The gravel road of the graveyard led to the pothole-filled dirt road of the town. It ran in a miles-long circuit, connecting the far northern edge of the town to the rest of it. There are not many things aside from cabins and the occasional historical oddity in my part of town. Like abandoned rock quarries and mansions.

Or to pick an example out of nowhere, a graveyard.

It took several miles along this road in either direction to get back to town. A trip that took a few minutes in a car. A bumpy, if beautiful drive, through the forest. The same couldn't be said if you are on foot.

On foot, it was, in short, a bit of a bitch.

The road was absolutely covered in potholes and hadn't seen a maintenance crew in my lifetime, which made trying to walk on it a potentially ankle-breaking experience for the inexperienced. I did own a bike, but it was a single time removed cousin to a street bike, so trying to ride it on this road was an excellent way to shake the teeth from my skull.

The obnoxiousness of getting to town probably had some sway on the fact that I was essentially a hermit when it came to social contact with the living. I knew a few people in town, but plenty of people knew I existed. If only in the sense of "that young midget who owns the graveyard."

Even though I didn't have any living friends, I wasn't lonely. I had plenty of friends and family. They just happened to all be dead. Thinking of ghosts made my mind drift to the one walking a few yards ahead of me. The tongueless man walked as if his feet were attached to lead weights. Each step a laborious effort that seemed to exhaust him. Why are you? – the thought had barely begun before I squashed it.

Now wasn't the time for that line of thinking.

I studied the familiar surroundings in an attempt to distract myself. The road was just barely wide enough for two cars to scrape past each other without leaving paint behind. And each side of the road was lined with rows and rows of towering birch and pine. Their tops reaching up towards the sky until they formed an organic tunnel.

A cold wind whipped through the trees. Causing the pines to rustle and shake and the birch to release another batch of orange leaves. The wind hit me, carrying with it the scent of dirt and ozone. I looked up past the trees to the gray sky. That storm was moving fast, and the wind was cold enough to make me glad I had grabbed a thicker coat.

I began walking a little faster, silently urging the ghost in front of me to speed up. Heavy rains turned this road into a mud pit, and my shower never seemed to be strong enough to get the mud out of my hair in a single session.

I didn't mind the rain usually. I found it beautiful, the way it transformed the world. It affected everything. It didn't care for your creed or religion. It didn't care where your political machinations dwelt. It didn't care if you're a man, animal, or something else altogether. Everything reacted to the rain.

Of course, some things responded to the rain by hunting.

My skin tingled as a particularly strong gust of wind brought a thick current of ambient magic trailing with it.

As it passed us by, I could feel Ben siphoning a tiny amount of that magic into himself, storing for later use.

Ghosts, like mages, could pull on ambient magic, but ghosts were also much more susceptible to the influences of that magic. Ambient magic was like a vast sea or equally massive fog bank that blanketed the world. It was everywhere as far as I understood it, but some places had a much thicker or thinner coating of it.

Silver Spruce had such a high concentration of ambient magic that it was thick as gel in some places. Ben had to be careful where he siphoned magic from. Ambient magic responded to thoughts and emotions, and particularly strongly to the thoughts and feelings of intelligent creatures--all of them, whether supernatural or not. A whole town in mass celebration would shift the magic of the area, coloring it with their thoughts and passions.

Of course, darker acts and emotions would taint the ambient magic just as much as the positive ones. Eventually, though, the magic would shift back to its natural form, but some acts and emotions could stain an area for years, even decades. And if Ben took from the wrong area, it would influence his mind.

It was just another reason that there were so many stab-happy ghosts. If you're too bonkers to care about where you're pulling energy from, you were likely to go even deeper into madness.

Yet another gust of wind came, stronger than the last, howling through the trees. As much as I might enjoy the rain, and how it dampened even the ambient magic of the world. I had no desire to get caught out in a storm.

"Hey, what time do you peg him for?" Ben asked abruptly.

"Huh?" Was my intelligent reply.

