“But . . . even though I miss you, it’s not the same anymore. You aren’t here, alive, so I can’t hold on to you in the way I want to.”

“He knows that, too, Magda,” Naja said in her gentle, soft voice.

“But I—”

“I know your heart Magda,” Naja said in a suddenly strange, distant voice.

Magda looked, trying to see, but it seemed to have grown too dark to see the spiritist’s lips moving. Shadows seemed to move in the blackness around them.

“I know your loyalty to me,” the strange voice said. “But who I was, who you loved, no longer exists. I have passed on. In your world, only my memory can exist. Your loyalty to me because of that memory is a part of life, but it can become disloyalty to yourself if you hold it so closely that it crowds out the rest of life.”

“Why did you leave me,” she asked in a halting voice as a tear rolled down her cheek. “I thought you loved me more than anything. Why would you leave me all alone?”

The candles hissed for a time as she waited, not knowing if he would answer. Finally, the strange voice returned.

“I had to do as I did because I love the world of life.”

Magda sucked back a sob. “Please, Baraccus, I don’t understand.”

“There are others who can do what I could do. There are others who can fight in the ways that I could fight. There are others who can serve our cause as I served it. In that way, as remarkable as you may have believed me to be, I wasn’t. I was not essential.

“But you are unique, my rare flower. There has never been anyone exactly like you before, and there can never be anyone exactly like you again. We are each that way. Because of the exact way you are, there are no others who could have done the things you have done, when you did them, in the way you did them. There are no others who have had the particular experiences you’ve had that led you to the choices you made. What you did, and what you have become, no other could have done in your place.

“You were, and you continue to be, on a unique path.

“There were so many paths that would have taken the world into eternal darkness, but there was only one to take it safely through this perilous time. You took the world on that path when it was needed.

“Had I lived, you would not have made the choices that took you down that path.