“Imagine encountering a rope stretched across your path. There is no beginning to your left, and no end to your right. The rope is infinitely long. It started forever ago and runs on forever. How could you take a measured portion of it? A portion of infinity is a contradiction. How could you, for example, measure out a fourth of forever? If you tried to cut a section out of such an eternal rope, it too would be eternal because the rope has no ends, so you cannot create them in something that does not have them as part of its nature. Just because you want a beginning and an end for your convenience, that does not mean that they exist. While they certainly exist here, in the underworld, those beginnings and ends do not exist.

“In the center of that vortex of power, time itself does not exist. A minute, a day, a year, they are all the same.

“So, in that eternity of time, that instant I was there in eternity, I had all the time I needed to search. In a way, I had forever. I searched forever.

“I tried to ask Joel’s spirit where they were, but before I even began to form the question, he told me that they were not there.

“I saw people I knew from Grandengart, people who had died in the past, before that terrible day Kuno’s army arrived, people who had been old, or sick, even a boy I had tried to help but who had died of fever. None of them knew where the rest of the people were, the people of Grandengart who had died out on the road that day.

“Everyone I knew could only tell me that the others were not there. They were not in the underworld.”

“How is that possible?” Magda asked. “How can they be dead, but not dead?”

Isidore showed the slightest hint of a smile. “That is the question that has led me to be down here, among the husks of the dead.”

The smile melted away, as if she were again lost in the vision of the memory.

“I saw tormented spirits, evil itself, lost in the black sorrow of eternal darkness. I dared not let my attention linger too long on such entities, lest they pull me into everlasting night with them and tear my soul apart.

“I saw the glory of the good spirits. I saw them at peace in gentle light. I didn’t want to disturb them, but I had to find the people who were missing. I had to ask them to help me, to tell me what they knew.

“One turned toward me, then, and I saw that it was Sophia’s spirit looking back at me through the soft golden glow. She said that I had already learned the truth. She said that there was nothing more to learn there.”