“You see,” Dar said, gesturing around the damp, dome-shaped cave, “the space offers excellent resonance. Not as perfect as something constructed for the purpose, but very good, nonetheless.”
Victor didn’t know exactly what Dar meant by resonance or even “the purpose,” but he tried to fill in the blanks and sound like he had a clue: “You mentioned something about the Spirit Plane?”
“Correct. Tell me, Victor, when you Spirit Walk from within a city, how many buildings do you see on the Spirit Plane?”
“Usually none.”
“Exactly!” Dar gently ushered Lam toward the center of the cave. “Take a seat there on that smooth section of stone. Assume a cultivation pose and try to tune out our conversation; you should be working to still your mind and prepare for a difficult ordeal.”
“Oh,” Lam looked around the cave, illuminated by a bright white globe of Energy that Dar had summoned. She suddenly looked less than enthusiastic, and Victor couldn’t blame her; this was a massive leap of faith she was taking. Nevertheless, she steeled herself and moved to sit where Dar had indicated.
“So, Victor, if a building doesn’t exist on the Spirit Plane, can we use it to focus Energy, creating our crucible for Lam’s spirit?”
“No, but I’ve seen structures on the Spirit Plane. Would it be possible to—”
“Build something more precise than a cave beneath my home? Certainly! Though it would take years to force the essence of such a structure to bleed into that realm. This natural space is perfectly fine, and I think Lam would rather not wait.”
“You’re right, sir,” Lam grunted as she sat and assumed a lotus position on the smooth stone.
“Stand close, Victor, and listen to what I say. I’ll be using some spells you’ve not learned, but this will be a good learning experience, nonetheless. Your primary role in this ritual will be to supply large amounts of Energy as I construct the crucible.”
“All right,” Victor moved closer to the large, stony man. Dar wore one of his signature pajama-like sets of silken clothing. They were the color of habañero peppers and looked very comfortable as he gracefully sat before Lam, his large frame dwarfing hers.
“Listen, Lam; part of this ritual involves me separating a part of your spirit to keep safe and secure in your body. It will be the anchor that pulls the rest of your spirit home through the crucible Victor and I will construct around it.”
“I see.” Lam licked her lips and nodded, her eyes darting to Victor and then back to Dar. Victor wanted to sit beside her, to put his arm over her shoulders and protect her. He banished the impulse, knowing there was a lot more to Lam than her current nervousness. She was a walking incarnation of determination; if she wanted to succeed, she would.
“To that end, you’ll need to slip into a cultivation trance, opening yourself to the Energy around us. That will help me access your spirit from the Spirit Plane.”
“Is that all?”
“No, that’s only the first step. While you’re meditating upon your Energy, I need you to focus your thoughts on the part of yourself that’s most stubborn, most willful, and most defiant. Using your focus, I’ll be able to carve that aspect away, and it will be that shard, with heavy, deep roots, that I’ll leave anchored in your body.”
“How do I focus on that?”
Surprising himself, Victor answered, “Think about all the times you’ve been denied and all the times you’ve risen up to take what people said you couldn’t have. Think about when you fled home. Think about how you rose in the Legion despite captains who tried to keep you down. Think about how you used the Greatbone Mining Consortium to gather wealth and power, taking a noble title when the old nobility tried to keep you under their boots. Think about . . .”
“I think I have it, Victor. Thank you,” Lam’s eyes shimmered with unspent tears as she smiled at him. Maybe she didn’t think he’d paid attention to all those things, but he had.
“Good.” Dar nodded and then motioned for Victor to sit beside him. “We’ll Spirit Walk now, Lam. When you’ve done what I instructed, we’ll know it.”
“Should I summon my coyotes to watch us?” Victor asked.
Dar shook his head. “My guardian aspect will watch over us, apprentice. Save your Energy, for I’ll use every drop.”
Victor nodded and sat down, forming a triangle with Dar and Lam. He felt a small surge of Dar’s Energy and knew the master had sent his spirit onto the Spirit Plane. Before following him, Victor looked at Lam and said, “I know you can do this.”
