Mars — the warrior souls

They rise to Mars. The sphere is deep red. A cross of light fills the whole sphere — the arms reach from horizon to horizon. In the cross, souls move like sparks, rising and falling and crossing and flashing. Their song: Dante cannot hear the words clearly, but the melody moves him beyond anything yet experienced.

He stares at the cross, absorbed, forgetting Beatrice briefly. When he looks back at her she is more beautiful than before — proof that they have risen to a higher sphere. He asks forgiveness. Then from the right arm of the cross, a soul descends toward him along the light, like a shooting star across the arm of the cross. It greets him in Latin — in the Latin of the twelfth century, pure and archaic: "O sanguis meus, O superinfusa gratia Dei!" My blood, O grace of God poured out. It is Cacciaguida.