“He saw that connection in everything, even in something as elemental as light and dark. Consequently, he also saw such interdependence in simple things as well.”

“Simple things?” Magda asked. “Like what?”

Isidore lifted one shoulder in a matter-of-fact shrug. “Where I saw a shadow cast across the ground, he saw the shadow, but also what he called the negative shape created by the shadow. He said they were inextricably linked, locked together, the positive shape and the negative shape, each depending on the other to exist. He said that to truly appreciate one, you had to at least recognize the contribution of the other.

“Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show light, so you shouldn’t curse the darkness. You needed death to define life.

“Hence, the delight he found in his ‘adventuring’ into areas others found terrifying. I guess you could say that his quest for understanding of the world of the dead contributed to a greater appreciation for life. My mother would roll her eyes when he would tell me about such things, but sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would see her flash him a private smile.

“So, perhaps more than most, I already had a pretty good working knowledge of the Grace, how it is drawn and how it functions, how magic itself is connected to Creation and death through Additive and Subtractive Magic, and how spell-forms can draw on these elements for power. My father did not view different aspects of the world, such as life and the underworld beyond the veil of life, as independent things, but rather as interdependent elements that were all part of a great, unified whole. In that way, he said, we were all part of all things.

“Sophia said that such an upbringing, learning, and understanding put me years ahead of most in becoming as a spiritist. She said that I had come to it as if it were my destiny, although she said that she didn’t believe in fate.

“The hardest part of Sophia’s lessons was that from my father’s teachings I was accustomed to thinking in terms of the whole, so learning not to see this world, but rather to exclude it from that whole, was difficult for me.”

Magda frowned. “What do you mean, learning to exclude this world?”

“To see into the spirit world, Sophia told me that I had to be able to look beyond what was around us in order to see into that other realm. She said that, while she didn’t herself know if it was true or not, some people believed that the underworld was all around us in the same place we existed, but at the same time it was separate and so we couldn’t see it. I can understand that now that I am blind; I can hear things I never before knew were there, but always were.