Once Robert and Julian had left, the air in the room changed so completely it felt staged. Not subtly. Not gradually. My mother performed an entire, decisive about-face, her posture loosening, her shoulders dropping, the carefully measured politeness she’d worn for the CKCD peeling away like a mask she’d grown tired of holding in place.

  She didn’t turn to me.

  She turned to Sophitia.

  “I didn’t predict that a haunt could be transferred with you,” my mother said, her voice thoughtful rather than alarmed. Curious, even. “A petrified maiden, no less.” Her eyes traced Sophitia’s stone form with professional interest, lingering on the fractures, the mineral bloom across her surface. “Judging from the equipment… War of the Archimedes? May I have the name my son gave you?”

  “My lord has deemed my name to be Sophitia.” she replied, voice calm, reverent, and entirely unconcerned with the impossibility of the moment.

  My mother nodded. Then she smiled, soft and genuine.

  “My son was always better with names than I was.”

  Yeah. You named the cat.

  “Welcome home, Morgan,” she said at last, turning to me. The words landed heavier than they should have. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be the first to welcome you properly, but the CKCD monitors mana levels all across the country. When a high-density spike hits the ambient field…” She shrugged lightly. “Well. There’s really only one reason.”

  She paused, then added, “Also…”

  She snapped her fingers.

  The sensation was immediate and strange. Not painful. Not pleasant either. It felt like standing beneath a waterfall made of cool fog as it passed through my skin, through muscle and bone, brushing against something deeper. The pressure lifted, like a veil being pulled away.

  The Dia-dron embedded in the back of my hand shimmered.

  Its surface polished itself in real time, facets sharpening, light catching along edges that hadn’t been visible before. The gem looked awake now, luminous in a way it hadn’t been moments earlier.

  “Ignore everything they said about spell use,” my mother said breezily. “Use your spells in this house as much as you want. After all, I have for years.”

  She winked.

  Yeah. That was my mother. Loretta Barlow. Mom. Anti-authoritarian metaphysical shop cracknut. Apparently also a walking blind spot in the CKCD’s enforcement net. I couldn’t help it. I smiled.

  “Mom…” The word caught in my throat, tangled up with too many other things. Guilt. Awe. Embarrassment. Relief. “I’m sorry. I didn’t believe in magic. I mean, I knew you believed, but I thought it was just…” I trailed off, then tried again. “I get it now. I get why you do everything the way you do. You were a spellcaster back there, right?”

  She shook her head immediately.

  “Nope. Saint.”

  That single word knocked the breath out of me.

  “It’s why I can see Sophitia, dear,” she continued, matter-of-fact. “Only those with spiritual presence can see the dead, the damned, and the decayed. Or animals.”

  I glanced toward the hallway, where Coco-Butter had been watching this entire exchange with an intensity I only saw him give to the birds outside.

  “If that’s true…” I said slowly, “…then what are ghosts? I thought they were just malevolent spirits that gather enough residue to form something physical.”

  My mother shook her head again, sharper this time.

  “No. Ghosts are not the spirits of the dead.” She leaned back in her chair, fingers steepled. “They are malevolent, but they aren’t people. Ghosts are ambient Aether shaped by human myth until it learns how to pretend it was always real.”

  She waited a beat, making sure I was listening.

  “We call them ghosts because nearly every ghost story is caused by one. The term stuck, and the Aether didn’t bother correcting us.”

  She leaned forward slightly.

  “Here’s the simplest way to understand it. Say you have a village. A hundred people. Small place. Everyone knows everyone else. There’s an abandoned hut at the edge of town, and one day someone says it’s haunted. Maybe as a joke. Maybe to scare a child. Doesn’t matter. The story spreads. Everyone agrees the hut is haunted.”

  She tapped the table once.

  “That agreement generates Aether. Not much at first. But enough. Enough to start something.”

  Her eyes hardened just a little.

  “Now let’s say one day, after the haunt manifests, some pies go missing from the baker’s window. The truth doesn’t matter. A hungry child did it. But the baker says the ghost did it. So now the ghost learns how to steal pies.”

  My stomach tightened.

