The underworld was teasing him. He gave up seeking the light, in order to not give the underworld the satisfaction of torturing him with the allure of returning to his afterlife.
He never thought he would ever love seeing the flaming skies again, but there it was in all its beauty trembling above him. Solid ground beneath him, thousands of heads surrounded him and an angel held his head in her lap. He reached for his neck. It was still attached to his spirit, and there was no wound on his throat that he could feel. It was as if he had never burned.
“What the hell happened?” he asked her. “I thought I was—”
“You were,” she said. “I let you burn.” She held up an empty calabash. “This was the last of the bushel. Thought I’d hold on to it. And it looks like it was meant for you all along.”
“What do you mean?”
“You gave me one of these thinking it was poison, but it’s just regular old fruit. Except when it comes in contact with the Nothing. Then things get a little strange. I wasn’t entirely sure about why I survived the Nothing in Yomi until I gave the calabash to Cottontail in the temple. She came back too. If you had waited—”
“Came back?” he said.
“From Nothing. Like you just did.”
He sat up. “She’s alive?”
“Still dead, but a lot less burned. She’s waiting back at the temple. Your bullet wound is gone too.”
Cross touched his forehead. The once soft spot was hard now. “So, you came back for me? I knew you weren’t bad, Raven.”
“But I am a better actor.”
“This was all an act? You didn’t mean that stuff earlier about us deserving to be here?”
“Oh, I meant that part.” She sipped from her flask.
The liquid smelled sweet, almost like calabash juice.
“But we’re all screwed up,” she continued. “Nobody’s perfect and never will be. If I can’t allow others the possibility to redeem themselves, then I don’t deserve redemption myself. Everyone deserves a second chance.”
“Why’d you let me burn though?” he asked. “If you knew how the calabash worked, you could have just told me.”
“Well, you know me. I’m not much of a talker,” she smiled. “But some things can’t be explained. You have to experience them. I needed to show you exactly what happened to me, but in a controlled way. And I didn’t want to burn you myself.”
“I’ve heard of long cons before,” said Cross, “but this is ridiculous. I’m getting tired of you putting my neck on the line.”
“You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But, you know what all this means? Second death, just like first death, isn’t so permanent after all. If we can get more calabashes from Bolon-Hunahpu we might be able to defeat the Nothing. Now I understand what must be done.” She stood him up.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked.
“It’s what you’re gonna do.” She slapped the jingling astrolabe into his palm and waved her hand dismissively. “You’re gonna leave.”
He glanced into the pit at the Toran and then back at the Raven. “I’m not leaving.”
“What do you mean, you’re not leaving? You came all this way. You have to.”
“I’m not going anywhere without Cottontail. I’m not leaving her or anyone else behind again.” He stepped away from her and headed in the direction of the temple. Her hand grabbed his arm.
“I don’t know what you saw or heard when we were in Yomi,” she said, “but the Nothing showed me things. It spoke to me. It told me that you had to go. It had to be you. You would bring about the Resurrection of the Dead.”
“Load of bosh,” he said. “Why are you even listening to that thing?”
“Because it told me something else.” She fell silent and turned her wings to him.
“Forget the Nothing,” he said. “Forget it all. You want to know what it told me? It told me to shepherd the girl. That I had to save you. But if Clem Balfour hadn’t shown up in that boat, I was going to burn you. Which I’m now very sorry for by the way.”
“Well, I tried to burn you first.” She faced him again. “And I apologize for my part.”
“Thanks,” said Cross. Her apology meant more to him that he thought it would. A sudden ease flowed through him a like cool breeze in the hottest realm of the underworld. “But don’t you see?” he said. “I didn’t listen to the Nothing, and we’re fine. You don’t have to follow its orders.”
“That’s the thing,” said the Raven. “I think you did exactly what it wanted you to do. If Clem Balfour hadn’t shown up, you would have burned me. But you didn’t. You shepherded me to Vingólf.”
“But it said that if I Shepherded the girl then I would burn and become a Nothing myself,” said Cross.
