Erk's footsteps echoed down the empty corridor, as he stalked the halls of the west wing. He'd been going room to room for at least an hour now, searching for anything that might have signified some sign of Shinu's activity before he had appeared before he and Cid. Blood, hair, some sign of a struggle, anything. If Shinu had indeed taken a prisoner, it was of critical importance that he find it now, before it was too late.

His dorm had been the first place the anxious wizard had checked, though he doubted the boy was stupid enough to take him there. Next had been the library, and the laboratories, and the tool shed. He'd found nothing, and it was driving him mad. He swept down the corridor like a whirlwind, his clouded expression deterring all who found themselves near his path. He had to find the poor wretch that had created this fiasco, and immediately...

There.

Smeared against the molding of the wall, near a closed, unadorned door. He saw a faint streak of red. Erk had found blood.

The elf kneeled down, and carefully inspected the carpentrywork. It was clear someone had tried to clean it, but hadn't done too good of a job; he must have been in a rush. His pulse quickening in anticipation, Erk followed the trail to the base of the door. With one last gulp of anxiousness, invisible to anyone onlooking, though Erk was along in the hall, he pulled open the door.

The bent sage stepped forward into what appeared to be a broom closet. Canisters of liquids and powders lined the shelves, barely visible from the dim light thrown by the hall lamps. Speaking a word, he commanded light into the room, radiating from a point in space just above his forehead.

The body lay on the floor. He appeared to have been severly burnt, to the point where his skin had cracked open and begun to bleed onto the concrete floor. A minor heave of revulsion wracked his frame as he stepped forward.

He needed to know what this corpse had seen. Allowing the point of brilliance suspended in the space before him to fade, Erk raised the long, white fingers of his hands out towards the corpse. His eyes opened wide, and fixed upon the huddled, blackened form on the ground before him, he began to speak words; sounds of indescribable emptiness tumbled from his lips. The room began to illuminate again, as his eyes shone with a sickly, green luminescence.

The phantasmal light played across the surface of the shelves for a moment, before the glow began to recede from the walls and floor; the light of Erk's unhallowed invocation seemed to shine only on the corpse strewn across the floor. It may have been a trick of the eerie light, but for a moment, the body seemed to... move.

Inexplicably, heeding itself to the commands of the frail figure before it, now possessed of a sort of horrific stature, the corpse shuddered. From the orifices of its maimed figure, a white, mist-like substance flowed, collecting itself within the sphere of Erk's enchantments. The ethereal fog coalesced, giving itself the form of the figure below it, but in pale.

Mouthing his words around the light that emanated from his mouth, Erk commanded the apparition.

"SPEAK! You who walk the planes of shadow, reveal unto me the secrets you guarded in life! I compel you, with the strength of the life which beats within me!"

The figure, its face covered with a ghostly hood, began to open its mouth to respond. As a croaked gasp escaped from its mouth, the horrible thing began to shriek. Like terrible, diseased veins, writhing arcs of purple energy materialized within the ghost, and tore it apart again into mist, which disappated into the air about. Giving a scream of terror, the wizard flailed back before this sudden assault, abandoning his invocations to craft shining wards about himself.

To no avail. The shrieking energy roared like thunder across the space between the corpse and the sage, carrying the screaming elf back out into the hallway. As Erk lay moaning in the marble expanse of the corridor, is seemed as if cold, feminine laughter rang from the smouldering corpse within the closet. He gave a shudder of terror... and then all went dark.