  “Next, some chickens go missing. Then a cow. Wildlife, obviously. But the story has momentum now. The ghost is blamed. So the ghost adapts. It learns how to take animals.”

  Her voice dropped, becoming quieter, heavier.

  “And then one winter, the snow rolls down the hill soaked red. An ocean of blood follows it into the village. Because by then, the myth has grown teeth.”

  She leaned back, exhaling.

  “That’s a ghost.”

  “So… if I understand Aether right,” I said slowly, choosing each word like I was laying glass across a fracture, “and how we use it… Aether is a mixture of data and mana. So how does an oral story generate it?”

  My mother nodded once, pleased. Not surprised. Pleased, the way she used to be when I finally asked the right kind of question as a kid.

  “Wonderful question.”

  She leaned back in her chair, fingers tracing the rim of her teacup. “In Aeterna, you use chants to cast spells. That’s the most visible form. Spoken words shaping intent. But there are other ways. Hand motions, for example. Spellcasters draw runic formations in the air with their hands.” She lifted her fingers slightly, sketching an invisible sigil without even thinking about it. “That doesn’t eliminate language. It just translates the chant from oral to somatic.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I frowned, gears clicking.

  “Language,” she continued, “isn’t just data. Calling it that isn’t wrong, but it isn’t complete either. Language is understanding. Understanding is knowledge. And knowledge is a form of power.”

  That landed harder than I expected.

  “When enough people share an understanding,” she went on, “especially an emotional one, it leaves an imprint. Stories repeat. Symbols stabilize. Meaning accumulates. Aether loves patterns, Morgan. It feeds on them.”

  She tilted her head, studying me. “You should read The Wise Words of Power by Magus Ardoin Thane when you get the chance. It explains this beautifully, and in a way that magic users across disciplines can grasp. Chants, prayers, code, myth. Same skeleton. Different skin.”

  I nodded, mentally adding it to a rapidly growing list of things I was apparently expected to read across realities.

  “I really wish I could bring objects back with me from there,” she added with a small sigh. “But sadly, since this is my otherworld, I can only bring objects there. Not here.”

  “That was actually going to be one of my questions,” I said quickly. “If I could get a gun for self-defense over there?”

  She chuckled, warm and unapologetic.

  “No. Sadly not. If I could, I’d have loaned you one of the ones in the armory.”

  “Oh that’s a sh—” I stopped mid-word, blinked, then did a full double take. “Did you just say one of… and the armory, Mother?”

  She laughed then, a deep, beckoning laugh that echoed faintly through the house and stirred something old and half-forgotten in the walls.

  “Son,” she said, wiping a tear of amusement from the corner of her eye, “I think you’re old enough to know that if that gem hasn’t already shown you…”

  She leaned forward slightly, voice dropping into something more intimate. More serious.

  “Our family is a bit more than special.”

  I stared at her, the implications unfolding like a deck of cards I hadn’t known I was holding. The metaphysical shop. The rules she never quite followed. The way she spoke about saints and spirits like coworkers instead of legends.

  “Wanna visit the armory? We can get you equipped with a weapon type actually suited for you, that you could use over there.” She smiled with a mischievous grin.

  There’s only one thing that the MMO gamer side of me was thinking right now.

  You have accepted a new Quest: Secrets of the Barlow Family.

  ***

  There were two things about this situation that made my nerves crawl.

  First, we were standing in what looked like a self-storage facility planted squarely in the middle of nowhere. Long rows of metal doors stretched out into the dark like closed eyelids, each unit identical to the last, the whole place humming faintly under harsh fluorescent lights. No cars. No nearby buildings. Just gravel, chain-link fencing, and the sense that if someone screamed, the sound would get tired before it found help.

  Second, it was dark and cold.

  On its own, the cold wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d been colder. I’d been much colder. But combined with the isolation, it set my imagination loose in exactly the wrong way. My eyes kept tracking the shadows as they slid and re-formed beneath the overhead lights, stretching and snapping back with every faint breeze. Every shift looked intentional. Every corner felt occupied.

  My thoughts, traitorous things that they were, latched onto that immediately.

  Right. Of course. I’m standing in the dark, thinking about the dark. So naturally, there’s going to be something in the dark.

