The Path of Souls was, as Lance explained it, the route that every soul in every world walked after the body it inhabited died. It was one of the central tenets of the Faith of the Light, and the Faith held that the universe — or the multiverse, depending on which branch of the theology you followed — contained many worlds, layered across different planes, each one populated and distinct, and that death in any of them opened the same door.
You stepped through, and you were on the Path. And the Path led to the Beyond.
What lay past the Beyond, nobody claimed to know. The Faith was unusually honest about this, at least in Lance's telling of it. The Beyond was the end of the road, and the souls that entered it did not come back to describe what they found, and the Faith did not pretend to fill that silence with answers it didn't have.
But the Path itself — the stretch between death and the Beyond — was where things got interesting, because the Path was shared. Souls from every world walked it. And because of that proximity, because all these different worlds sat close to one another along its length, it was possible, in theory, to wander.
To step off the forward route and drift toward another world entirely. You could visit places that had nothing to do with the life you'd just left. You could, if the circumstances were extraordinary enough, find a person you'd lost — a loved one who had died before you — if that person had not yet passed into the Beyond but had instead been born again somewhere else, in a body and a world they'd never known before.
This was supposed to be vanishingly rare. A mistake, when it happened.
The Path had a direction, and souls were meant to follow it, and the Faith taught that crossing between worlds required an error in the fabric of how things worked, a slip that the universe did not make often and did not intend to make at all. But the Faith also acknowledged that it happened. Rarely, improbably, but it happened.
That was the belief, at least. And Sael was aware — had been aware for the entire duration of Lance's explanation — that the word belief was doing an enormous amount of structural work in every sentence.
The Path of Souls was unverified. The soul itself was unverified. The existence of other worlds, the mechanics of crossing between them, the Beyond, all of it rested on a foundation that Sael could not touch, could not measure, could not observe under any conditions he would consider controlled. He had spent his life relying on what he could confirm through his own senses and through evidence that held up when you pressed on it, and the Path of Souls, by its very nature, did not offer that.
It offered tradition, testimony, and a framework that was internally consistent if you accepted its premises, but it did not offer proof.
He would have set it aside entirely — filed it in the same mental drawer where he kept every other metaphysical system he'd encountered and respected without adopting — if he had never met Bran.
Bran was his closest friend, and Bran said he was from a world called Earth.
He had told Sael about it years into their friendship, by which point he'd clearly given up on the question of whether anyone would believe him and had arrived at the more practical position of simply saying it and letting the listener do what they wanted with it.
He'd been hit by a vehicle on a road in his previous life, and then he had been born here, as an infant, into a royal family, with every memory of his old life intact. An adult mind inside a baby's body, watching a world he didn't recognize assemble itself around him while he learned to walk and talk for the second time.
Sael had not believed him immediately. His mind did not permit that, even for people he cared about, and he'd spent years doing what he always did with claims that defied his understanding: he examined them.
Bran described history that existed in no record Sael had ever found. Technologies that operated on principles this world hadn't developed. A system of science, of physical law, of understanding the behavior of matter and energy, that was so internally coherent and so detailed that fabricating it would have required a kind of genius that made the alternative explanation — that it was simply true — considerably easier to accept.
And Bran had arrived as a newborn. If his memories were a delusion, they had formed before the brain carrying them had finished growing, and Sael had never been able to reconcile that with any model of delusion he was aware of.
So he believed Bran. Conditionally and incompletely, in the way he believed anything he couldn't verify firsthand, which was to say he held it as probably true, and he kept the door open, and that door was the reason he was sitting here at this hour listening to Lance describe a metaphysical framework he would have otherwise dismissed as outside his area of concern.
Lance had been watching him through the silence that followed the explanation, giving him time, which Sael appreciated.
"Alright," Lance said. "I'm going to need you to breathe deeply, sir."
Sael breathed deeply.
It was not a difficult instruction to follow. He'd spent years training his breathing as part of his mana regulation practice, and the rhythm Lance was guiding him toward — slow inhale, held, slower exhale — was one his body already knew. He settled into it and let his pulse drop, and after a few cycles he could feel the familiar shift in his awareness.
"Good," Lance said. "Now close your eyes, please."
Sael closed them.
"I need you to let go of yourself," Lance said. "Your thoughts, your awareness, all of it. Let it drain out. Don't hold onto who you are or where you are. Don't try to stay present. Just let your mind empty until there's nothing left in it, and let your consciousness go with it."
Sael opened his eyes.
"That," he said, "is going to be difficult in this context."
Lance blinked in confusion. "Why is that?"
"As all other mages, I carry a mana core," Sael said. "Though mine is a fairly intricate one. The amount of mana it stores at any given time is substantial, and at the level I've reached, maintaining it requires a degree of active regulation that my conscious mind handles continuously. It's become automatic in the way that breathing is automatic — I don't think about it unless I need to — but automatic is not the same as involuntary. My mind is still doing the work. If I were to actually lose consciousness, fully, the way you're describing, I would lose regulation of the core."
Lance was quiet for a moment. "And what happens then?"