“I know, Victor. Thank you for your confidence and for being here with me. If something goes wrong, please tell . . .”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong!” Victor growled.
“Please tell Edeya I loved her, and don’t let her know what I was doing when I died.”
“Dammit, Lam!” It was one thing for her to contemplate failure, but now, if the worst happened, she wanted him to lie to Edeya.
“Please?”
Though he didn’t like to admit there was a chance she’d fail, he forced himself to contemplate it and be serious. He took her hand, pressing her calloused, narrow palm with his thick, equally calloused thumb. “You don’t want to carry that kind of burden out of this world, Lam. Don’t leave Edeya here with a lie, and don’t make me be the one to deliver it. This isn’t the sort of secret that would make her life easier. You’re not doing this only for her, and she needs to know this side of you, the side that’s willing to risk everything for a better shot.”
Again, her eyes filled with tears, and she pressed her lips together, clearly stifling some emotion as she slowly nodded. “Okay, Victor. You tell her then. Tell her I loved her with everything in me.”
“I will, but stop this line of thought. Focus on what Dar told you. You aren’t going to fail this. Your spirit is fucking strong, hermana.”
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and nodded, pulling her hand free and resting it atop her knee. “Okay. Go; I’m sure your mentor wonders what you’re doing.”
Victor nodded, closed his eyes, formed the pattern for Spirit Walk, and cast it. When he opened them, he sat in the Spirit Plane’s strange echo of the cave. Weird wisps of Energy flitted about in the dark, glowing with faint lavender light and turning the cave into a mysterious, magical place. Dar’s spirit-self paced about, carving runes into the stone floor with a rod of solid, peach-colored Energy. “You had words with her?” the man rumbled.
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“Yeah. She had some doubts, and I tried to get her focused on success.” Victor stood as Dar grunted his acknowledgment.
“Last-minute nerves are common in any high-stakes endeavor.” He gestured with his weird, glowing, orange rod. “This is a manifestation of my Energy. I use it to impart my will upon this tiny piece of the Spirit Plane. These runes will hold our Energy, funneling it into a pattern that will test Lam’s spirit, forcing it to shed Energy to pass through, stripping it down to her most essential, most vital essence. I could try to explain each rune as I work, but they all will require a lesson, and each lesson could take hours. We don’t want to turn this ritual into a week-long affair.”
“Will I ever learn them?” Victor asked, moving to peer down at one of the runes with its swirls and jagged lines. They reminded him of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Of course. You’ll learn some of them as I teach you rituals, and I’ll also give you a text to study.” Dar moved and began carving another of his magical glyphs into the stone, and Victor decided it was a good time to voice a concern he’d only partially acknowledged himself.
“I’m not sure I’ll be in my current townhome for long, and it sounds like this cultivation chamber is a big project. Shouldn’t I wait until I have a better, more permanent place?”
“It can be moved. It’s a large task, but as you gain more power and wealth, you’ll want to do so in any case.” He looked up from his task, made eye contact with Victor, and nodded. “You’ll want to create a chamber in a portable room, something you can take with you from world to world on adventures and journeys.” He sighed and turned back to the glyph he was carving. “Such a portable space, capable of holding the Energy of strong cultivation treasures, is not something an iron-ranker will likely come across. Not unless he was fabulously rich and could have his family purchase it for him at auction.”
Victor narrowed his eyes and absently reached for his neck, but the vault wasn’t present on the Spirit Plane. “I . . .”
Dar snorted. “Have a fabulously wealthy mentor who will absolutely not spoil you to such a degree.”
“I was going to say I might have something like that already.”
“Doubtful. Still, if you think I’m wrong, we can look at what you have to evaluate the possibility.”
Victor nodded, dropping the subject; he didn’t want to show Dar the vault until he’d hidden the ivid royal jelly somewhere else first. He trusted Dar, to a degree, but had no idea how an old monster like him would react to such a treasure. On many levels, Dar and his peers believed that might made right, and he very well may see Victor’s possession of such a treasure as a mere formality.
