The first basic note of her identity. A symbol of a tune, one awaiting the rest of the melodies that formed her full song.
“We can find more,” Kayden said. “I think.”
She wasn’t encouraged. “But how long do we have?”
Kayden faced her, saw the concern in her eyes even through the brilliance emanating from their depths. He smiled In reassurance. “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure there’s enough of them left alive for you to terrify.”
“Oh?” She quirked up a smile that made his heart skip a beat. “How do you intend to do that?”
“By solving this mystery of ours. We have one clue you’re forgetting a little.”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“This site of your death and the lights I was following—they both lie on the same trajectory.”
Her eyes widened as she understood that there had to be a connection there they could explore. “That is… quite interesting, yes.”
“Besides, there are a few other routes I intend to delve into more fully once this funeral business is over.” Kayden stood up straight, looking back at the distant village. A smudged painting in the distance, nothing more. Like he was a ghost too, viewing it from the plane of the afterlife. “We’ve been on the backfoot of this mystery long enough. It’s time to take the initiative.”