Balance (The Divine, Book One) Read Online Free

Me.
Right. "What it meant was that she was Aware. Not on a conscious level at
first, but Aware just the same. She could exert her will upon Purgatory itself,
and it bent in response. She didn't want to be nude, and so she wasn't."
    I
looked down at the clothes I was wearing. "Mr. Ross said I had made
this," I told him, waving my hand at the room.
    "That
is somewhat true,” he said. “But not completely. Everyone who dies experiences
Purgatory in a different way. It has no specific shape or form, but rather is
consumed by each individual according to what they believe it will be. For me,
this place is typical to 14th Century Italy. The others here are peasants,
merchants, and farmers. In my mind you would normally be a knight, however your
will has changed this place to something you are more familiar with. While you
are here I am a CEO, sitting in the penthouse of a modern skyscraper. You have
made this my reality. If you went outside the people around you would find
themselves in this city you have created, and many would suffer some level of
disorientation before they would be able to adjust to the change."
    I
looked out at the city again with new eyes. This was all a figment of my
imagination? "How far does it reach?"
    He
shook his head. "There is really no way to know. It could be all of
Purgatory has changed because you are here. Most of the inhabitants here will
not remember the change once you have gone."
    I
wanted to test this. I wanted to have some proof that what I was hearing was
true, to see what Dante saw. I wanted to be in his world. I tried to picture a
medieval castle, a throne, and a large timber table. Nothing happened.
    "You
don't have control of it," Dante said, as if he had been reading my mind. "Not
yet. Your mind created this because it was familiar. It will hold onto it
tightly until you can convince it that it doesn't have to."
    "I
feel like Neo," I said.
    "Hardly,"
Dante replied.
    Something
was nagging at me. Something he had said before I tried to turn this place into
Camelot. "Once I've gone? Isn't Purgatory, you know… forever?"
    "No,"
Dante said. "Purgatory is never forever, unless you choose it to be. It is
where the souls who have not chosen a side or who have not earned a place in either
Heaven or Hell are sent until such a time as they do. Time is not observed the
same way here, so such endeavors can take many hundreds, if not thousands of
Earth years. And yes, you will leave this place if you choose to accept who and
what you are."
    There
it was again. "Who and what am I?"
    "You
are a diuscrucis, a crossbreed of angel and demon. Not directly of course, but
somewhere in your lineage, buried deep within your roots. The blood of the
creatures of dark and the creatures of light flows through your veins.
Moreover, the balance of this mixture is precise, or you would not be here now.
Almost all diuscrucis are inherently good or inherently evil, depending on
which side is more dominant. But you... You are a perfect balance of every
variable in the equation. The odds are so infinitesimally small, that it has
happened twice in a millennia is beyond words."
    I was
expecting something grandiose, after all Dante had said there was only one
other like me that he had ever met. This went beyond grandiose though. This
went deep into impossible. You would think a guy would know if his grandma were
Satan's handmaiden. If my day had gone any differently, I would never have
believed it. I did though. There was something telling me that I should.
    Dante
had read my expression, and he watched me curiously as I worked through
acceptance of my family tree. "You would know if I was lying Landon," he said. "That is one of the traits you inherited from your
good side. It is what allows me to tell you all of this, and know that you will
accept it and believe it."
    I did
know he was telling me the truth. "If that side helps me to recognize
lies, does the other make me better at telling them?"
    It
was part of the