Constance had hovered silently over the lovely young Georgiana where she sat in the library, the undulating tendrils of her ectoplasmic form shimmering with a soft light visible only to those like Callum, blessed (or cursed, as you will) with the vision for the uncanny. For those who could see, it might seem the young noblewoman bore a ghostly halo, or else the strangest of guardian angels kept watch overhead. Of course Constance caught the small, terse nod from her dear friend, expecting nothing more from him in way of acknowledgement of her warning concerning the state of the young noblewoman's heart. Lady Westmoore had not been brought into their peculiar fold after all, introduced to the select inner circle of those initiated into the esoteric knowledge of the worlds beyond the merely mundane.
But there was nothing mundane at all to be found as Callum revealed the poppy he'd preserved for Basil Westmoore, a seemingly humble gift of remembrance that was suddenly anything but to the ghost's otherworldly senses. A whisper of a breeze seemed to gently tousle the soft tendrils of Georgiana's dark hair, but even as Barnesworth moved to stop up any draft from the window, Constance knew something far greater had come visiting in Westmoore Manor.
Constance's eerily blue eyes closed in that strangely mortal way she had yet to let go, her heightened senses suddenly lost, rapt by a sudden, humid heat and the near suffocating impression of a deeply green darkness. She could almost feel the earthy peat beneath fingers she had not possessed for more than five decades now. Her head fallen back as her ethereal body floated toward the high ceiling, arms outstretched as she allowed the visions to flow through her. The piquancy of an unknown spice, fragrant and new to her entirely, wrapped her in a sensation that was strangely warm and… And oddly welcoming, and somehow?
Somehow this uncanny sensation was also strangely familiar, though she could think of nothing in her unnaturally lengthened un-life to which she might compare these odd impressions. Intrigued beyond all measure, Constance did not follow after her friend and their prospective client as they left for the dining room, her gentle soul convinced Lady Westmoore meant Callum no harm in the least, no matter what failings might be laid at his feet after her brother's tragic death. Instead she followed after Barnesworth – incidentally though, since that strange, supernatural zephyr seemed to follow him into the servants' corridors tucked behind the walls.
Such spaces were not unknown to Constance of course – she had come to know them very well during her mortal life at Fives Foxes, and better still after her death. But she swiftly discovered the servants' tunnels of the Westmoore Manor were far vaster and stranger than any she had experienced before – almost labyrinthine truly, defying any true understanding of the patterns the household help were meant to follow. Blind ends and false walls, twists and turns that defied all logic, stairs that led to nothing, trap doors that bottomed out into small, cramped rooms not even equipped with the shelving needed to be proper root cellars.
For no reason she could put her finger on, Constance was not so much intimidated by the corridors as she was intrigued, her thoughts turned to the child she had once been and the wondrous good time she'd have had here behind the walls of this strange manor. Barnesworth had long since disappeared - to the dining room, Constance could only assume – but she did not feel the least bit alone. Whatever had touched the Lady Westmoore in the library still lingered, the strangely heavy fragrance of thick, wet foliage and damp earth laden with spice and heat seeming to beckon her onward, wherever she might have stopped or lost her way.
There was no fear in her heart – Constance was long dead after all, her mortal coil ensconced in the family mausoleum at Five Foxes. What more harm could ever come to her? And so she followed where she would, down into the bowls of the Westmoore Manor, where the cold and damp and dark might have discomfited any mere mortal who traveled so far. A strange, rhythmic thrumming seemed to well up from beneath, almost like a heartbeat of thunder the further she descended until she came to an ancient iron door, its bars long since rusted and broken away in places that would have allowed a slim man or woman, or perhaps a child, passage into the stone lined ways just beyond.
