Selene nodded her head along to Venla's question. "Many think that a seance is for contacting the dead, but that is an oversimplification." She'd entered the cadence of a pedagogue giving a lecture. "It's a dive into the waters of Memory -- yours, and all others who have walked a similar path, and ended up in this place."

The monastery had a lot of memories to share. It was a generous place, full of ghosts and legends, and it didn't take much to coax them out of hiding. Just a few candles, some verse to repeat, and one could spend the whole afternoon in conversation with Past and Present. Even Future made an appearance sometimes.

So caught up was Selene with the possibility, that she did not notice the unease she'd stirred in the two girls. Venla choked it down with a smile; Mina, however, had not yet learned that skill.

'Binding.'

An echo of fear, long past but still looming. Its shadow swallowed Mina up, and she was gone.

"Oh, dear," Selene said, glancing down mournfully at the spot where her young protege used to be. "She's turned invisible again."

A few steps on slippered feet took Selene off the path. Grass brushed delicately at the hems of her robes. Nearby, a rocky fountain bubbled into a shallow pool. "Mina, come back," she called out into the empty garden. "I meant a temporary binding, it wouldn't be like what you---"

A dark wave washed over Captain Selene. She swayed in the current of it, some of the paper scrolls under her arm slipping down, threatening to fall. With a drop of her shoulders, she let out a weary sigh. "I'm not helping things, am I..." Selene scolded herself in a low mutter.
 
She cast her eyes toward the spot where Mina had been, careful as someone peering into a dim root cellar. Then she turned back to Selene, trying to muster a small, encouraging smile despite the lingering shiver of unease from talk of seances and bindings. The brewer's daughter had little to no experience with rituals of any kind.

“Well now,” she said, “I don’t reckon you’re makin’ a mess of it half so bad as you think. You’ve a kinder way about you than most folk I’ve met. Sometimes words just… tumble out wrong, doesn’t mean you’ve spoiled anything."

“Oh... here, let me,” Venla murmured, already stooping down. Skirts pooled around her knees as she crouched. She gathered the fallen parchments one by one, fingers careful. The grass was cool beneath her, smelling faintly of mint and morning dew, even though it wasn’t morning at all. When she rose, she did so slow, as if not to spook a bird or a girl made of daze and spectrums.

"Oh now, don’t be hard on yourself, Syr. She’ll come back when she’s ready.” Offered the papers up with both hands back to Selene. Close now to the Captain of Dusk, Venla felt small. As someone might do when they see the great moons rise full over the horizon.
 
The papers were loosely bound booklets of field notes written in looping shorthand. Whoever wrote them had a delicate, but illegible scrawl. The only thing that could be deciphered at a glance were the illustrations of insects that occupied some pages. Branching wings and segmented legs penned in thin, precise lines. An earnest attempt at iridescence blotched along shell and membrane in pinks, greens, and blues. And bisecting lines where incisions were made in the real subjects.

"Thank you dear," Selene said, accepting the papers. This time she held them with both hands, draped much more securely in the crook of one elbow.

She’ll come back when she’s ready.

"She might not," she admitted. Mina had no sense of comfort or home. What came naturally to other children couldn't be assumed of the girl, made as she was. "Either way, she certainly isn't here anymore."

A shift of her shoulders and a slight nod of Selene's head bade Venla to keep walking with her. Down the path she stepped, letting the meandering Autumn breeze - with its unhurried rustle through the leaves - set her pace.

Venla had a way about her which urged a person towards earnestness. A face and voice that said, tell me your troubles. Don't pay any attention to me. The Sanctum of Dusk was full of eccentrics and rogues, folk who thought first of their own work above anything else. She was out of practice when it came to that kind of unaffected charm which turned the focus away from its bearer, again and again. And so, Selene didn't notice that she'd been disarmed by the young woman.

"People come to this monastery when they've nowhere else to go. I've harbored criminals and heretics, the wretched and the cursed." Some of that unearthly lilt she'd had in her voice before returned, as Selene continued. "But a child isn't any of those things. If Mina could go anywhere else to learn of her magic, I would take her there."

Her words ran freely through the garden.
 
Venla glanced down at the bundle of papers. “Those sketches…” she ventured, tilting her head as though the angle might help her make sense of the iridescent blotches and precise little cuts inked on the page. “They’re right lovely, they are. Careful work. Did... did you draw ’em yourself, Captain?”

Listening came naturally to her; she’d done it her whole life. Listening to the elder's stories over the hearth, to travelers who needed a warm meal and someone to speak their piece, to fields whispering of rain before the clouds came. And now, to Selene.

