Within moments, the twins had levitated themselves and joined me on top of the rock outcropping. We sat there, looking out over the horizon, not saying a word.
Finally, Corwin broke the silence.
"Any news from the frontline?"
I shook my head. "No. I'm sending out a new scout to Solaro. We're about half a day away, but the owl will have been there and back by the time we are ready to leave tomorrow. I want to have some idea where to head towards."
"Good idea," he responded. "I don't want to get caught in the middle of a discharging weapon again. We can't really rest until we move out of combat zone."
"How big is this combat zone?"
"It's everything in between Topaz City and where the Mage Elites are."
"And how big is that area?"
Corwin snapped his fingers and an illuminated map appeared in front of me, hovering in the space between us.
"Here is where we are now," he pointed to a spot on the map.
"Here is the train station at Helene," he indicated another location near the base of the mountain.
"And here, is Topaz City and the Academy," he pointed to the spot on the map where the Academy was.
I noticed that he actually pointed away from the map, into the air in front of the map, and I suddenly understood where and how Topaz was located in relationship to the topography.
Since it was within a bubble, it existed, not on a flat plane with the rest of humanity's towns and cities, but on its own dimension.
My mind was reeling with an overload of information that had just been ripped out and exposed at me. I couldn't believe we had been living in a mage's bubble all this time.
Topaz City, the city that I was born in, that I grew up in, only existed within a bubble extending like a frog's eye, from the real world full of humans.
I had no clue there was even a conflict between mages and humans. I never dreamed that we were exiles, driven from the world in which we once lived.
"You see all this area here?" Corwin pointed to the huge swath of land in between.
At my nodding, he continued. "The Mage Elites' plan is to take back everything that was lost in the last great war, over a century ago. Here is Solaro." He pointed back towards the map.
"The skirmishes started up at the train depot the day after we left. As you can see, we barely made it out before the Scourge Winds followed us and then went onto Zircon City.
I'm not sure how Solaro fared, but I hope it was spared."
"It's a bit further north, so it doesn't look as if it was in the path of the Scourge Winds." Connor added. "And besides, if the Mage Elites sent the weapon out, they wouldn't want it to blow directly back at them."
He paused to think before continuing. "You said that the owl confirmed that Solaro is still alive and well, so even though it's at the epicenter of all this activity, we stand a better chance at safety if we can make it there in one piece."
I frowned. "So if the Mage Elites want to retake the area between Solaro and the train depot, why would they send such a destructive weapon as the Scourge Winds?"
Connor hesitated before answering. "Most likely, it's because they feel that they don't have a choice."
At my questioning gaze, he continued. "It is true that the Scourge Winds destroy everything alive, including bacteria, down through the soils to a depth of twelve feet, but this also keeps the land so sterile that humans can't return to it any time soon because they can't grow any food or live in such a dead zone."
"I see..." I nodded, not quite seeing.
Connor noticed my lack of complete understanding. "To reclaim dead land takes a huge amount of effort to terraform and cleanse the water and the land, as well as to reseed the area with organic material.
"Mages can do it in only a few decades, whereas humans do not yet have the capability to to do this type of terraforming within that amount of time. There are areas on Earth that have been utterly destroyed by ancient Scourge Winds that are still desolate."
"The Mage Elites' plan is to take control of the dead region and establish themselves. By the time the land is alive again, they will have had protective measures in place to defend the region."
"Why would Blackstone and the Council of the Mages be against the Mage Elites retaking the land?" I asked the obvious question that had been .
Corwin shook his head. "It's not so much that they are against the Mage Elites wanting to reclaim the City of the Angels. They are against the methods being used."
"I don't understand."
"The various weapons, like that Scourge Wind, require a different kind of power than what we mages use on a normal basis."
"What kind of power would create such horrors as the Scourge Winds?" I asked with a shudder.
"The power of the Shadow Beings." Corwin's tone was ominous. "The Scourge Winds are not of this world. They are demon-driven, and they require certain sacrifices made by those who choose to utilize the powers of the shadow beings."
I was almost afraid to ask the next question.
"What kind of sacrifices?"
Corwin took a deep breath and held it in for a few moments, as if debating to himself if he should tell me or not.
He finally exhaled and responded with some reluctance. "The Shadow Beings extract their payment in fractions of souls."
"What?" I asked. "I don't understand what you mean by fractions of souls."
He held up his hand. "It's a bit complicated, and I'm not sure you are able to grasp this information without a deep understanding of fundamental magiks, but basically, here's how it works."
He snapped a finger and an image of a flower with three stamens, surrounded by seven petals appeared between the three of us. He pointed to the stamens.
"Think of the mage soul as a flower with three stamens and seven petals. The stamens represent the three main souls, which consist of the physical soul, the mental soul, and the central soul."
