“You were out in the open. It’s completely possible,” Marius agreed. The queen was right to be worried. He hadn’t thought about the specifics of that morning. He’d been catatonic at the time and had few memories of his own. But she was right. A dragon in the area could have easily made themselves invisible and escaped notice. They wouldn’t have been scared off by the erupting volcano, and they wouldn’t even have had to have been close to see what was happening. Dragons could see for miles and hear across great distances. Avery’s secret was definitely not safe.
“What do you want me to do?”
She groaned. “It gives me no pleasure to ask this after our last conversation, but could you ask Harlow to keep her ear to the ground? Given her family’s past relationships, it’s possible someone will approach her or her parents. She might be the key to finding out who’s behind this.”
Marius raised a hand. “Let me get this straight. After warning me that Harlow might be a spy and that I should be exceptionally careful allowing her close to me, you are now asking me to ask her to be a spy for us?”
“I know it sounds ironic, but—”
Marius grumbled. “No.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. This could be a life-and-death situation. We’re connected, you know. If someone kills Avery and she stays dead, Clarissa and I could lose our magic. We got lucky bringing her back when we did. Her soul was still with us. When Aborella unbound us before, we lost all our powers. A true death would likely mean the same fate.”
He turned back toward the window that wasn’t a window. Why couldn’t anything be easy? “I’ll consider it.”
Raven dropped her chin once in silent agreement. “Now that that’s settled, there’s something else I need to talk to you about.”
“Hmm.” The bird in the tree outside the window had captured an insect in its beak. He watched the legs kick as it swallowed its meal down.
“I’ve studied the drawings Alexander did of the markings on your torso, and I have a theory about the symbols.”
He turned back around and shot her an expectant glare.
“When Gabriel and I first met and he learned he could trust me, he explained that Paragon existed in a different dimension from Earth. At the time, I didn’t have a good handle on what that meant. And when I asked him, he held up two napkins and explained that it was like two parallel worlds existing simultaneously, but that aside from the use of a portal, you could not reach one from the other.”
She walked to the symbol at the center of her ritual room and passed her hand over it, muttering an incantation whose meaning Marius did not understand. A figure glowed to life. It looked like a stack of thirteen different pieces of white parchment separated by varying gaps that were filled by night sky and twinkling stars.
“Thirteen dimensions. But these aren’t like Earth and Ouros. These aren’t physical dimensions but spiritual ones.”
Marius shook his head. “I’m not following.”
“My first clue was when you said that the goddess was in the same place as you before we resurrected her. I understood the spell Eleanor used to kill her. Eleanor did not send Aitna to Earth or some other physical dimension. That doesn’t work with spiritual entities. She sent her to the underworld.”
“What does this have to do with the symbols?”
“I was examining Alexander’s sketches, and I kept coming back to the spiraling symbol that you and Avery share. I could have sworn I’d seen it before. After extensive research, I realized I had… in an old grimoire. The symbol represents the afterlife. So I started thinking, what if the afterlife wasn’t some abstract concept but a place? And what if it was layered?”
He squinted at the floating rectangles over the symbol.
“We have folklore in my world that hell has levels. Hell is how many humans think of Hades. Earth and Ouros have a shared history, so I started linking each of your symbols to a ‘level’ of Hades. Instead of researching in books on symbols, I read books on the underworld, and that’s when I had a breakthrough.”
Marius’s head was spinning. He was trying to follow, but this idea of spiritual dimensions was not an easy one for his mind to wrap around.
“The easiest way for me to explain is to show you. I’m going to open a window to the first level, the one closest to us spiritually.” She pointed at the first rectangle in the stack. “Tell me if you recognize what you see.”
Her lips began to move, and so did her arms and hands. She drew intricate symbols and made large sweeping movements in the air as she circled and mumbled the words to some ancient spell. When she stopped moving, a blazing light appeared at the center of the symbol. With a grunt, Raven pulled her hands apart.
Marius stopped breathing. “I know this place.” He stepped forward, reaching toward the warm yellow light and white tower beyond. His fingers bounced off an invisible barrier.
“It’s a window, Marius. Not a portal.” Sweat broke out on Raven’s forehead.
“I’ve been there before. It’s a good place. We tried to get back there as much as possible.”
With a groan, Raven clapped her hands together, and the window closed.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“It means that I think each of the symbols on your body represents a dimension that your soul traveled to while you were dead. The books I read on the subject suggested that normally when someone dies, their soul goes to one of these dimensions. It’s a type of purgatory. The soul must pass a series of trials to move on. Eleanor’s curse kept you from ever transitioning. She stopped you from truly dying.”
