“I see that you remember now, Analise,” Caelestis said in the meantime, nodding. “You have been a worthy Champion for one who was not brought up in the ways of our world.”
“Wait a minute. ‘Have been’? Aren’t I still one?” I asked, a little panic in my voice.
Caelestis looked serious as she replied, “Analise, you are a tangle of oppositions. You are My worshiper, and My Champion, and as such are worthy to take your place with Me in My demesnes as of the present.”
My eyes went round. WHAT was she saying!?
“But,” she continued, “You are also a Human who is not from this world. You would have another place to go to in your world if you experienced circumstances like these over there.”
“Hopefully, we’re talking about Heaven being that other place,” I said, unable to stop a small tremor of fear in my voice.
She smiled at me. “There are many different reward afterlives, or Heavens, as you call it. Some are permanent. Some are transitory. There are also penalty afterlives—again, some are permanent, and some are transitory. Each reward or penalty afterlife is based on a soul’s core belief system. No one place is more right than another place; all afterlives hold equal validity, and no one should ever tell another one any different! What matters is what is right for that particular individual at the time of death. You, however, have transcended the usual arrangement, so your case is less clear. And then, too,” she added thoughtfully, “there are the circumstances under which your soul left your body in the Sub-realms.”
My ears perked up at that. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that you, Analise, have a choice. You can either choose to come with Me to where I rule in My reward afterlife, or My Heaven, if you will; you can choose to go to whatever reward or penalty afterlife awaits you in the Human world; or you can return to the Sub-realms from whence you recently came.”
“What kind of a choice is that?” I exclaimed. “I want to go back! I’m not done yet!”
Caelestis held up one smooth, fair-skinned hand. “Do not be hasty, Analise. You are in what many would call an enviable position. Not many souls are given a choice as to what happens to them when they die. But know that whatever you end up choosing will be final. You will not be allowed to change your mind once you have announced your decision. Think well upon it, but not for too long. Your window for choosing your fate yourself is not a large one, and it would sadden Me were it to be taken from you by circumstances. When you are done, pray to Me, and I will return to hear your choice.”
Caelestis vanished in a swirl of golden motes, leaving me alone again in the white featureless landscape. I started pacing around in a small circle.
“Okay, that’s a lot to take in,” I said out loud to myself. “I guess I’m Schrödinger’s cat now. I’m dead, but I’m not dead.” I stopped, and a lop-sided smile pulled at my lips. “And I need to decide which way to go: all the way dead or back to life. So if Caelestis told me to think about it first, then there’s probably a reason for that. So, I guess the first thing to consider is: am I silly to think that I could handle being on a rescue mission into an incredibly dangerous place in a magical world?”
“I think you are,” said a voice behind me.
I whirled around. A plain, modern-looking frameless full length mirror hung in mid-air behind me. I walked up to it and saw my reflection, but something was off about it. I blinked and looked at it again, realizing that though it was me, it also wasn’t. In the mirror I was dressed in what I’d been wearing the day I crossed the mist gate: blue jeans, a white t-shirt, white sneakers, a fuzzy black hat that covered most of my blonde hair which was pulled back into the kind of braid I wore to fencing class, and oversized sunglasses. I raised my hand to touch the glass, and the girl in the mirror raised her hand in the exact same way to meet mine.
She then took off the sunglasses and said, “Seriously. You’re just a stupid fifteen-year-old geek girl without many friends who’s having trouble in Social Studies. You need to have ‘game over’ stamped on your forehead and go home to whatever’s your fate in the human world.”
I fell back a step, feeling a little shocked that my reflection had just spoken to me. I shook my head briefly to clear it.
“No, she doesn’t,” said another voice loudly.
I looked over to see where that one was coming from. Another full length mirror now hung in mid-air off to the left, but this one had a fancy brown wooden frame surrounding it. I walked up to it and saw my reflection again, but this one was of me in the clothes that Caelestis had first dressed me in when I’d fallen through the mist gate: blousy green shirt, sturdy brown pants, knee-high leather boots, and a beautiful belt. My hair hung loose around my shoulders, and my blue eyes no longer had the sunglasses on.
“You may be dead, but you don’t have to go back to the human world. You have the chance to go to Heaven—boom!—right now. And a magical one at that! There’s no guesswork for you here. You got it. You’ve got the ‘in’ because you’ve earned it. Don’t you feel some kind of relief to know what’s in store for you? Take it with both hands and run with it, girl!”
“There is another choice she can make,” said a third voice.
I looked over to where those words came from, and I saw yet another mirror hanging in mid-air, this one with a simple gold frame around it. I walked up to that one and saw a reflection of myself dressed as I had been before going after Jason: white and gold chainmail armor with Caelestis’ winged circle emblazoned on it, a white shirt and white pants under it, and a pair of gold-colored leather boots. My hair was tucked behind my ears, and my eyes squinted a little as if bothered by all the light here.
“You are in the midst of a quest like you’ve always read and fantasized about. Yes, it’s harder than you had ever imagined it, but you have grown so much since crossing the mist gate. Are you willing to abandon both yourself and your friends, including Jason?”