The darkness meant nothing to Constance, who had no need for such mortal necessities as "light" by which to see. Her uncanny sight adjusted swiftly to the deep blackness, recognizing the sparkling crystalline forms about her for the rock walls of a cavern, the charcoal swaths above her head whispering of the passage of untold numbers of feet and torches. Her ghostly form undulated further down the corridor, the thunderous pounding louder still though that odd sensation beckoned her forward nonetheless, as if it had a mind of its own. A strange whisper of a notion came to her then that she recognized this pounding, that if she thought long and hard enough, she would remember, and know…
Oh! Constance's ethereal laughter burbled through the caverns, bounding along the tunnels she now realized had been carved by the relentless tides of the sea herself! She pulled up short though as her ethereal laughter seemed to catch fire, a swift shot of lightning along the cavern wall in a line that spiraled through the rock and disappeared. Her fingers lifted to her lips in surprise, yet another unconscious mortal gesture not yet lost to time or disuse. And then Constance laughed once more, watching the lightning-like patterns form all over again, and then singing the lines to a supernatural life as she traveled further and further into the caves.
The sound of the sea crashing into the cliffs became near deafening, as loud as her heart might have once been if she'd clapped her hands tight over both ears and amplified even more as the tunnel before her opened into a great underground cavern. Black sea water lapped at the gravel shoreline, kissed the aged wooden bones of a long-abandoned dory rotting away in the salted sea water. The ghost peered about slowly, letting the tendrils of her unnatural knowing feel for the presence that had led her true this far, and finding it finally near the ribs of the rotting skiff. For a single brief moment, Constance though perhaps – just perhaps – she might have sensed the impression of a form, yet it was gone long before even her preternatural senses could make heads or tails of what she saw, disappearing into the gravelly shoreline as the greatest line of all suddenly lit a brilliant blue-white from beneath the dark sea waters, eastward and out to the open ocean itself.
The ghost's form knelt there on the cavern shore, her ethereal hands hovering lightly over the tiny water-beaten stones…
Constance's head tilted swiftly, the tiny form seeming to take shape beneath her fingers. It was… Well, it was a man-shaped form, perfectly in proportion but so very tiny! The ghost concentrated her impressive will to a fine pinpoint, setting aside stone after stone, uncovering…
Why, it was a soldier! A child's toy soldier of tin, the remnants of the scarlet paint that had once made up his uniform clinging precariously in spots where the sea water had not yet eaten away. He was a stalwart little being as well, his little musket still held at the ready in his wee hands – she could not help but smile at his seemingly eternal vigilance. Never once did it occur to Constance, there could be any kind of nonsensical coincidence at play here – she must see this piece to Callum, a piece of the puzzle that was the mystery within and beneath the singular Westmoore Manor.
All the tendrils of the ghost returned to her then as the toy soldier seemingly lifted of its own accord from its rest on the black gravel shore, wrapped within the pale silver light of Constance as her energies coalesced into a singular ball of ectoplasm with only one purpose: to apparate at the location of the golden band she once wore in her life, a ring that once signified love and loyalty betrayed, but now graced the pinkie finger of the one man in this world who redeemed it all.
Constance presence beside Callum in the great dining room would have been unnoticed by anyone who was not sitting right next to him, a burst of un-living cold wrapped about him like a shroud that slid away slowly, leaving only the single toy soldier suddenly materialized and at rest in the palm of the hand that wore the old golden ring.
"This house has old bones Callum. Old and most unquiet." She had no breath to catch anymore, but he could not have missed the genuine exhaustion in her disembodied voice, whispering softly in his ear. "Passages far beneath wind through the rock and stone foundations, hewn by the sea and leading to hidden tidal pools far below, ancient caverns large enough to have accommodated boats – I found the skeletal remains of one at least… "
Constance quieted for some moments as the zephyr of her voice trailed off, regathering her strength to finish the report of all she'd found on her excursion. "And ley lines, my friend. Such ley lines! Embedded deep in the bedrock, a convergence of power beneath this very manor in the strangest configuration I have ever seen. From every direction Callum, every direction, they converge and form a spiral beneath us, not a few following the twisting of the sea caverns themselves. And the most powerful of them all? A line that is a veritable cable of supernatural energy, flowing westward from across the Channel itself!"