The question fell away from my lips as I remembered. Charlie. He wasn’t here.
Deep within my spirit was something absent. A missing piece. The other half of my soul wasn’t complete. Even here in the Ancestral Lands, I wasn’t made whole without him and Oberi.
It made me feel vacant in a way that the others weren’t, and that emptiness tore through me, even though everything was safe here.
I had to force myself to put Charlie aside. I’d made my choice. A life for a life, and I’d been glad to make it. There was no turning back now.
“We’re technically soul mates. Ezra and I have been together in almost every lifetime,” Aunt Stevie explained. “We just signed our newest contract to be together in our next incarnation.”
I looked down at my hands. “So… you’re going to leave soon?”
“Oh, no, there are multiple versions of ourselves in the spiritual realm, and they all exist at the same time. Even once we reincarnate as other people, these versions of ourselves will still be here,” Uncle Ezra said, gesturing between him and Stevie. “In fact, you can go talk to my warlock self that lived in the fifteen-hundreds if you head down to—”
“Wow,really?” I burst. “How’s that even possible?”
“You can have multiple versions of yourself that exist at once, because time isn’t a continual line,” Aunt Stevie said. “Think of time kind of like a planet… like the world you came from. California and Malovia both exist at the same time, in different places, you just have to hop on a plane or take a portal to get there. So multiple versions of yourself can exist at once, just at different moments in time, because you are all one being— your higher self, which is your spirit name.”
I’d never gotten my spirit name on earth, despite going through multiple ceremonies, so I didn’t really know who my higher self was supposed to be, or what she was supposed to be called. The idea seemed complicated, at first, but it really wasn’t to me. It was sort of like what Oberi said about having different forms at different times. They were allOberi, just not all at once.
I wish I could tell Kallie all of this. She’d have found this stuff about time interesting.
“Does that mean I can go meet other versions of my past self?” I asked Grandpa.
“If you wish, but I don’t suggest it,” Grandpa Liwanu said gruffly. “They don’t make for good conversation.”
“You just say that because all your other selves argued the whole time,” Uncle Ezra stated. “Mypast selves were great.”
“Ezra’s selves all put together have the intelligence equivalent of an onion,” Aunt Stevie teased.
“Hey, we know how to party! You can’t say it wasn’t a blast,” Uncle Ezra argued.
“Itwasa fun time…” Aunt Stevie admitted reluctantly.
Hm. It’d be interesting to have a conversation with multiple versions of myself. Or a party, in Ezra’s case.
Or maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Me and all the past Avas would probably conspire to do something crazy here in heaven.
I could hardly wait.
Grandpa Liwanu stood from the table. “There’s so much more to see. Ezra will show you around.”
Aunt Stevie waved her hand. The dishes whisked away, as if they never existed at all. I followed my uncle outside, where his Familiar emerged from his body. It was Dyami, his thunderbird. The massive yellow bird was absolutely beautiful, with jolts of lightning racing up and down his feathers. I reached out a hand to stroke his cheek, and the thunderbird nuzzled against me tenderly.
“You’re gonna love this,” Uncle Ezra said. He climbed onto Dyami’s back, then reached out a hand to pull me on in front of him. Dyami took off, electricity shooting off his wings. A warm wind brushed my hair back as we rose from the trees and into the multi-colored sky. The rainbows swelled around us, and I looked down to take it all in.
The Ancestral Lands went on forever, in every direction. The expanse was so massive that I didn’t even know where the other planes of heaven couldbe, because this place went on forever.
Dyami sailed upward, out of the day and into the night, but he didn’t stop there. He kept moving through the layers of sky until the land below us vanished completely and we were surrounded by nothing but galaxies.
We had no need to breathe. Dyami sailed through the stars, flying through space just as easily as he would anywhere else. My jaw dropped as we sailed past planets, blazing a trail through meteors and comets. I put my hand out and felt a tingling sensation as the stars around me skimmed over my fingers.
Eventually, Uncle Ezra pulled Dyami up. “Watch this,” he said, with a hint of arrogance.
I looked down. Below us was a gigantic red star, at the very end of its life. The star burned hot, turning redder and redder until it suddenly exploded into a bright white supernova. The supernova shone outward with its incredible brilliance, beaming in a circle until the star began spiraling inward, turning into a small white neutron star. It glowed with a miniature light that was pale in comparison to the beaming supernova it had just been.
I was speechless. I couldn’t believe I’d just observed the collapse of astar. Those took millions of years, and I’d seen it all in a matter of seconds. Like death, time didn’t mean anything in the spiritual plane.
“Cool, right?” Uncle Ezra prodded. “I’ve seen like, dozens of them.”
