The book was boring.

Insanity stole into her mind like a deranged thief, taking what was important to her, adding new dangerous ideas, seeding a new personality and muddling up the rest. New sparks of ideas that once she would have dismissed as bizarre started to grow roots, deep roots, they started to make sense in one revolutionary eureka moment after another, cascading out of control, luring her further and further from the self she once knew, until she was so deep that she no longer recognized the forest around her, paths twisted and turned out of sight, so dense were the trunks, she followed one path wildly after another, making new connections in her new distorted reality, after a while she had trodden the new paths so much that they formed an inescapable maze, a prison without walls.

In a madhouse, sanity looks crazy. But in truth, conformity is insane.

It was certainly a read but unbeknownst to Fleur, the book reflected upon her in more ways than one. What she, the abnormality considered normal was but a contraption of complexity to others. Having completed the task that Lord Servas Phantasm set for her brought back incomparable memories of her late mother and brother. She had accepted a job earlier this morning, in search of some Jewels as she was running low. A heavy silence settled over them, thicker then the uneasy tension in the atmosphere. Unsettled eyes glanced unceremoniously around and tried to avoid catching other glances that passed by. Some shifted uncomfortably in their seat and others grasped their sweaty, nervous hands under the tables, and even others shuffled their feet against the cobbles of the bar floor, awkwardly tracing the outlines of each brick while judging whispers swirled in the air around the small space where the only woman had just beaten every man ever known to chug down the most liquor in a single sitting. Half-buffed, Fleur was ready to call it a day before she realized she had no more money for any booze.

Soon enough, the darkness swept over her face and with the help of the drinks, Fleur knocked out. Another nightmare partook. The ghost town was forgotten entirely. It had been built in a shallow basin and so once over the brow the smattering of rotting wooden buildings disappeared from view. It had less charm than a graveyard, at least those are places built out of sentimentality and love. This was a place built by greed and abandoned without a backwards glance. They came with the allure of gold in the hills and left in bitterness, resenting the land for its failure to deliver them unearned wealth. Just to stand amid the rotting town was enough to make you feel like a ghost, an unwanted spectre of the humans that came to take and never give, never to love the land or the nature, not to make a home or be respectful. In the still air of this natural depression the stain of their indifference had time to sink onto your skin. It was beautiful and melancholy, haunting in its desertion. A monument to what motivated its builders and a testimony to their undying folly. The town had been built on a grid and no expense spared. The glass stared down from skyscrapers that kissed the grey sky above. The roads were perfect rivers of tarmac untouched by all but the construction vehicle tires. Traffic lights blinked to control the non-existent cars and the pedestrian crossing buttons were shiny without a sheen of finger-prints. The air was as clean as the countryside. On occasion a deer would gallop through the streets or a bird alight on the tall black lampposts, but other than that the only noise was the wind. At the train station stood seven high-speed engines with multiple high-class carriages but the clock on the wall had long given up on telling the time. By anomaly it topped the nations charts for lack of crime, smallest hospital wait-lists and lack of children failing in school. It was a ghost town, or perhaps a ghost city. Built in the belief that people would come and industry follow. They just never did.

Did she spot her mother?

She was late. Fleur remembered her job and dazed down into the dungeon where she couldn't see anything. Her hands reached around and finally picked up a flower; was it the right one? The only way she could verify it was through the Lord Servas Phantasm so up she went and skedaddled over to the man. Presenting the flower, he wept in remembrance of his late wife the same way Fleur thought of her late family. At the very least, she still had her father, as crippled as he was. "I still got something."