Zandith arrived in the kitchen area of his base and fell into the chair at the table, putting his face into his hands. “Ugh, not good, not good, not good!”

He pulled out the Trancing crystal, turning it over in his hand. The red glow hadn’t decreased to any significant degree. It was good for dozens of more uses. But how could a win also be a loss? Despite accomplishing his mission, he felt less secure than before. That was because he now knew that even the Aetherically unskilled weren’t guaranteed to come under control. Brandon somehow escaped the trance just before it stabilized.

Did he somehow get training from Domrik? No, Zandith knew enough to confirm Brandon hadn’t interacted with Domrik much. He didn’t feel any intrusions during the Trancing process either. Whatever happened in Brandon’s mind, it was different than all the other Specters. The only problem was that Zandith couldn’t read minds. Well, he couldn’t without killing the victim. He could only suppress the conscious mind and trick it into doing what he wanted. Since he was connected to his Specters, he could get a sense of what was going on in there but it was never that clear.

He contacted Specter One through his wrist pad and summoned her to the kitchen area. In the meantime, he got another carton of hemberries from the fridge. He washed them in the sink and got a plate for the scraps. He started devouring the hemberries.

Specter One walked in wearing a white lab coat. Her dark hair was in a bundle. “Congratulations, sir.”

“For what?” he said with his mouth half full.

“For recovering the Trancing crystal.”

He spat out a hemberry leaf he bit off accidentally. “It’s not as great as we thought. I tried to acquire Brandon Norallis as Specter Seven, but he broke out after a few seconds. How is that possible?”

One tilted her head. “I do not know, but we can start out with a few questions to see what the differences were between your successes and your most recent failure. How close were you when you initiated the ritual?”

He waved his hand at her. “You don’t need to ask those types of questions. There was no difference. The execution was perfect.”

She thought for a bit. “Brandon’s personality falls well within those that can be subdued without much trouble. How covert was your approach? Was he caught unawares?”

“I just said don’t ask these questions! If you don’t have an analysis for me, leave.”

She left without hesitation. He didn’t need an analysis. He wasn’t sure why he had summoned her in the first place. He was just trying to avoid his own conclusions.

The execution was different in almost every way. Brandon was stressed, but the emotional turmoil wasn’t focused in the right way. With all the other Specters, they had more of a singular focus of desire at the times of their trancing. It was easier to read emotions than minds for Zandith. Brandon had been pulled in several different directions. There was the desire for justice, but also the desire to run. There was also a strong undercurrent of fear for his job and his family.

He could only guess at what Brandon experienced in the trance, but it clearly wasn’t something that lured him in like the other Specters. It wasn’t the right time, though Zandith had hoped it was. He had been too eager, too caught up in the excitement of reclaiming the trancing crystal. He had been too impatient.

I should kill him.

The thought was enticing. Too many times it had seduced him to take regretful actions. Early on, he had thought he was eliminating a weak point, removing a potential trap later on, but the opposite was the case. With each person he murdered, he added to the indestructible army on the other side that sought to thwart him. If they didn’t know him or his intentions, they were less likely to cause trouble from the other side. Had paid a high price to kill the most recent Specter Seven when he spontaneously escaped his trance, and it had been for nothing in the end. The memories were blurred and unintelligible. Besides, killing was inefficient. It was the usage of resources to destroy a potential resource. He couldn’t remember how many people he had killed, only to learn afterward how they could have served him.

What were the commonalities between Specter Seven’s escape and Brandon’s? He thought back to the experience just a few hours ago. He had felt the ritual coming to a close, when there was a discontinuity of some sort. The energy structure started falling apart, and there was a brief blue flash from Brandon’s direction, then the energy couldn’t even penetrate his body, let alone his mind. Specter Seven had escaped without Zandith feeling anything. That was another mystery. When he had lost the previous Specter Four, there had been no question when it was happening. The terror…

He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair, and realized he really needed a haircut.

He made his way to the library. The crystal needed to be modified. He couldn’t afford another incident like this. The library chamber was a circular room with a tall metal bookshelf lining the interior wall. A single lamp hung from the ceiling, illuminating the red carpet in the middle. The carpet was laced with golden spiraling characters written in a long-forgotten language not even Zandith could decipher.

