Once the sculptor had been escorted back inside the castle - "Just a dizzy spell, I assure you," he'd protested when picked up and heaved over an arm - Eiren ran to his room as fast as he dared without drawing attention. He dove onto his bed and nearly threw aside the pillows in an effort to extract his notebook.

Something tangible at last, he crowed to himself, messily scrawling down as much of his conversation with Severin Quilby as he could remember. From the man's own mouth, a clear connection to some knowledge of the fate of the Kelfordshire Ladies! Once he had written the most important line of all, I am merely the tool with which she found her true form, he tapped his pen to his lips and considered the implications of these words.

If the letters he perused were of any indicator, the first unnamed wife of Elmund Van Wyk was a lovely, tender woman who seemed to genuinely care for her husband. The painting that held her image in the family room supported this rather different persona - her appearance was as sweet as her letters were.

Eiren rolled onto his back and stared hard at his notes. What did the statues of her have to do with her loveliness? Why did she look so distraught in his dreams, if she appeared the agency of peace in all renditions of her? He groaned aloud, the contradictions and the similarities meeting together in a sweltering mess in his head. He needed to think more clearly, organize what he had learned, and what was assumed.

A line was drawn quickly down the center of a new page. On one side, he wrote That Which We Know, and on the other, That Which is Strange or Implied. The first side received the following notes:

- A kind woman by all accounts

- Fond of LVW

- Immortalized as a nymph by SQ

- Hidden in the back of the grounds, by a pond

The other side was much harder to fill, Eiren realized. All of the things he felt about this nameless woman, and he was yet unable to express any of them in concise thoughts.

"Everything here does its best to irritate my advances in knowledge!" Standing and pacing, he absently folded and unfolded the page, trying not to feel foolish for considering his Strange or Implied notes. Chief among these was his dream - this was the clearest evidence Eiren had for suspecting something amiss with the late Lady Van Wyk, and yet, it was not real.

Of course, one should never truly disregard what sleep told him, Eiren knew that, and it gave him some measure of comfort, but what did not comfort him was the path listening to this dream would take him on. The Lady was in fear of him. Even after the stress of the approaching birthday, and the terror his near-fatal run in with Lord Van Wyk had caused, Eiren had not forgotten the look on the face of the girl - the Lady, he corrected. She had grasped at her throat and screamed about her breath, and now, he thought with a heavy sigh, leaning his head against the window and peering over the visible grounds, she was a statue. She was now in her true form, as Severin had called it.

He pulled the notebook up to his face and scowled at the paper, before reluctantly writing on the second side the following:

- Someone has stolen her breath - does this mean she was dying?

- Why did SQ show me her figures after asking about my religious practises?

- Was SQ responsible for her death?

- What killed the First Lady of Kelfordshire?

Eiren looked at what he had written and shuddered. The implications were terrible, in writing killed. There was nothing to suggest she had died any way other than some unfortunate, natural death, but the dream had a strong impression on him, one that was impossible to shake loose.

In the distance, he could make out the ashen hair of the sculptor, bobbing up and down as he roamed the grounds. Eiren squinted and leaned forward, immediately interested in the actions of the most peculiar man.

Severin appeared to be looking for something. No, he was trying to escape the priest! Eiren noticed - just barely - Father Bele, tottering after the sculptor and yelling. The sculptor appeared to be yelling back, waving his hands as he dipped in and out of the hedges. It surprised Eiren to notice that the sculptor appeared to have a better idea of the landscape than the priest, for the latter soon lost the sculptor, and stood aimlessly, unable to direct his anger at the intended source. From his position at the window, Eiren could clearly see Severin, hunched over and coughing into his handkerchief, not terribly far from the priest, but well hidden by several layers of shrubbery.

The sight of the sculptor interested Eiren greatly, and reminded him of the mystery before him. He needed more information about the Ladies, but there was none to be found in a room unoccupied by another other than himself in a great many years.

He would have to continue his search in the halls of the Castle.

Eiren considered for a moment where to begin looking. Somehow, he felt he wouldn't find anything he needed on the Eastern Wing. The rooms here were few and consisted of a handful of bedrooms, and an overwhelming number of baths, cupboards, and veritable closets of sorts. He considered Caelony's room, and the bond they had briefly shared over discovering anything at all about the Lord, and the loss momentarily paralyzed him.

Intentionally avoiding thoughts of her and her lover, he had tried desperately to forget that fateful night, but still, the image of her, wrapped around the chest of someone else, stung him to the quick. He knew not who this other man was, not where he came from, or how Caelony had snuck him onto the grounds, but it did not surprise him that he had never heard the man mentioned before. It required no great deal of imagination to believe that the Lord Van Wyk would not approve of her lover, and the image of his wrath, if he did learn, had tempted Eiren many a time to reveal this terrible secret. Yet, something always held him back - was it his hatred for the repression the Lord represented?

Whatever it was that kept him back, Eiren felt that to tell was impossible. Revealing Caelony's personal escape would put Eiren's own investigations in jeopardy. Better to give her one small thing, and protect many as a result.

"Stop this!" He smacked the side of his face and released a frustrated roar. Thinking about her would do nothing for him now! He tucked his notebook in his shirt and made his way out into the hall, a strong desire to do overcoming him and pulling him about the castle. He peered into every room that wasn't locked or permanently shut from age, marking each one's general location in his book when he had finished looking into it. For the most part, none of the rooms contained anything at all of note.

