Jorun focused.

He would need an anchor. He looked around the empty room. There was nothing but the old house. He thought about the body that lay in the shallow grave.

A witch.

Young, alone and afraid.

Forced to live in this home for all time.

He focused his breathing and let the energy slide into the ground. It spread through the small house and long tendrils began snaking from the various structural elements to a point in front of him.

Next he needed the energy to manifest a purpose or drive.

Looking for friends.

It was a simple enough purpose. He focused the energy and drove it into the sphere.

Next he would need to create the focus. If he didn’t push hard, it wouldn’t be very focused on the purpose he had just defined. He suspected that it would take more energy to accomplish the focus. He poured the energy into it.

Looking for friends.

The next element was the heart. If he wanted a being of passion, he could pour energy into it and help define it. Love or hatred, either was acceptable.

A little love.

He was burning through the small reserve of energy he had been taking from the cemetery quickly. So he didn’t want to pour as much into creating this aspect. A vague or ill defined passion was acceptable enough for him.

Breath.

He needed to breath the voice into the creature. He poured energy into his throat and forced it out and into the sphere. It took a lot of his energy, but he figured that Latty would be able to chat with it for a while.

He was almost done, and he would be able to rebuild his reserve easily enough. There were two more stages to this process, and neither of them were as important as the ones that he had already accomplished.

The next step was the eye. It’s ability to see beyond the obvious. Intuition, instinct. These were important for only specialized situations, so he only poured the minimum amount of energy into it. The eye opened above the sphere, a vague and unclear thing.

The last piece was the connection to the next realm. If he understood what the book meant, he would be able to use this for a proper reincarnation or resurrection. He wasn’t entirely certain how it would work, but it was definitely the first real clue that he had seen in his journey to accomplishing the resurrection of his hometown.

He filled out the eye’s energy with as little as he could, then he poured the remaining energy he had into the last stage. It wouldn’t serve to making the specter more useful, but it would allow him to study the last layer’s book.

The final result was a shell. It glowed in the faint and familiar way. It was like the books. They existed in a real way, but they weren’t physical to anyone else. He suddenly realized that he had poured too much energy into the process and that he wouldn’t be able to complete it.

“Is it done?” Latty interrupted his train of thought.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Uh, I may have poured all the energy into creating the frame and I don’t have enough to actually form the specter into it’s physical shape.”

“So you have to stop?”

“I need to get some more energy.”

“What do you need to do then?”

He shrugged, “I mostly need to wait for a while. The cemetery is generating energy for me. I shouldn’t need to do much more than that.”

They chatted idly while they waited. It took a couple of hours for him to build up his reserve, it was still before midnight and he knew that there was plenty of time for him to wait.

“Here we go.”

He held up the vessel and poured raw energy into it.

It shifted, drawing the small amount of energy and it became different. This was a small little amount, but he immediately drew it to the circle and began studying it.

The book was far simpler than the one for Latty.

It was not simple thought. The only reason that he could understand this one was because he had defined it himself.

“Find what you wanted?” Latty asked, “This is very interesting to look at from this perspective.”

Jorun simply shrugged as he released it from the circle. It floated over to Latty, still ball-like, and began chatting with her. He began to mark out the elements that where necessary t change this into the second circle. As he worked, he listened to the two ghosts talk. The new one was incredibly simplistic compared to Latty, but she talked to him anyway.

They continued chatting, more or less in circles.

He hadn’t ever noticed it, but he could tell Latty wasn’t bothered in the least.

Ghost’s cannot change.

He had to try and talk this way to Latty. He had been keeping the conversation alive, because he didn’t think of things in the right way. Latty wasn’t able to talk or think, she was just a more complicated version of the simple little ghost drifting in front of her.

“Ghost, into the circle.” he commanded it when he had finished making the marks for the second circle.

It drift into it and froze in place. The pulsing energy of it’s light holding was the only visible change.

The book was very different.

It contained many of the same ideas, but it expressed them in entirely different ways. He spent a little time studying it, but he didn’t want to waste the night. Dawn was coming and he wanted to see the seventh circle.

He hurried through the process each time as he listened to the two ghosts chat. They picked up the conversation as if nothing had happened or changed and resumed talking around each other. Faint echo’s of their lives. Well Latty’s life.

She isn’t the original person.

He needed to know this. This alone had revealed a great truth to him.

Even if you bring back the loved ones as carefully as possible, they aren’t alive.

He made a note of this in the tome.

It was the first time he had ever written into the book.

The entire text changed, responding to his words.

Jorun stared at the page for a moment as he considered the implications, and then realized he was running out of time.

He finished the seventh circle and began the examination. Each of them had revealed pieces of information he hadn’t considered before. It’s book held the words he was looking for.

There is no living soul connected to this form.

Jorun sat down as he had the answer he had wanted. He watched the rising sun slowly warm the distant horizon and bleed through the window. When strands of light struck the small ghost he had created, it exploded into dust.

“Hey where did it go?” Latty asked confused.

“Don’t worry about it Latty. I just need you to enter the circle.” Jorun instructed.

She drifted into it and he felt an option to open several different paths open before him. The tome hadn’t made it entirely clear. He had feared that it would take seven different and unique circles to be able to view the information contained in the different layers, but it was all visible here and now.

He opened the book containing Latty’s Seventh Level.

This contains the soul of Lattara von Eldrin.

He closed the book and released Latty.

“You are smiling. I take it you found something you needed?”

“Yes Latty, I found the thing I needed. I can at least bring you back to life. Although I don’t know if it will immediately help with my personal goals. It does suggest exactly what I suspected it does.”

“I can live again?” There was a desperation in those words.

“I think so. I need to gather more information first. So make sure that you don’t get in my way.”

She grinned. Her eyes cold and hard, “I would kill to have my life back.”

“It will probably be necessary little Latty. That and even more.”

He watched the sun rise, and new that he had to do whatever it would take.

He would survive, and everyone from his home would survive.