…Silent under a young plum tree
I held her there, my quiet, pale love
In my arms like a lovely dream.
And above us, in fair summer sky
Was a cloud that caught my eye
It was so white and high above;
When I looked up again, it was there no more…

On a particularly clear day, when the winds happen to be blowing in either a northwesterly direction, or not all, a vast scar upon the earth can be seen, whose magnitude of desolation was so great, that one could not be faulted for thinking they had treaded upon the moon. The great swath of grayed terrain is pocked with immense craters of varying sizes, and bare powdery silt that is carried with ease by the winds in elegant, coruscating waves. Little, if anything, takes to the sky, shuffles about the ground, or roots itself to earth, in this barren, foreboding and majestic Land of Ash.

“I have waited what seems an eternity for your direction.”

A young man counsels with ghosts and from his dais of straw and tattered cloth, he greets his otherworldly visitors; he speaks with words that dissipate so much as fog past his lips. Colorless mortar and brick seal in his senses and to him nothing but the soft chorus of rain exists beyond that.

A voice like a thousand pistons, cogs, and gears whirs outs: “Give to us our payment of nothing—”

Another, humble as a man while in his death throes, gasps: “—at the great engine of the universe—”

Rumbling below the others, is an utterance of embers and smoke that declares: “—for there is no fortune but solace for you there.”

These nebulous beings waxed lyrical on the matter of an aged covenant between both parties. The young man, who was assuredly much younger when this had been first arranged, was taken aback by the sudden manifestations, but retained his subtle sophistication nonetheless.

And to them, he dictates: “I bequeath to you what is asked for, but I have no means of delivering.”

The calculating yet delicate intelligence, which had been the first to speak, retorts with clockwork precision: “You have been given ample time to find the means!”

“And still I have found none. All paths to your vaults have been exhausted.”

Quick to amend the young man’s truncated knowledge, the second eminence, which seemed to inherently beg for pity, is quick to inform that: “there is one path you have overlooked, many a time.”

“And this is?”

The wispy, airy breath continues: “The great veins below the earth, which begin far from view and end even further.”

“Their very existence is disputed.”

“By the many, yes, but they are very real.”

“Where am I to even begin?”

The final, smoldering apparition bellows a response, “within the great mountains before the Ashlands; those immaculate bookends. We will consul again when you arrive.”

The young man solemnly places his head in his hands, and reflects on what has transpired. Before he can look up to behold their forms, or gaseous lack thereof, the first voice, in all its exacting coldness hisses, “Do not fail us, Modus, not again.”

Her words lash his insides, a razor to the soul, and she vanishes before Modus can muster a rebuttal. That was likely her intent, though. She was the cruelest of the three, and Modus was familiar with this fact, however, this recent consul between all four of them, was the first in almost 10 years, and he had since acclimated to the absence of her sadism. When Modus first spoke to the beyond for guidance, it answered in kind with these three tutors of sorts; they offered him relief from the greatest loss one can suffer, and he was quick to accept.

Their communications had, at one point, been extraordinarily frequent; so much so, that he had named each one according to the forms in which they chose to manifest themselves: The Automatic Prophet, The Defeated Father, and The Holy Vessel. Yet, more often than not, they remained in a disembodied state when making auditory contact, only. Modus did however; question their validity as ghosts, as he simply referred to them as such with the umbrella term. They were quick to object to such a generic phylum, but accepted it for lack of anything better. Moreover, they had left him alone with the prospect of an arduous march of penance into a land reserved for the ethereal, the unknowable, and the damned. Demons, tricksters, or even sadists seemed far more apt than mere “ghosts” at this point.

Modus rises from his seat and moves to a single window pane within his rustic lodging; looking out upon it, he views a world swaddled in so much as thick cotton, as nothing is absolutely distinct from one another. A series of imposing silhouettes dot the horizon, and for a moment, Modus wonders whether or not he is alone amongst these monoliths of shadow. Following this thought, he reserves himself to retrieve a secreted possession of his as soon as the dense fog clears and allows for him to do so.

It is this item, this mystic cargo, which to him meant so much, yet valued so little, and was sequestered by the phantasmal trio. It is his end of the bargain for their covenant from the abyss, to be delivered at a surreal nexus only known of by deranged pioneers and zealots.

Modus continues to stare out into the void. He will unearth what is asked for with gusto when he is able to.