“I figured that if she wouldn’t give me the help I needed, then maybe I could learn enough to do it on my own. I’m a sorceress, after all, so I’m not without abilities. Although the methods involved were a mystery to me, I thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so complicated to learn just enough to check on the souls lost to me and find out if they were at peace. I guess I felt guilty for failing to be there for the people of Grandengart when Kuno had shown up and wanted to make up for it.

“The old woman, of course, knew what I was up to. She finally asked what it was I hoped to accomplish by contacting the spirit world so directly. I explained my promise to Joel to help make sure that he and all of the people of Grandengart had made it safely into the embracing shelter of the good spirits.

“She chuckled and asked what I thought one of the living could do to influence events in the spirit world. How did I think I could help souls gone to the underworld? Did I think I could take them by the hand and lead them into the glory of the light of the Creator? Did I really think that the souls in the underworld would never be able to find peace until I found it for them? Of course I had no answers.

“So I told her, then, of how the bodies of those killed in Grandengart had been harvested and taken away. I told her that I was greatly worried about what the gifted down in the Old World were doing with the dead people of Grandengart. I told her that I had a terrible feeling that the souls of those people were not at all safe.

“That gave her pause.

“Sophia became darkly moody and said again that such things were not the responsibility of the living, and besides, no matter what we might wish we could do to help, we had no say in the spirit world. But the worry about why the corpses had been taken nagged at her. I could see her demeanor change with the mystery surrounding the harvesting of the dead.

“One evening, she finally said that she would help me see that the people of Grandengart were at peace, but on a condition.

“Because I was a sorceress, and not the typical person who came to her for consultation, she wanted me, in exchange for her help, to first learn from her to be a spiritist. She explained that it was an old and honorable craft, but with an unfortunate stigma attached to it. She said that she was nearing the end of her life and wanted to pass her lifetime of knowledge on to someone of a new generation. She wanted the skills to live on.