Jorun had spent a good hour cleaning up the house. He had already gotten familiar with the numerous chores that Betty had used to clean the house, and they weren’t that complicated.

As the sun rose through the spindly forest, the piles of sand and dust were slowly driven out of the building. He found that a small well was still able to draw water and he used this to scrub down the floors. While he was scrubbing he discovered one of the floorboards was loose, and it had a cavity below it. It was a little difficult to be certain, but it looked big enough to hold several books. So he tried it out with his tome, and went back to cleaning.

The white substance that had been put on the walls was peeling, and he wasn’t sure what he could do with that. So he left almost everything above the floor alone. The windows, doors, and lack of any furniture were all something that he would need to deal with if he were to stay here for very long.

He stopped to eat whenever he got hungry, and it didn’t even take half of the day.

The last thing he needed to do was to move the old witches book. He wasn’t sure if he would want to be using it or not, but it served no purpose leaving it in a hole in the ground. So he wandered over to her grave and brushed off the dirt he had used to cover up the hole. The book was still there, and he had the sudden thought of looking into it’s pages.

He opened it as he took it out.

The first page almost made sense, but it still gave him a sense of discomfort. It wasn’t as bad as reading some of the later pages. He closed the cover and stared at the book.

“What are you thinking?” Latty spoke up in her usual carefree manner.

“I am wondering if I am able to improve my ability enough to read this book.” He waved the witch’s book.

“Why?”

“If I can learn from it, I might be able to use it’s knowledge somehow. I don’t know what I will be facing as I go into this world.”

“What if you can’t learn from it?” She drifted overhead, pulling off her cloud impersonation.

“Well, I don’t think it would be wise to keep it around myself. I doubt people would react well to discovering a book about Witchcraft in my possession.”

“How would they know what it is about? I can’t understand a thing either of those books say.”

He stood up and moved it into the under floor space.

He stared at his first tome, and decided that he couldn’t just do nothing. So he pulled it from under the floor and went into the room with the circle’s markings in it.

“Latty. Hop in the circle please.” He instructed the ghost.

She did as he asked, and he felt the energy change as she froze into place. The circle glowed its ominous color and the small book popped into existence. He opened it and considered something that his tome said.

Each layer is bound by a single ideal.

This was supposed to be Latty’s first ideal. It was intended as her core component. The thing that defined how solid or ephemeral she was. Not that he had any idea about what that meant.

The book was full of information. It described her desire for power and her restless spirit, but what it didn’t do was describe a single ideal.

After a while, he gave up and severed the link

“Find anything out?” She asked as she came unfrozen.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I don’t know. It is supposed to be a single thing, but there is just a limitless number of things in your book. It is the opposite of single.”

“That’s cause I am a complicated girl.” She preened.

“I think I need to follow the instructions and build a more basic ghost. It should be easier for me to figure out some of this with a less complicated character.”

“Let’s do it! I could do with some company.” She clapped her hands enthusiastically.

“I got to wait until evening. Most ghosts don’t do so well during the day.”

Latty rolled her eyes, “What will we do until then?”

“I was planning on visiting the old hermit.”

Latty pouted, “Not him again. He is so boring.”

Latty had a very limited field of interest. She grew bored with almost anything that didn’t directly relate to her obtaining power or experiencing new things. Jorun paused as he considered this. There was something here.

Maybe he was looking at this the wrong way. As far as he could tell, the person she had been in the real world had been obsessed with gaining power. He thought about her restless energy and how he had read that she couldn’t change. He had been assuming that was because of what she had experienced in the waste.

Being trapped in a single place, and a desert at that, for what amounted to hundreds or thousands of years. He had been thinking of her in terms of a person. A person would grow tired, bored, and frustrated with being trapped there. However, that wouldn’t have had an impact on what was marked into her first circle.

Then he got it. He had been thinking of her lust for power and her restless energy as separate things. The book implied that the first circle could only contain one singular point. A fixed idea.

“Hey Latty, when you were alive, what did you want more than anything?”

“To go on adventures with my dad. To fight terrible monsters and become a hero.”

Jorun mulled it over. There was definitely the possibility he was on the right track.

He took a quick look at the old book before he stashed it away. He opened it up and read through the first page. It almost made sense. He let the cover swing shut and put it away and put the book into it’s hiding spot.

“Well let’s head over and see what the old man is doing.”

Latty sighed, “Farming. He is always farming.”

She was right.

He immediately stopped when Jorun showed up, “Go away.”

“Don’t be that way, I can weed for you.”

“You are terrible at weeding. Go away.”

Jorun choose to ignore him. The man did the same, and Jorun spent a few minutes digging through the garden and thinking about the book. It was hard to say that if it was really easier or not, but he felt that he had improved.

He pulled a plant from the ground, careful to make sure that he didn’t allow it’s roots to stay in the ground.

“You almost seem like you know what you are doing there.”

“I didn’t know almost anything when I first met you. I guess I know at least a little now.”

“If you help this much, I wont have anything left to do.”

“It can’t be that bad having some free time.” Jorun looked up at old man. He didn’t look particularly happy.

“What am I going to do if it isn’t farming?”

“I see a lot of people playing a game in town, how about that?”

“You mean chess?” The man looked over at Jorun, only pausing for a moment.

“Yeah, I have seen people playing it all the time. They seem to have fun.”

“I don’t have a chess set.”

“Make one. It doesn’t look that hard. You were just complaining about how you didn’t have anything to do.”

“I don’t want to make anything.”

“I can carve it, if you tell me what to do.”

“You just can’t leave me alone. I just can’t figure out what your game is.” He sighed, “I don’t need you to carve one. It is pretty easy to get going.”

It didn’t take them too long to finish up, and he pulled out a simple board with the familiar grid.

“We should have properly marked pieces, but we really just need something that represents each of them. I know some people who are able to play with nothing but a piece of paper.”

Jorun did his best to withstand the flow of information, but the man who normally said very little was suddenly brimming with energy. He had the board set up and pieces laid out in only a few seconds. They played a couple of games before it was getting dark and Jorun wandered off home.

“Wow,” Latty drifted up once the house was out of sight, “I can’t believe how different he is when you two played chess.”

Jorun had lost every game against the man.

“I feel like he is pretty good to, and it makes me think that he was holding back against me.”

“Looks like you got him exactly where you wanted him.”

Jorun turned down the path and considered what she had said. Latty was right, but there was one problem. He was starting to like the old guy.

“It’s time to create a ghost.”