Mostly, she remembered to keep far enough away so that some absentminded whiff of soulmist could not stray out at him. But occasionally other passions distracted her from that end; she seemed to have forgiven the light for whatever crime it had committed and enjoyed pausing to glance at it. With her anger hastily tucked behind a thin veil of anticipation, she became peculiarly amiable. She smiled at Laszlo and his sobering questions.
“You cannot go forward from the end, tikita.” The word, which meant warm-blooded, was spoken against foreigners in the North, where it demeaned anyone whose flesh was not blessed by the Snow Queen, Morwen. Compared to the ice-chill of her non-body, everyone was tikita; Chaeli did not use the term cruelly, yet. “Unless your end means different from the Vani end, then there is nothing after. But this is not the end. Would I be here, if the end has come?”
She had been floating backward in front of him, using the bend of the gloam-lit walls around him to hint at the way. At an unexpected turn, her ethereal outline dissolved into the wall behind her, enveloping her sight with solid darkness. She shrieked and lurched forward, casting herself far too close to the man on the other side. Mumbling an apology, Chaeli escaped quickly into the corridor beyond. The path had been descending from the start, but there the slope began to near on treacherous. Fortunately, the walls and ceiling sank inward, narrowing the passage and giving a groping hand a closer hold, should a body fall. Spurred by mortification and undaunted by physical obstacles, the ghost raced forward into the darkness.
Even without her, the path would lead Laszlo easily, without turns. In fact, moving further downward would even render the little rock in his hand useless. An identical glow soon illuminated the moist rocks with a slick, eerie shine, growing quickly in strength. Only a few more steps, and the tight hall would burst into a large room of stark air and bright light. Giant towers of unmined opalgloam rose above the height of even the tallest symenestra, rough crystals throwing their radiance in all directions. Chaeli sat among them, where most could not climb, the gray blemish of her form almost entirely eaten out of sight by the light that surrounded her.
As soon as she thought she heard the first hint of his arrival, she began to speak with unmistakable pride painted on her tongue, “I do not know the way out, but I have found the way to beauty. Can you see? It’s almost like the aurora. People think living is only in the body. Anyone who sees the aurora knows better. Anyone who sees me can learn better.”