When Selene spoke of harboring criminals and the cursed, Venla shrugged her shoulders gently, but firmly. “You keep your doors open for ’em..." she said, glancing sidelong at the Captain with a tender sort of honesty, “That tells me more about the place...and about you... than any tale of who’s come knockin’.” The wind shifted, lifting the faint scent of ripe plums. She glanced at Selene.

“Not many would take a child like Mina in, you know that, don't you?” she murmured. Truth was, Mina tugged at her heart like a little sister might do, something protective and soft. She angled her gaze down the winding path ahead, lined with fallen plum leaves, their colors like sunset scattered on the stone. “Takes heart." Her words weren’t flattery. They were simple truth.

Her gaze lingered on the garden’s edges, where twisted roots and fallen leaves mingled with the neat cobbles. She thought of the crooked little alleys back in Astenvale, of her own small hearth and the smells of bread rising in the oven. “If you don’t mind me asking… what happened to Mina? How did she come to be here?” Venla kept her tone light, summer-like, but there was a tremor of the deeper world in her chest, a careful hesitation. Her own chaos had already taught her the weight of secrets and the fragility of lives touched by power.

“I only mean… she seems… well, remarkable. And I’d like to understand."
 
"Oh, these?" The papers shifted once more, with a rustle to match the dark plum leaves overhead. "Old work. Just a bit of field research that wasn't worth binding into a book. Edelbert and I couldn't prove the hypothesis in the end. We thought if we could understand how insects were affected by the blight, we could uncover the truth of it. Some say the blight is a curse of the soul, others a plague of the body. A butterfly has a heart, but what does it beat for, really? What spite could it harbor, that the blight can twist?"

She chuckled at the thought of it, a sound that was too light for the topic. The kind of corruption that could turn a butterfly into a blighted butterfly must be delicate indeed. The notion did not hold the same menace to it as a blight wolf or a cursed spirit, but it was the smallest of things that sometimes held the most importance.

That is, at least, what Selene had told herself when her toes had gone numb wading through the marshes, pulling wings off damselflies and preserving grubs in iodine, all those years ago.

"Of course we didn't get anywhere. It's not the sort of question you cannot answer with diagrams and dissections. But Edelbert is asking for my notes again, so here they are. I wonder what sort of madness has possessed him this week."

The scriptorium was at the end of the path they took. A squat little tower at the center of the garden with a tiled red roof. Ivy vined up the curved walls in heavy mats, obscuring the crumbling plaster beneath. Syr Edelbert, Pursuant of Death, had the old tower all to himself. Nobody else could stand the smell of his work for very long.

There was one arched bridge and a babbling brook between them and the scriptorium. Selene stopped on the bridge to look into the water. Chunks of old brick and cobblestone - salvaged from the ruins of the old monastery grounds - lined the bottom of the stream. Murky water rolled lazily over the rocks, and a school of little black fish sheltered in the shadow of the bridge.

“If you don’t mind me asking… what happened to Mina? How did she come to be here?”​

The spell Venla had cast on her broke. Selene let out a breath, and remembered who she was. The captain of her sanctum, with a charge to protect.

"We don't know," She lied. "Mina's tellings of it are... difficult to decipher."

“I only mean… she seems… well, remarkable. And I’d like to understand."
​
Selene gave a smile, a generous squint but no flash of teeth. "Yes, she is remarkable." The smile fell to shadow, as she watched the flick of a fish tail dart below. "But please be careful what you ask. Understanding things, sometimes means destroying them."
 
Selene’s words rolled ahead of them like a warning bell half heard through fog. Be careful what you ask. Venla had worked tavern floors long enough to know when someone was gently steering a conversation away.

"But please be careful what you ask. Understanding things, sometimes means destroying them."

There was the sort of understanding where you took something apart. Laid it out on a table. Pulled them apart to see how they ticked. Named every piece, measured it, took it all the way down to bone and marrow. And folk do love that sort of understanding. Made them feel wise. Then there was another sort of understanding, Venla thought. It came from sitting close enough to share the warmth, from passing bread and salt back and forth, from listening more than speaking. You didn’t learn it all at once, and you might never even learn it whole. It was not clever work. No notes to take, no grand conclusions. It demanded more patience and kindness.

“Well,” she said lightly. Venla glanced sideways at Selene, green eyes bright as spring leaves. “I suppose that depends on what sort of understanding one’s after.” Then she shrugged, a small, practical thing. Very small-town-born. She did not push the conversation any further.

“I think I’ll go find the kitchens, if that’s alright,” she said. “All this talk of plums has set my stomach to rumbling, and I’ve found it’s best not to ignore such things.” A faint, fond shrug. “They get louder if you do.”

A pause, then a sheepish smile crept into her expression. She dipped her head to Selene, earnest as anything. “It’s been an honor meeting you, Captain Selene. Truly."
 
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