  My attention ratcheted up another notch, muscles tight, breathing shallow, every shadow suddenly guilty until proven otherwise. The light hummed. The gravel crunched under my own boots and sounded far too loud. I could practically feel my pulse echoing in my ears.

  “A ghost isn’t going to randomly manifest just because you’re anxious,” my mother said mildly.

  She reached over and rubbed my shoulder, grounding in a way that cut through the spiral before it could fully take hold.

  “I can definitely tell you got into an adventurer’s guild,” she added, a hint of amusement creeping into her voice. “They’re very good at teaching new adventurers to be alert for every possible threat in their surroundings.”

  I exhaled slowly, some of the tension leaking out.

  “That’s a good instinct in a combat scenario,” she continued. “This isn’t that. You can relax.”

  Easier said than done, but I tried.

  “Besides,” she went on, gesturing vaguely toward the rows of storage units, “once the CKCD gets you a new phone, you’ll be able to see ambient coalescence of Aether. Ghost manifestations don’t sneak up quietly. They gather. They ripple. The air gets…busy.”

  My mother motioned toward one of the larger storage units near the far end of the lot. Its door was wider than the others, the metal slightly scuffed, the lock older. Ordinary enough to pass without comment. That, somehow, made it worse.

  She slid a key into the garage-style lock and turned it.

  The orange door groaned as it lifted, rolling upward on its tracks and revealing… another door.

  Not a storage door. Not metal. Not industrial.

  This one was smooth, matte, and inset into the concrete like it had always been there and was simply pretending not to exist. A keypad sat beside it, dark and unlit.

  “What do you think the code is, Morgan?” she asked casually, as if we were unlocking a shed.

  I stared at the keypad, then back at her.

  I remembered that weird chant I was forced to recite on my birthday.

  “Kethaal sonari venem aldrak?” I ventured. “Was that chant numbers, or was it a magia?”

  She nodded, pleased.

  “Numbers.”

  I blinked. “Wait, that sounded nothing like numbers.”

  She smiled and stepped forward. She didn’t touch the keypad. Not a single digit lit up.

  Instead, the door reacted.

  The surface rippled inward, folding in on itself like liquid glass collapsing toward a drain. Light spilled through the opening, bright and impossibly blue, the edges shimmering as if reality itself were briefly reconsidering its shape.

  “Also a chant,” she added calmly. “It’s the harmonic frequency of the Dia-Dron embedded in your right hand.”

  …Well.

  Glad you dropped that bombshell now.

  I looked down at my hand, at the gem glinting faintly beneath my skin, and felt something subtle hum in response.

  The gateway pulsed once, like a held breath released.

  “Enter,” my mother said, stepping aside and gesturing me forward.

  Taking the leap of faith, I stepped into the armory and understood immediately what she’d meant.

  The space beyond the gateway was vast, far larger than the storage unit had any right to contain. Rows of weapons stretched out before me in disciplined order. Firearms of every make and era rested in racks. Swords, knives, and grenades occupied their own carefully segmented sections. Staves stood upright in weighted cradles, their surfaces etched or worn smooth by use, while shelves of books lined an entire wall, spines marked with sigils, titles, and warning seals.

  Jewelry occupied a quieter corner, though “quiet” felt like the wrong word. Rubies and sapphires dominated, cut and set with meticulous care. Among them sat a collection of purple gemstones so deeply saturated they made amethyst look washed out by comparison, their color almost humming in the air.

  I turned my head slowly to the right and nearly laughed from sheer disbelief.

  Military tanks.

  Three of them. Parked side by side. Clean, maintained, and very obviously functional.

  The absurdity of it all was capped by a suit of plate mail displayed nearby, polished and elegant, its proportions unmistakable.

  It was fitted. Fitted for my mother.

  I looked back at her, then at the impossible collection surrounding us.

  “Welcome to the Barlow Armory, Morgan,” she said, her voice steady and unadorned. “It’s time we had a real conversation. About what our family is. How I met your father. What we knew would happen when we decided to have you.”

  She glanced toward the far end of the armory, where the blue light faded into something deeper, older.

  “And about my side of the family,” she finished, “across the door.”