Jason. Hearing his name sent a pang through my heart. The other two mirrors must have either seen the look on my face or somehow felt the pang, because they each started up a clamor of telling me why I should do what they said.
“Quiet!” I yelled. Silence instantly fell. “Who are you guys, anyway?”
The chainmail one replied, “We are you—or some of the reflections that you are made up of, anyway.”
“There are lots more of us—or rather, you,” said the t-shirt-and-jeans one. She waved a hand and the plain was filled with hundreds of mirrors of me: some that looked the same, and some that looked different. I saw reflections of me in my fencing gear, in my school clothes, and in my fuzzy purple bathrobe. She waved again and they all vanished. “But they’re not important now.”
“We are the three biggest ones since we represent the choices Caelestis has given you,” said the medieval-clothed one. “To go to an unknown afterlife, or to choose the reward afterlife that is already known.”
“Or to resume her quest back among the living,” added the chainmail one. “You must be fair and list all choices even if you don’t agree.”
I blinked as the chainmail one scolded the medieval-dressed one for not listing her choice. Had I been like that before my quest began—narrowing choices for myself when choices had had to be made? It was a sobering thought.
“Can I ask one or more questions of each of you?” I asked.
“That is why we are here,” said the chainmail one. “This is the Place of Soul’s Election, where you can clarify yourself, to yourself.”
I nodded, and went up to the modern frameless mirror. “If I choose to go home, can I go home to New York City?”
“No, duh,” she replied. “You’re dead. You’re going to go to either Heaven or Hell.”
“Actually, Caelestis said I’m not quite dead yet.” I smiled to myself at my inadvertent Monty Python line. “Do I get to choose where I go?”
“Weren’t you paying attention? You don’t get a choice. You’ll go wherever you were supposed to go before y
ou crossed over.”
Hmm. From BEFORE I crossed over, eh? That was telling, since the chainmail one had almost complimented me on how much I’d grown since coming here. Might that missing growth tip the scales for the human world choice one way or the other?
The t-shirt-and-jeans one must have seen something in my face, because she hurriedly added, “And if you go to Heaven, you’ll get to be with Grandpa Patrick and all our other relatives again. You won’t get that on this side. You’ll probably be the only human in Caelestis’ Heaven.”
I paused. That was a pretty good argument, and she smiled smugly at me as if she knew it. Which, I supposed, she did.
“Thanks,” I said to her, and walked over to the fancy brown wooden framed mirror.
“If I choose Caelestis right now, what is her Heaven like?” I asked that reflection.
The medieval-clothed one shrugged. “I have no idea except for what Dusk said maybe less than a couple of weeks ago. Remember?”
I nodded, recalling what the amber-eyed Surface-elf had said as we left the keep that first time: ‘Nothing is really over until Life is over, Lise. And then you get a whole new set of situations with which to figure out’. Which meant to me that Caelestis’ Heaven might not be as restful as the human ones were said to be. Maybe it was more like the Norse description of Valhalla, where fighting every day and feasting every night was the rule?
The medieval-dressed one added, “But you at least know that you’re going to a reward place instead of a penalty place. I think that’s a pretty important distinction, don’t you?”
I nodded, thanked her as well, and went to the simple golden framed mirror.
“Tell me why I should return to the Sub-realms,” I said to her.
The chainmail one shrugged. “That’s not my place to say. It’s yours.”
I frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to answer my questions?”
“You haven’t framed one. You’ve merely told me to tell you why you should return. And before you reframe it as a question,” she said, holding up one hand, “remember that I am here to help you clarify what’s inside you, as was already said. I can’t change anything you feel. So, really, you know the answer in your heart of hearts as to which of these three choices you most want to make. I can’t tell you what that is; you have to discover that for yourself.” She then smiled and said, “But I will give you a hint. Think about how you spoke to each of us reflections.”
“Aren’t you going to give me arguments or reasons for your choice or anything?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I blinked. That was a pretty short answer and rather unexpected.
“Okay, umm, thanks,” I said and stepped backwards to a point where I could see each of the mirrors easily.
I looked from one to the other and realized something: each reflection was me not just dressed from a different period in my life, but each actually was, mentally, me from a different time in my life. So what I needed to decide was what the right thing was to do based on where I felt I was in my life right then. I looked at each mirror, thinking about the person I’d been when I’d been wearing each of those sets of clothes, and came to a decision. I hitched up the white robe I was wearing and settled down into a comfortable cross-legged position on the white surface. I closed my eyes and put myself into the meditative headspace for prayer.
CHAPTER 13
I felt a slight wind stir my hair as I finished praying, and I opened my eyes to Caelestis’ golden motes stirring in front of me. I stood up in anticipation of her materialization.
“Have you decided?” she asked me when she had arrived. “I do not wish to pressure you, but your time to choose has nearly ended.”
“I have,” I said. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided I really do want to go back. I can’t abandon Auraus, Arghen, Ragar, and Heather—especially not in the middle of a quest. And I think I love Jason. I’d like a chance to find him and see if he feels the same way about me, and if so, I’d like to see if that could lead somewhere for us.”
