Heaven's Darkness (Book 2)

Chapter 16 - Red

 "Quint, wait up!"

"There's no time to wait! We have to keep moving!"

Ashura was gone. We let her slip through our fingers. There was no time to spend searching for her, either. She would have to wait for us to find her, wherever she was.

I just hoped we would find her before it was too late.

"We're approaching the heart, Red!" Quint called over his shoulder. "The hazier your vision, the closer we are!"

That was quite an understatement. I couldn't see anything in front of me. I tripped over my own feet at least four times already and Quint's white cloak was just a giant blur to me now. I wasn't about this can't-see business.

Especially since we were one man short.

Everything in front of me was a mixture of light, pastel colors that ran together. I couldn't depict anything to know what kind of scenery was around here. It was even weirder how I couldn't sense the spirits on my mind's radar. I wasn't used to that kind of obliviousness. It was unsettling.

As I concentrated more on trying to sense what was around me, I stopped paying attention to what little I could see. I rammed face-first into Quint's back, knocking the both of us to the strangely soft ground.

"We've approached the edge," Quint panted, crawling onto what seemed to be all fours, but what could I tell; I was blind as a bat.

The funny part was that nothing before me was different in the slightest. All of the colors and swirls were the same kinds as before. How could Quint tell where we were if it appeared exactly the same?

I didn't move from where I sat panting on the ground. "What is so important about this edge?"

I heard him shift his weight on the grass to catch his breath. "It's the entrance to the heart of the spirit realm. The second tier."

At my wordless confusion, Quint continued.

"There are basically two tiers to the spirit realm. The first tier is where the alive, healthy people's spirits roam freely in the forms of animals and other nonhuman creatures. The second tier is where the spirits go when the people die. This is where the heart lies."

I wasn't usually the person to get confused pretty quickly, but this wasn't something my brain felt like accepting at this moment. It seemed way too abnormal and illogical.

"So, that's heaven, I guess?" I tried, furrowing my brow.

Quint made a sort of shrug motion. "In a way. When a person dies, their conscience dies with them, but their soul lives on. The soul of a person could either become one with their shadow or one with their spirit, the soulless one disappearing from that particular realm. There is always an equal amount of evil people to light people. Whatever happens to their soul depends on whether their soul is full of darkness or full of light at the time of death. Most people would prefer to be in the spirit realm when they die. That gives them a greater chance to possibly make it to what some people believe to be the real heaven, the place beyond the darkness."

"But, I thought you mentioned earlier how all three realms had to be in equilibrium. Wouldn't death in our realm disrupt this equilibrium?" I was so lost. Thank the dragons this wasn't my magic.

"Well, in the earthen realm, you always have an equal number of dark people to light people. Whenever a darkened soul is born, a light one is also born to keep everything in balance, and vice versa. The same concept applies for whenever a person dies. So, in terms of light and dark, the universe is always balanced.