It was not until Eiren had traveled to the Northern side of the castle, across the house from the massive library, that he found something close to what he was searching for. He had found a bedroom, quite unlike the mess that was Caelony's, and vastly different from that of the Lord's. In fact, he had not recognized it as a bedroom for several minutes, so pleasant and bright and wholly separate from the rest of the rooms in Kelfordshire.

Intrigued by the bright lights that flooded the room upon first sight, he had slipped into the room and peered excitedly around. It was a neat room, shelves and books piled in organised fashion. Lace and cloths were gently placed under various boxes and glass displays, most of which contained roses and flowers that looked suspiciously like those from the pond.

Eiren gasped aloud and grinned - if the statues of the First Lady were placed by the pond for a reason, then surely, it was for the fondness she had for the flowers that grew there! He jotted this down messily on a new page and peered around, a grin pulling his cheeks into a stretched, unfamiliar smile.

Using his pen to gently move aside some of the boxes, he found that some of them sat upon letters and elegant sheets of paper. He peered wide-eyed down at one and saw that the handwriting contained the same scrawl that the first of the letters did, and the confirmation thrilled him. Whirling around and waving his hands in the sunlight that poured in from a momentary break in the clouds, he laughed aloud at the luck bestowed on him. Perhaps, while he was here, he would learn at last the name of this wonderous Lady, or how she had met the man who owned such an impressive estate. Possibly, he laughed to himself, he would learn how she felt of the sculptor, and the priest!

As he slowed his movement, his eyes fell on the bed of the Lady, and its stiff, unused covers. The pillows were covered with a delicate layer of dust, and when Eiren pressed a finger to the surface, the pillow resisted ever so slightly.

The sight of the bed, unused in what was quite possibly decades, quelled the excitability Eiren had for finding the room. The gravity of the death struck him, and he sat down in the light pink chair at the desk that held so many boxes and notes.

Whoever this Lady was, she was no more, and Eiren felt a sudden guilt for his own existence. Tears filled his eyes, mere seconds after he had laughed aloud, as he considered that she would never again write a letter, never laugh herself at something as simple as a rose.

Once he had sniffed his way through a few minutes of self-pity and remorse for the death of somebody he knew almost nothing about, he pulled a smooth, grey journal from high up on a pile of books and prised open the covers. The book emitted a gentle creak when he pulled the thick front page apart, and a tiny puff of dust kissed his nose when he turned a few pages.

There, in so light a touch, was a name, swirled across a page, and the declaration that this was the personal journal of the Wife of Dearest Elmund Van Wyk, of Kelfordshire Estate. Unfortunately, Eiren could not make out the name. It was written with so many swirls and dots and lines, that he could only make out that it began with an L, but that very well could have been an E or an I. Although it made sense to him that the name wouldn't have been clear, as it was written by somebody who knew what they were called, and didn't expect any other eyes to view it, it still disappointed him that he couldn't decipher it.

The first few pages after such an elegant introduction were largely nonsensical. They told of creatures that did not exist, and names that were foreign and peculiar, and places wild and strange. Eiren gathered that these pages were dreams, and he eagerly devoted a page in his own notebook to shorthand descriptions of these - if this woman was warning him of something in his sleeping life, then what she saw at night was of great importance.

The next few pages of the journal began her actual story, the daily chores and duties she carried out. She mentioned a maid, a serving girl of sorts, who her faithful husband - still a peculiar notion to Eiren, who saw none of the charms in Lord Van Wyk that she did - had found from afar. The Lady described this maid as being foreign and very strange, but feeling very fondly towards her.

Though we do not understand one another, and I speak nothing of the language she is a native to, we still talk, if you can imagine, and we talk quite frequently! She and I chatter at one another as often as we breathe, it seems sometimes, and Father Bele, bless his soul, says we talk more than actual sisters do! How delightful!

Eiren smiled sadly at this and wondered if the Lord only brought on staff from outside of the country. Was this serving girl perhaps from Severin's homeland?

The fate of the maid was briefly decided in a few short words.

She is gone from us now. Dearest Eli told me she had given herself for our Great Ones, our gods of light and silence. Although I dare not say this to him, it saddens me that someone with so much light of her own should be forced to give it up for those who do not give up anything for us.

Oh, how silly I am! I have just spoken with Father Bele, and he has comforted me most kindly in this. He chastised me as gently as he dared, but reminded me of the sacrifices many the Golden and Silent Ones have given. "Life," he said, much the way my father would have, had his sweet person still lived to this day, "costs life, and she gave as much as they would have. There is no greater honor." I am much comforted by this, and although I miss her dearly, I shall be forever proud of her sacrifice.

Eiren stared at the page in horror. Was the maid... killed? Had she died under some horrible religious pretense? Eiren swallowed and wiped at his brow, covered in damp, cold sweat. The clockwork presence of the sculptor swam to the forefront of his mind, and he looked up and shivered. Just how was he, a foreigner as much as the maid, but still living, a part of this wild tale?

At that moment, the priest screamed something rather shrilly, exasperation filtering through all of the walls and rattling around in every room. Eiren flinched and huffed in annoyance, but the sound reminded him that he should not wait much longer in here. He had already been roaming the halls for many hours, and reading the Lady's journal had rapidly stolen nearly a half-hour from the day.

He stood up and tucked the journal under his arm, gently behind his own notebook, and quietly slid out of the room, smiling grimly as the dearest Father Bele screeched at another victim of his frustration.