Chapter 211 - Sea Of Solitude

To prepare for the divination, Ghost brought a book from the library to consult himself with, and from a room that appeared to be his storeroom of old, dusty and forgotten things—a seal. It was round and etched in on a tablecloth-like piece of black fabric with white thread and lines of aspects for seeing, hearing and knowing.

Compared to the jade seal Ghost gave me, or with the seal on JJ's coffin, it was a crude and simple thing. But if I looked closer, there were a lot of similarities to the jade seal. While the coffin seal was like a net, these both appeared to be more akin to looking glasses. Was the jade seal a divination seal, too?

In the middle of it, Ghost placed a saucer in which I shed a few drops of blood. After that went the hardest part, one for which Ghost needed to consult his reference material.

"The seal is here for the hardest part of the work—dipping into the infosphere." Ghost gestured at it without looking up from the old paper pages. "To avoid overload of information, one can't look everywhere at once, which is what your blood is for. It will be a focus, and when we dip, we will only see the points that are connected to it. You, of course, your living blood relatives, Jean-Jacques, if I'm right. I'd filter on blood relatives, but this is beyond my skill, so we will have to just concentrate after the fact."

"We? Would you need my help?"

"Of course, my student! I will just open the channel—it will be easier for us both, especially since you know Jean-Jacques much better, if you were the one to sort through the information I would get from it, while I focus on the seal itself. This is the hardest part. The seal will pull out the informational aspects near the focus points. Only a bit, so it won't disturb anything. Your task is to find anything in there that could be used to locate Jean-Jacques on the map."

"This sounds… like it's going to be one hell of a riddle." I sighed. "Alright, let's do it."

"Yes? Splendid! Come there and give me your hands."

We stood on the opposite sides of the small table Ghost picked for this task. Our hands created a circle around the seal, and around my blood in the middle of it. Aside, on a chair, laid worn wooden figurines of a bear and a dog.

"Open your well," Ghost instructed. "I will send the information to you, and you will process it and send useful stuff it into the bear, and the useless into the dog. We might use them to check the results later."

"Did you just pick them at random, or are these special figurines somehow?"

Ghost shrugged. "It's just some stuff that I didn't enchant yet… So, here. Are you ready?"

I nodded. Ghost grinned at me and closed his eyes. I followed his example and focused my inner vision only on myself and him.

I watched how Ghost pulled and pushed on the strings of the seal, almost playing it, and how from something so seemingly simple, a wondrous thing happened. It was… beyond my understanding, the same way it was beyond my understanding how zeroes and ones in computers turn into all the programs we use in our daily lives.

This was a wonder of seals. And this one, reached far, far out, through the world, to seek what was similar to what Ghost put in it.

Then, it poured out of Ghost's well, and I became too busy to wonder. There weren't supposed to be many people connected to me through blood, but there certainly was a lot of information to gather and filter.

There was information about Nightingale headquarters—the name "Nightingale Coven" itself, Ghost's name too, a seal, and other things that I could tell from the start were about me. I stuffed them away into the dog without thinking twice.

Then there was what, I was sure, was about my parents. Paints and painting, food and cooking. Glimpses of thoughts about everyday things. That went into the dog, too.

But these, at least, were easy to identify. What would I do with an information about a room? Just a room. It could be about anything, so it was useless to me as well.

Ghost kept channelling, and I kept sorting. Ideas, thoughts, data… And then there it was. A car—that was a definite idea in itself. A man—someone with thoughts and ideas, but without my grasp on them. Ghost's divination only gave a narrow sight of what was around the target, which was both good, because it saved me from frying my brain, and bad, because it gave little about the places the person was at.

The car, for example. I caught that, but nothing that would offer me an idea where that car even drove. Just that it did, and fast.

But there were other things. A sea, North, solitude. These were, I knew, thoughts—and they belonged to JJ's head. Hope and fear—not emotions, but ideas. And beyond that—nothing, like he was just not thinking about anything at all.

Ghost closed the channel, and I caught myself on forgetting to put the information I found into the bear figurine instead of keeping it in my well. When I opened my eyes, Ghost looked at me with interest.

"So, did you find anything?" He turned to the figurines and hummed. "North and sea? This can mean a lot of places."

"Yeah… Baltic Sea is the closest one from here, but it's close to the city, and he's still moving, if I caught that correctly. And if he's still moving, then what we found can still mean about nothing." I slammed my palms on the table in frustration. "I need a map! A map, and maybe I will have at least a guess then."

"Oh, but look at bright side, Diana," Ghost patted me on the shoulder.. "At least your blood works. I wasn't sure it even would!"