I had gotten so caught up in getting distracted by my surroundings that I had lost track of my immediate surroundings. It was a bad habit of mine, and one I never seemed able to shake.

I turned my attention to Ben and asked. "What?" He rolled his eyes and pointed in front of us.

"Lanky. What time do you think he's from?"

Ben's voice was casual, innocent. And completely full of crap.

I shot daggers at him with my glare, but the dark-skinned man didn't so much as blink. He just kept on walking. A grin plastered firmly in place.

He wasn't fooling me. I knew exactly why he was asking. Free entertainment.

Historically speaking, I hadn't exactly been the best at guessing the time period a ghost was from. Well... That was a bit of an understatement. If guessing a ghost's time period was a class, the teacher would've physically thrown me from the classroom then proceeded to burn the chair and desk I had used before scrubbing themselves.

But just because I had an abysmal success rate was no reason not to try again...

I focused on the ghost in front of us. I really needed to think of something to call him. "The ghost," or "lanky" wouldn't work.

As I had noted before, he was wearing a button-down and brown slacks with a white, bloodstained, lab coat topping it off. The blood and the man's rather ordinary looking tennis shoes were the only things about his clothing that stood out as strange.

I turned to Ben and shrugged. "I don't know, the 40s?" Ben chortled and shook his head. "Nope! Not even close." I looked again, not noticing anything new. "Late 80s?" He kept shaking his head. "90s?" I said, certain that I had gotten it wrong again--no change in reaction.

"I threw my hands up in frustration and looked up towards the sky, which caused me to almost trip in a large pothole. Ben laughed as he walked through the pothole like it was flat ground. "Fine! When is he from?" Ben stopped laughing and examined the man, stroking the light stubble on his chin in thought.

I rolled my eyes; we both knew he had already guessed. After a bit more posing, Ben answered. "Late 60s, early 70s." He said with complete confidence.

"How? Where are you getting those dates from?" Ben smirked and tapped the side of his head at the temple. "It's all about using your head." My glare was sharp enough that if I had been a mage, it likely would've started a fire. "And by that, I mean his hair and shoes, Ben said with a calming gesture. That tussled, shaggy look? Yeah, that's not a forties hairstyle. And I can't see a scientist or whatever he is wearing tennis shoes to work in the forties either."

I grumbled a bit, but I knew he was probably right. He was fairly skilled at guessing when a ghost was from. He probably would've been a grade A student in the hypothetical class, or a high B grade at the very least.

Ben and I sped up our pace to catch up to the man in question, who hadn't slowed during our conversation.

"You know," Ben said after a few minutes of walking in silence. "I'm kinda wondering what this guy's story is." I nodded in agreement.

We had been walking for a good half hour. At the pace we were going, it would likely take another half hour before we reached town. But there was a bus stop we could reach in a couple of minutes, if we could convince the man to get on it, it could save us the time and the walk.

"I'm curious too, his appearance is strange. Even for ghosts," I said as I studied the man. I saw Ben nod out of the corner of my eye.

"No tongue and a lab coat. My guess is a government conspiracy. Maybe he was working on a super-soldier serum or something." I eyed him as we walked. "Have you been lurking in movie theaters again?" Ben pressed his hand against his heart. "Don't say it like that! I'm not lurking. I can't exactly stroll up and buy a ticket, can I?"

I shook my head as I smiled. "Ben, it's okay. We all have our weird hobbies. I like collecting worn out paperbacks, and you like sneaking into dark rooms full of teenagers and watching intently for a few hours... while hiding in the corner," I shrugged.

"To each their own."

Ben lifted his fist and turned it back and forth slowly, examining the white scars that stood out in stark contrast against the rest of his skin. The deliberate intensity that he was studying his fist with, as if asking himself whether or not he should use it on me made me take a step to the side.

A moment later, we both looked up at the sound of screeching brakes. The bus had arrived at the stop at the same time we had.