I nodded. So far this was fairly basic knowledge that even young kids get at the first or second year of school.
"You need all three to exist in this realm. Without a physical soul, you'd be see-through, like a ghost. You wouldn't be able to interact with physical objects in this dimension."
"Without your mental soul, you'd be like a zombie, able to touch and manipulate objects and people but you'd be witless and without a memory of what you'd done and who you were."
"Without a central soul, you'd be the perfect tool for possession by a shadow demon. I'll get more into that later, but let me talk about the seven anchoring layers."
He pointed to the petals of the flower. "The seven flower petals around them represent the seven anchoring layers, which is actually our senses of sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch, vestibular, and proprioception."
He glanced my way. "With me so far?"
I nodded.
"These anchoring layers lock down our three souls so that they sense and receive input to vibrations in this dimension only."
"And why is that important?" I asked.
"It's important because if our senses aren't locked into this dimension, we would go mad. We'd hear things and see things and feel things which do not exist in this dimension."
I laughed even as I got goosebumps. "That sounds like an insane person."
"Schizophrenia exists within the mage community as well, but it's more than just a simple disease of the brain."
"These things that some people are able to hear and see could actually exist elsewhere, but since our souls can only exist here in this plane of existence, we need to remain firmly anchored in this dimension."
I nodded. That made a lot of sense.
"Imagine seeing something dangerous in a different dimension and trying to react to what you see. Meanwhile, a vehicle is coming at you in this dimension and you can't see it to avoid it because your sense of sight has gotten stuck in that other dimension."
He sighed. "We need to remain with our three souls in this dimension or it gets forfeited through death."
"OK, I understand that, but I'm not getting something," I scratched my head. "You just told me that we can't go anywhere without our souls, so why would the shadow demons want to bargain with our souls?"
"Good question." Corwin nodded. "The Shadow Beings have their own three souls, which exist in their dimension and cannot be imported here.
"In order to physically interact with people and objects in our dimension they would need to obtain and possess souls that are created in our dimension. More specifically, they need to obtain both the physical and mental souls in order to animate that avatar while being anchored in their own dimension."
"Hmmm." I scratched my head. "What about the central soul?"
Corwin nodded. "The central soul is a different beast altogether. You cannot bargain your central soul away. Once you die, it goes back and rejoins with the universe, back to that One Soul that the Sylphytes have been preaching at us all this time."
"So why bother with the other two souls if the central soul is never in danger of being lost or stolen?"
"Because if you lose your other two souls, once you die, you can never come back to this dimension."
Corwin's eyes narrowed. "If the Shadow Beings can make some kind of bargain, whereby they can gain a physical and a mental soul, they can slip into our world and walk among us. They can even stay in our world and pass as one of us—with a few crucial differences."
"This is against the laws of the universe and there are serious consequences for this type of behavior, but while the Shadow Beings are still running rampant and the consequences have not caught up with them yet, they can do serious damage to an existing dimension."
"How do they damage a dimension?" I wanted to know.
Corwin waved his hand through the flower image and it dissipated like smoke.
He snapped his finger and another image appeared in front of me. This one looked like a spider's web with a marble rolling around on its top surface.
"OK, think of our dimension as this web with us as this ball rolling on this side. Let me color this side orange."
Corwin waved his hand and the top side of the spider web as well as the ball turned orange.
"Now, pretend that the dimension that the shadow beings live in is here."
He twisted his hand and the image flipped upside down.
"Let me paint that surface a different color," he muttered.
Another wave of his hand resulted in a blue color on that surface which had just been turned upwards.
"And let me add a shadow being here," he created a blue sphere and allowed it to roll around on the blue side of the web.
"With me so far?"
I nodded.
"Good," he smiled. "Now, what would happen if that blue shadow being tried to come over to our side?"
I shrugged.
He used his finger to wiggle the blue ball around until it found a space between the web that was large enough for it to wiggle through, then he pushed it through, using his index finger.
It popped over to the orange side. Where it had pushed through, there was a torn section where the web began to fray.
"The shadow beings can move back and forth once they are able to find a weak spot between the worlds and tear through it to create a portal."
He created more small spheres and began pushing them through various holes in the fabric of the web.
"Each time they pop through a new hole, it causes another tear in the fabric of the dimension. Make enough of these tears and eventually, the dimension becomes unstable and falls apart."
"That is why I said it is against the laws of the universe to dimension-dive. It causes serious consequences. Everything is interconnected. When they do damage to our realm, they also do damage to their own realm because the realms are really opposite sides of the same web."
"If there is so much risk, and so much damage done to our realm, why would we do this?" I asked.
Connor responded. "To the Mage Elites, the end justifies any means they have at their disposal. The Elites are willing to expend this energy if they could be assured that this area will be free of humans because the alternative would be complete annihilation of the mage race."