He bided his time and watched Dar work and, after a while, began to notice a shimmer of pale, yellow mist at the center of the circle of runes. When he stepped toward it, he had an overwhelming sensation of being close to Lam. He could smell her faintly musky, cloying perfume mixed with her sweat. He could hear her laugh, her battle cry, and her desperate pleas for Edeya to wake. He could see her bright emerald eyes, the glitter of her wings, and the shimmer of golden Energy around her warhammer. He could feel her hard, muscular arms squeezing around his ribs. All those things combined into “Lam,” yet when he took a step back, all he saw was the misty, yellow blur in the air.
“She’s opening herself well. You’re feeling her spirit, yes?”
“Ah!” Victor nodded, suddenly understanding. “Yeah, I can definitely feel her.”
“Another fifteen or twenty minutes, and I’ll have the circle prepared. Then we’ll begin charging the runes.” He gestured with his free hand. “Come. Watch me closely. Even if you don’t understand the runes, you’ll benefit from the experience.”
Victor did as he was told, following Dar as he moved about the circle, seemingly at random, tracing one glowing glyph after another into the stone cavern floor. Meanwhile, Lam’s spirit became more and more palpable as she opened herself to the Spirit Plane. While watching, Victor asked, “Is everyone open to the Spirit Plane when they cultivate?”
“To some degree, aye, though Lam’s in a place where the barrier between planes is very thin, partly because of the nature of this cave, but mostly because you and I are currently spirit walking here, our spirits have pierced the veil, and they hold the doorway open for our return.”
“Veil? Like the veil to the land of the dead?”
“No, a more generic sense of the word. There are many veils separating the various planes, universes, and realities. The veil to the land of the dead is far more commonly mentioned, primarily thanks to Death Casters and their fascination with it.”
“But,” Victor couldn’t help but fish for answers to questions that had plagued him ever since he’d learned about Belikot and his death-attuned magic, “what is that place? If the Spirit Plane is where spirits wander, what’s through the veil? The one the death casters are obsessed with? I mean, I met Old Mother on the Spirit Plane, and she had no intention of going—”
“It’s complicated, Victor. Our spirits are influenced by our lives and our beliefs. When your Old Mother died, she believed she would wander far as a spirit and start a new life. Her belief strengthened her will, and she made it so. Some people have no such conviction, and they’ll wander the Spirit Plane for a while until their inertia fades, their lingering personality disperses, and they succumb to the pull of one of the places beyond the veil. There, they may wallow and wander for millennia or even eons before something happens to spark their desire to begin anew. Alternatively, some force, some god or equally powerful entity, pulls them out, and they make their way into another material plane to begin a new life.”
“So, what you believe affects what happens to your spirit?”
“Exactly so. For that reason, I’m convinced there are many heavens and many hells created from the combined force of will of millions of spirits believing one thing or another. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a Spirit Caster, walking around without their body long before they die, learning the universe's secrets before their time. Your Old Mother has likely already wandered far and chosen a wonderous place to begin anew.”
“So the place your friend, Master Lo’ro,” Victor tried to show the proper respect, “is taking me through that veil, but will he know where we are when we step through?”
“Oh, he’ll have his theories. It could be some version of a hell or limbo, but it won’t be a nice place; you’re looking for tormented vestiges of intelligence. It may seem cruel, but you’re likely doing those spirits a service, bringing them forth and exposing them to repeated contact with your will. It may shorten their torment by thousands of years.” Dar stood, and his glowing wand of Energy disappeared. He brushed his hands off, looked around the circle, and nodded. “Done. We’ll charge these sigils with Energy, strategically intermixing our harsher affinities with our more encouraging ones. We must test Lam’s spirit, but we must be careful to ensure she makes it through.”
“Are you going to split off a shard to keep safe in her body?”
“Only when we’re ready to begin will I pull her spirit through, entrapping it in this circle. Then we’ll return to the Material Plane with her shard and coax the rest of her home through this crucible.” He clasped Victor’s wrist in his massive, surprisingly soft hand and pulled him toward the edge of the circle. “When I tell you to channel a certain Energy, do so; I’ll guide it into the sigil.”
“Okay,” Victor nodded, “ready.”