"The mana destabilizes," Sael said. "When a mage with a level over 5000 loses consciousness, their core loses regulation, and the mana leaks into the environment faster than it can be absorbed. At small volumes, the effects are local. Strange weather, objects behaving incorrectly, minor distortions in the area. Unpleasant for anyone nearby, but containable."
He considered how to frame the next part. "At the volume I'm carrying, the leak would not be local. Mana that isn't regulated molds itself. That's how spells are made, you shape it deliberately, with intent and structure. Unregulated mana shapes itself without either of those things, which means you get spells, many of them, forming spontaneously and without any logic governing what they do or where they go. The chain reaction accelerates because each spell destabilizes the area around it further, which accelerates the leak, which produces more spells. I haven't lost consciousness in years. At a certain point in my development, my body stopped allowing it. The cascade, if it ran its course, would likely destroy this continent and leave permanent damage to the mana structure of the land itself. Possibly beyond the continent, depending on factors I've never had reason to calculate."
Lance had gone very still across from him, and his face had lost a shade of color that Sael was fairly sure it wasn't going to get back anytime soon.
"In theory," Sael added.
"Ah," the young man said. "That would complicate things a bit, I think."
"Well," Sael said. "Yes."
Lance leaned back in his chair and pressed two fingers against his temple. He stayed like that for a while. Then he lowered his hand.
"The Path," he said, "can only be perceived through what we call the sixth sense. It's a skill. It would appear in your system as a level 1 ability once you'd mastered it, but mastering it requires you to sever your reliance on every other sense you have. Sight, hearing, touch, spatial awareness, mana perception, all of it. Those senses are rooted in this world. They're how your body interprets this specific plane of existence, and as long as they're active, they will keep pulling your awareness back here. The sixth sense only opens when the others go quiet. Fully quiet. Which is why I asked you to empty your mind and lose consciousness, because that's the fastest way to get there for most people."
He paused. "For most people being the relevant part of that sentence, apparently."
Sael considered this. He turned the problem over in his mind without rushing, checking each surface for a handhold before committing to a grip.
"There may be a way," he said.
"What way?"
"I could leave," Sael said. "Physically, I mean. Go up. Past the atmosphere, the sky, into the space between stars. I've never done it before, but my constitution should be high enough to sustain me in that environment for a considerable stretch of time. Long enough, certainly, to attempt what you're describing. And out there, with no ground beneath me and nothing around me in any direction for a distance my senses couldn't meaningfully bridge, the connection to this world that you're concerned about would thin on its own. My senses would have nothing to anchor to. The emptying you need might come more naturally under those conditions, and if my core did destabilize in some partial way during the process, the mana would disperse into a void instead of into a populated landmass."
It was only when he finished that Sael noticed Lance was staring at him, his mouth half closed, and his hands, which had been resting on the table, had gone flat against the wood as if he'd braced against something and forgotten to let go. Sael was not sure if what he said made him think he was mad, or so out of the ordinary that his belief on what can be done or not was challenged.
"Lance?"
"Yes," Lance said. "Apologies, sir." He blinked twice, quickly, and straightened in his chair. "If it means we avoid the — the continent situation, then I suppose that would be a good approach. Yes. I think that would work."
"Good," Sael said. He did not mean to overhear, but he was fairly certain Lance had just muttered "what the fuck" under his breath, which was the first time Sael had ever heard a priest curse. He somehow liked him slightly more for it. "What am I supposed to do once I'm there?"
Lance took a breath, and when he spoke again his voice had shifted back into the instructional register from before.
"Once your senses go quiet, you'll still have awareness. It won't feel like awareness the way you're used to it. There won't be a body attached to it, or a direction, or a sense of time passing. But you'll be there. And in that state, you need to focus on a single point. A destination. You're looking for the Path, but you can't search for it the way you'd search for anything else, because searching implies direction and direction implies senses you won't have access to. Instead, you hold one thought. Just one. The person you're trying to reach. You hold their existence in your mind as completely as you can — who they are, what they mean, the shape of them in your life — and you don't let it waver. The Path responds to intent. If your intent is clean and singular and you maintain it long enough, the sixth sense opens, and you'll feel the Path. It'll be there, and you'll know it."
He reached into the satchel he'd set on the kitchen table when he arrived and pulled out a small clay flask, stoppered with wax. He set it between them.
"Please drink this before you go," Lance said. "All of it. It will bring you to the threshold faster than you could reach on your own. Think of it as a bridge between your ordinary state of consciousness and the state you need to be in. It won't force you there — you still have to do the work I described — but it will make the crossing possible for someone who's never trained in the discipline."
Sael looked at the flask. It was plain fired clay, no markings, no ornamentation. But he could feel what was inside it. The mana signature was dense and layered, and the structure of the mana itself was unfamiliar to him, which did not happen often.
"What's in it?" he asked.
Lance hesitated. He glanced down at the flask, then back at Sael, and there was a brief tightness around his jaw that loosened before he spoke.
"The formula is proprietary to the Temple," he said. "I can't share it with anyone outside the clergy. I'm sorry, sir. I understand that asking you to consume an unknown substance requires trust, and I wouldn't ask if there were another option."
Sael studied him for a moment. Then he picked up the flask, broke the wax seal with his thumb, and drank.