At my words, the modern mirror and the fancy brown wooden framed mirror both vanished, leaving only the golden framed one behind.
Caelestis smiled at me. “I did believe that this would be your choice, but you are the one that had to make it for yourself,” she said. “Any of your choices could have been correct, but I am glad that you chose to remain in the world.”
“Before whatever happens next happens,” I said, “can you answer some questions for me?”
Her brilliantly green eyes twinkled at me. “Remember that there are rules I and every other Deity are bound by, so it will depend on the nature of your questions.”
“Why did Auraus’ light spell blow up like it did?”
“In the presence of a little iron, magic is affected as you have seen. In the presence of a lot of iron, magic becomes unpredictable.”
“But that didn’t happen before in the keep; what it did was cancel out the magic,” I argued. “And there was a pile of iron bars there!”
Caelestis shook her golden head. “No, My Champion, the iron bars that were in the keep’s dungeon were not enough to affect magic in the way Auraus’ spell was affected in the cavern. You should be glad for that. Had that little amount of iron made Bascom’s magic explode like Auraus’, you would not have survived his lightning spell when attempting to rescue my Priestess and Quiris’ Champion.”
I gulped a little, remembering how the electrical bolt had numbed my hand and arm as it travelled up the sword I’d been holding then. If what Caelestis said was true, then that cavern the others were still in must be in the middle of an iron lode or something. Whoa.
“Okay. Next question: is Jason all right?” I asked.
“He lives.”
I frowned. Living was not the same as being all right. I remembered then the vial she’d given me for him, and I hoped that he would still be all right by the time we got to him.
“So, what happened after I died?”
“There is no need for me to tell you. You can ask your comrades yourself,” she answered with a smile.
“So are we ...?” I started to ask, but she held up a slim, fair hand to cut me off. “Even oracles only get three questions, Analise Lynden Baxter, even if the answers are not what they wished them to be.”
Drat. I’d forgotten about the rule of threes here. I gave in with a shrug. “What happens now?” I asked instead.
“First, I want to talk to you about what you hold in your heart. I am concerned. Auraus has prayed to Me about it, and now I have seen it for Myself. There is no need to keep remembrances inside of you. You should acknowledge those you have slain, true, but then you should let them go.”
I winced. “Caelestis, it’s not that easy,” I began.
“Lise,” she said, coming to place a hand on my shoulder, “taking lives, and saving lives, is part and parcel of what a Champion does. Yes, you are young, and yes, doing such things change you as they would change anyone of good heart. But as long as you do not become comfortable with the idea of killing, then when you do what you must because others depend on you, that is heroic and not villainous. But do not harbor the memories in your heart—not completely, anyway. Give them their due, but let them go.”
“But I’m guilty!” I said, tears rolling down my face.
Caelestis sighed. “I will return,” she said, and vanished.
In the blink of an eye she was back, and behind her stood the ghostly outlines of a variety of beings. There was quite a lot of them.
Caelestis said, “These are the souls whom you have interacted with one way or another since your arrival, but not all are …”
“I’m so sorry!” I cried out to them, interrupting her, and started bawling.
Caelestis came over to hold me like she did when I first arrived. When I was all cried out, the souls murmured various things like ‘it was fine’ and ‘do not worry’ and things like that. As each spoke, they dissolved into sparkles and dissipated. Soon the
flat plane behind her was empty, and my heart felt curiously light. I also felt drained.
“Lise. If you ever start to feel like that again, remember this happening here. Continue to hold life precious as you do what you do. Give your enemies respect when they pass, but do not hold onto them anymore. You are not held accountable for others’ actions, nor for the results of those actions if you have been following the truths of your heart,” she said warmly.
I nodded and snuffled. “All right.” Taking a deep breath, I asked, “So what happens now?”
“Place your hands on the mirror,” she replied, reminding me that the gold-framed one was still there.
I walked up to the mirror, and the chain-mailed reflection raised her hands to meet mine.
“Fare thee well, My Champion,” Caelestis said softly behind me.
I squeaked in surprise as the chainmail reflection reached out and yanked me into the mirror with the hardest magical tingle slamming across my skin that I had felt yet.
I woke up to find myself lying on the floor of the cave where the last fight had been. A couple of the magic torches were stuck in hastily made rock piles to provide some light, and everyone from the party was kneeling around me. Each of their faces had a shocked expression on it to one degree or another. I would have sworn if anyone had asked that I saw a glow in Auraus’ eyes fading as I looked at her.
I started to sit up, but she pushed me back down. “Lise, you should rest awhile.”
I brushed Auraus’ hands off and sat all the way up, saying, “Why? I feel fine.”
And I did. I felt like I had just woken up from a deep sleep on the second to last day of a school vacation where all I’d done was relax through it. The color red caught my eye in the torchlight, and I glanced down at my clothes. My formerly somewhat dirty white and gold chainmail and clothes were now predominantly red. A stiff, rusty red. I swallowed.
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