I expected the ghost, man, I need to think of a name for him, to walk straight past the bus. Instead, he froze in place, turning to look at the old vehicle. After a few long seconds, he headed straight for it. His movements showing more, pardon the pun, life than they had before.

Ben and I quickly followed as he stepped straight through the bus doors, which opened a moment later. I exchanged a glance with Ben before climbing on.

The bus driver was a hefty woman in her thirties, who raised a brow at me as I climbed in. "Just one today? Huh, a Few people usually get on at this stop," she said. Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched for her frame.

"Just one?" I glanced at Ben and the man in confusion for a second before my tired brain caught up. "Yeah, strange." She gave me a look that told me I had waited too long before responding. I winced. I wasn't used to dealing with living people. The woman only shrugged, though, and closed the door. I heard her muttering something about weirdos as I walked over to where the man had sat down.

A few things about this situation had stood out as strange from the start. Ghosts appearing wasn't unusual at all, my presence pulled them in from wide and far. But the timing of his appearance was a little strange. He had shown up almost immediately after I confronted Noren. And while he wasn't all the way there, he was far from totally mindless. It was a little strange that he had only now approached me.

And at the end, just before I had been hit with Noren's memories, I had felt something, a resistance.

Did that have something to do with this? I shook my head and grumbled, "I can't see how, if I had hit a ghost with my shroud, it would've felt different." I caught the bus driver giving me a sideways look in the mirror. I shook my head. "Half the town already thinks you're crazy, Alder. Why not add to those rumors," I thought with a smirk.

The bus rocked and bounced on the uneven road, and I stared out at the passing wall of trees for a while.

Eventually, though, I turned my attention back to the ghost. I really need to think of a name for him... John. I looked at John, once again noting the dried blood on his chin and the splashes of it on his lab coat.

What had happened to him? Losing your tongue wasn't a common way to die. It wasn't like falling down the stairs or choking on your dinner. He had been murdered, and the fact that he was wearing a lab coat just made it even weirder.

Maybe he had been mugged by some particularly cruel robbers on his way back from a costume party? That was ridiculously contrived, though. Then again, almost any situation I thought of to explain his death sounded equally farfetched.

The bus screeched to a stop just as we crossed onto the pavement. With a hiss of hydraulics, the bus lowered to let a few people on. Even though we were back into the town proper, there was still a thick canopy of trees reaching high into the sky. In fact, there were only a couple of buildings outside of downtown that wasn't under the shade of trees.

Once the new passengers were seated, the bus set out again, though the drive was far smoother now that we were on pavement.

"Secret government tests to genetically engineer a super mage." I turned, slowly as to not appear as if I were jumping at nothing. I tried not to talk to ghosts in public. It was true that I had something of a reputation as a nutcase. Or at least I had been told I had that reputation. I would have to actually interact with people to confirm that for myself. Regardless, talking to empty air all the time was a good way to cement that reputation.

As a byproduct of that, I had become very good at conveying my thoughts through looks. And by "looks" I mean glares.

The one I gave Ben would've been easy to pick up even if we had been strangers. "Are you serious!?" It communicated. Ben shrugged. "It's possible," he defended. I glared harder. "Okay, fine. I'll admit it's not likely. And now that I think about it, what would a super mage even look like?"

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. We continued like that for several bus stops. Passengers cycled on and off, and we kept going. I did note that each time I stayed on; the bus driver had a disappointed look on her face.

I was lost in thought when Ben shook me. "He got up!" I looked around and saw that John had risen from his seat, which had been empty since every time someone tried to sit there, they shivered and moved to a different one.

The tall ghost turned and walked out of the bus. Ben and I quickly followed. I acted like I didn't hear the relieved sigh from the bus driver as I walked out.

We only had to walk a few dozen yards before John stopped in front of a large building. "Well, Ben. Got me new theories?" Ben shook his head as he stared at the building. "Not presently, no." My eyes traveled from the bloodstains on John's coat back to the building in front of us.

Why on earth had he taken us to Eliza's Aquarium?