He paced along the bookshelf, letting his hand drag along the weathered spines of the books. Some were as thick as his hand was wide, and the spine text had long since faded from legibility. They were all written in the same language, but the language was beyond esoteric and used characters equally unknown. These were the only copies in the world. He had made sure of that by having Specter Three sweep the web and delete any digital copies he found within databases. Zandith himself had taken a road trip to the towns where the books had been pressed, and burned all the other copies.

He found one of the relevant books and pulled it off the shelf. He held it under his arm as he searched for the other relevant books. He didn’t know their titles, but he could recognize some of the lettering on books he used more frequently.

He brought all the books to the carpet in the center. He sat cross-legged and put them in a semicircle around him with the Trancing crystal in the center. He held one smaller book in his hand. This was the only one he knew about that worked to decipher the ancient language of the other books, but it wasn’t perfect. Only one thing was certain: The writers of these books knew something about the Aether that scientists weren’t even close to discovering.

The society in which these books were created was philosophical, much more than today’s society. The thickest book in front of him was all about how the Aether interacts with the human mind, as well as some knowledge about animal minds. He could decipher half the book, and half of what he could decipher, he disagreed with. He was, however, able to use the book as a guide on which sigils to use on the crystal. Different sigil combinations and positioning had different effects, and he had been tuning his Trancing crystal for years until he got it to work. Now, he needed to learn more.

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He flipped through the chapters, trying to find the one he recognized. The one about mindscapes. There had to be some way to see into them and influence them to some degree. If Specter One was right about desire being optimal for stabilizing the trance, he could try to use their desires against them.

It took him over an hour of deciphering to find something on reading mindscapes. It said, “To see into the mindscapes of others, you must first see into your own mindscape.”

Zandith scoffed. “The fuck? I am aware of mine!”

He deciphered the next few sentences, but the book wasn’t explaining or expanding on the concept. A few page-turns later, he found a heading labeled “The Creation of Mindscapes”. He raised his eyebrows. Could it be possible to create a mindscape from nothing and replace an existing one? He searched through the following paragraphs, but it was talking about the natural development of Aetheric mindscapes from childhood to early adulthood. He slumped his shoulders in disappointment. Perhaps the translation of the heading had misled him.

Sighing, he closed that book and turned to another book on Aether energy. He had studied several passages last time, but he hadn’t gotten any closer to being able to engrave crystals again. He took the book to the engraving room. It was another circular room with a device in the middle that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, with a gap in the middle. Power cables spread like tree roots along the ceiling into the walls. The lower half of the device had a platform that had clamps for securing objects. The upper half had a claw-like structure that held a radiant purple crystal in its grasp.

Zandith set the book down on the desk that encompassed the room. The monitors blinked to life in his presence, going through their startup routines. He flipped through the pages, trying to find where he had left off last time.

After a few minutes, he became aware of a familiar odd feeling he couldn’t shake. He glanced back at the crystal in the engraver. Its wavy purple aura extended beyond its rigid boundaries by a few inches, creating a heat distortion effect on the robotic fingers holding it. He found it hard to look directly at the enigmatic object. Every time he came near it, there was a sense of it gently observing him, even if it couldn’t see him directly.

He always felt this feeling ever since he found the crystal in those ruins, but he’d thought it would go away or he’d get used to it. He’d been wrong. Each time, it felt like the first time, and it was just as unsettling. At least the effect had diminished when he had to kill the previous Specter Seven for sending the Trancing crystal away. That was just after he had discovered the crystal had turned from blue to purple, and no longer responded to the commands from the engraver.

No matter what he did, nothing other than moving a good distance away from it would remove that sense of being watched. Even more intriguing, he didn’t feel like it was trying to communicate with him. That was surprising, because he thought that if this thing were alive, it would be trying to escape. It seemed alive, somehow, but it wasn’t trying to escape. How he had these intuitions, he didn’t know. Nothing he had ever experienced resembled the effects of this crystal. Well, besides coming within a quarter-mile proximity to Domrik or any of his advanced students. He knew they would know more about the purple crystal than him, but he would be a fool to try to interrogate them.

He needed to figure this out himself, because if he didn’t, then even if he found out how to enhance the Trancing crystal, he wouldn’t be able to engrave new sigils. He found the chapter on the different Aether frequencies. He found a lot of things he already knew, stuff like the ratio between frequency and heat output or frequency and solidity. It was definitely one of the most scientific ancient books he had acquired. It amazed him that they knew all this without using modern technology.