“Fear,” Dar said. Victor pulled a ribbon of the dark, purple-black Energy out of his Core and sent it through his pathways into Dar’s hand, where it gripped his wrist. Dar grunted his approval, knelt, and touched a sigil with his other hand. It flared with the dark Energy. “Good!” He moved his hand to a nearby sigil and said, “Rage.” Victor switched his pull, driving some of his red, angry Energy into Dar’s hand, and a second later, the sigil flared with crimson fire. So it went on for nearly an hour. Dar led him around the circle, lighting most of the runes with fear or rage, but occasionally, he’d ask for glory or inspiration.
When Dar finally released his wrist, he said, “Rest now. I’ll charge the rest.” Victor saw that he’d only helped charge about half the runes. He nodded and sat down near the misty essence of Lam’s spirit, watching as the giant, pajama-clad man nimbly stepped around the circle, effortlessly charging each rune with taps of his bare toes. Some flared with golden, sparkling Energy, others with orange light that reminded Victor of Dar’s rune carving rod, and still others were populated with cold, gray Energy that filled Victor’s heart with dread if he looked too long upon it.
“Stand,” Dar said, startling Victor out of his ruminations. He blinked, wondering where he’d gone; he’d lost himself looking into those cold, gray runes. “Watch now as I reach through this aperture into Lam’s Core and pull forth her spirit.” He didn’t wait for Victor to acknowledge his words. He just did exactly what he said he’d do; he pushed his thick, black hand into the misty golden Energy hanging at the center of the circle. He seemed to concentrate for a couple of seconds, and then he pulled his hand back, gripping the ethereal, translucent shape of Lam’s spirit by the wrist.
She was naked, with wild hair and blazing wings, and she looked furious. Her eyes scanned the cave, but they didn’t seem to see Victor or Dar. Victor averted his gaze, somehow feeling dirty looking at Lam’s nakedness, wishing he could banish that glimpse of her breasts from his mind. “She won’t be aware of us. Her senses on this plane are wanting. This is her defiant aspect, the tough, willful piece of her that you helped her to focus upon. When we return to the Material Plane, I’ll bring this part of her with us, but the bulk of her spirit will be left behind.”
“Why can’t I see the rest of her spirit?”
“Well, because this aspect is overbearing—when I pull it home, what’s left will look similar, though likely less . . . angry.” Dar chuckled, watching Lam’s spirit crouch, hands out, ready to claw anything that challenged her. Victor had never seen such a fierce expression on her face, not even when he’d watched her fight.
“Are you sure she doesn’t need that part of her to fight through the crucible?”
“She may, but it’s better to have her strongest aspect in her body, clinging tightly to her flesh, forcing the rest of her to come home.” Dar clapped Victor on the shoulder. “I know you’re worried, but trust me, boy. I know what I’m doing. Let’s return now.” This time, rather than lead the way, Dar watched Victor until he nodded and severed his connection to the Spirit Walk.
When he returned to the dim, natural cave, he found Lam slumped over, staring at the stone floor, drool running down her chin. As he reached out to wipe the saliva from her face and gently push her mouth closed, Dar moved, grunting. He was back in his body, and he reached out to touch Lam’s forehead. A flash of golden Energy told Victor the Spirit Master had put the defiant fragment of Lam’s spirit back inside. Her eyes sparkled momentarily, but then she slipped back into catatonia.
“Now, Victor, you will take her left hand, and I’ll take her right. Together, we’ll urge her spirit fragment to call the rest of her spirit home. We’ll lend her Energy for the fight, and her spirit will push its way through the crucible we constructed. When it breaks free and comes home, Lam will be whole but greatly reduced in Energy potential.”
Victor nodded, almost feeling like he’d done something wrong, like he was guilty of something, as he took Lam’s hand. Was this a mistake? Should he have talked Lam out of this? Between himself and Dar, they’d put a hell of a lot of Energy into that “crucible.” What if Lam couldn’t make it? What if they took away too much of her defiance in the spirit shard they’d left in her body? “C’mon, hermana,” he growled, gripping her thin, limp hand. “I’m not letting you get lost. Come on! Time to come home.”