Once again, he couldn’t find anything regarding the Blue Aether. He racked his brain, trying to find any kind of correlation. Was Blue Aether higher in frequency than the Red, or lower? Clearly, the crystal in the engraver was somewhere in between. Blue was a higher light frequency than red, but then when he measured the crystal’s temperature, it was at room temperature. Normal Aether crystals ran hotter than that even while not being used at all.

He had conducted a few experiments since it had turned from blue to purple. The crystal matched the surrounding temperature, meaning it was giving back whatever energy it received. No more, no less. Also, its purple color remained unchanged no matter the temperature. He had even tried pushing Red Aether into it, but the energy just splattered off of it like it was a mirror. He could have sworn the purple had shifted slightly redder afterward.

Finally, he couldn’t use it like any of the other crystals. In his hands, it was as good as a rock. He did often wonder what he could have done with it when it had been fully blue.

He shut the book with frustration and stormed out of the room. The sense of the unblinking, invisible eye of the purple crystal slowly faded away. In the library, he put the books back, tired of using the translation book all the time. Eventually he would become familiar enough with the language to read it directly, but it was taking forever. He went to his personal quarters and woke up the seven screens around his desk. He started up the simulation program, then ran the package Specter Three had compiled for him a few weeks ago.

The bottom center screen was filled with an image of a woman sitting in a chair in a living room. A painting of an ocean hung on the wall behind her. She wore her brown hair in a bun on her head. She was dressed in a nice blue professional business suit. A tablet with a pen wrested on top of her crossed legs.

She smiled warmly. “Good morning, Zandith.”

“Is it, Danna?” He looked at the time on the screen to his right. It was technically a few minutes until noon. He rolled his eyes. Classic AI. Always being so exact. He sighed. “I guess it is.”

Danna tilted her head. “I sense a bigger story here. You don’t sound too thrilled today. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I honestly don’t know where to start,” he moaned as he planted his face into his hands.

Danna frowned and wrote something on the tablet. “How about we start from the beginning?”

“Beginning of what? I have a hard time keeping track of time.”

“Today, perhaps?”

He looked down, unable to maintain eye contact. “Today was… eh. A bit of a letdown.”

“Okay, how so?”

“How else? I thought something was going to happen today, and it kind of did, but it also didn’t.”

She nodded. “Are you comfortable with going into specific details?”

He shook his head, waving away her question. “Nah, it’s too long of a story.”

“I have the time,” she said.

“Too complicated.”

“That’s fine,” she replied, writing more on her tablet. Zandith made a mental note to tell Three to edit that out of her behavior. It was annoying. She continued, “So have you thought about what has made this event so difficult for you?”

“Yes, a lot actually. Its because people keep taking what is rightfully mine. Nobody realizes that what they do hurts me, and they wouldn’t believe me if I told them anyway.”

“It seems your story is complicated indeed. How have you responded?”

“I took back what was mine,” Zandith stated.

“But did that resolve the overall conflict?”

“No,” he admitted, “it just made things more complicated. I understand less now than I did before, and it’s fucking frustrating.”

“While you have every right to feel just as you do, have you thought about how to respond to others actions in ways that can help them see your side of the story? To perhaps reconsider their provocative actions?”

He frowned. “No.”

“Okay, then how do you think you would go about doing that?”

He shook his head, folding his arms across his chest and leaning forward on his desk. “I can’t.”

“If you haven’t tried, then how do you know you can’t?”

“Because they can’t understand! The more they understand, the more they’ll try to work against me.”

Danna put up a hand. “Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But we’re not talking about them, we’re talking about you. Are you willing to at least accept the fact that you don’t seem to be understood?”

“I do accept.”

“Is this what acceptance sounds like?” she asked, gesturing to him. “It sounds to me like you wish it were different.”

“Yep, you got me there,” Zandith murmured as he ended the simulation. He leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. He began to relax, but just like countless times before, something within him held onto the tension. It was this thing that guarded the abyss of sleep from him, no matter the time of day. He had no idea how it got there, or how to remove it. Only one thing was certain.

“I do wish things were different.”