“And five minutes ago, that’s exactly what happened.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Cross. “A while ago you were talking about destroying the damn thing. Now you want to work for it? What the hell did the Nothing say to you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m do it’s bidding now so I can destroy it later. We’re all just trying to survive. You know all about that. I’m just not sure if either of us ever had a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Every decision I make is my own.” He slapped his chest.
She shook her head as if frustrated. “I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe. You’re always going on about how the Great Goddess is guiding you.”
“That’s just me talking,” he said. “I don’t know what the Hell she’s doing. I hope she’s paying attention. Sometimes it feels like she is, but I can never know for sure. But having faith doesn’t automatically mean you give up your own free will or your ability to think for yourself. My old friend Sinuhe used to say, ‘Experience will show you, a Master can only point the way’.”
The Raven stared him directly in the eye. “So, you don’t believe in destiny?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I believe we’re all on a particular path at any given moment. And that destination changes with every choice we make.”
“Well, you tell me where this leads.” She gripped his shirt with one hand. “The Nothing told me personally that an adversary would become a true friend. And then I would have my final fall.”
“So we’re friends now?” Cross smiled. “I just wanna make sure because I never know with you. You’re hot. You’re cold. It can get a little confusing.”
She stared at him cold, blank and icy, just like when they had first met.
He grew serious to match her demeanor. “Well, my friend, I ain’t got no plans to take you down again,” he assured her. “You didn’t go through all the trouble of bringing me back from Nothing just to be afraid that I was going to burn you. And it’s not like Ropey would allow anyone else to get close enough to you. You just burned the toughest demon I ever knew. I don’t see any soul taking you out anytime soon.”
She released her grip on his shirt. “That’s what I thought it meant at first too.” She slipped off one of her boots and pulled out a roll of vellum. She held it in front of him. “Take this. After you pass through the Toran, you’ll have to inform the Mal’aKim of this gate.”
“What the hell is a Mal’aKim?”
“Angels.” She took a breath. “My true name is…Muriel.”
The roll of her tongue along the ‘r’ sound and the hard ending of ‘el’ flowed from her lips like a melody. He opened his mouth to speak his true name but his voice failed to come through.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s probably best that I don’t know yours.”
“Charles,” he said. “Charles Hill. Friends called me Charlie.” She was the first soul he had told his true name to in more than five hundred years. Releasing the name from his lips left him feeling vulnerable, yet more open to receive the world. He gained new strength in his resolve. He stood straighter and lighter on his feet.
The Raven handed him the vellum. It was one of his wanted posters th
at the squals had made. “I’ve written an evocation spell on the back,” she said. “It’ll summon an old friend of mine.”
“Since when do you know about things outside the underworld?”
“Since I drank from the calabash,” she said. “It took a while, but all my memories came flooding back. You returned this precious gift to me, and now you have to go and tell the Mal’aKim about what’s happened here. Tell them about the Nothing and how it’s spreading.”
Hundreds of thoughts passed through his head, and a funny feeling bubbled inside his stomach. Earlier he had come to terms with his fate of second death. Now he had only a minor interest in leaving the underworld and a stronger desire to stay with Cottontail and the Raven. They were the closest thing he had to a family in a very long time. He wasn’t ready to give that up.
“There’s nothing really out there for me,” he said. “Everyone I knew and cared about is dead and gone by now.”
She bent down and pulled the obsidian blade out of the ground and sheathed it into the holster across his back. For a moment she peered into his eyes, longingly as if sending him away wore heavy on her heart.
“Come with me,” he said. “Don’t stay here. You, me and Cottontail can go together.”
“There’s only one ticket. And from what I remember about the astrolabe, only one soul can use it at a time.”
“No, I mean we should give the astrolabe to Cottontail first. She can find a way to send it back to us. You’ll go next. Warn your Angel friends. And then I’ll go.”
“The other spirits won’t stop coming for your head.”
“Let ‘em come. I’m not running anymore.”
The Raven took the astrolabe from his hand and draped it around his neck. The plates and arms on the astrolabe spun wildly as if the mere act of him wearing it activated it. A pillar of green light shot out the Toran and punctured a hole in the flaming sky; the sky rippled and swelled like a lake that a boulder had fallen into.
“Sinuhe was right.” The Raven raised her voice over the rising wind. “The Toran is for you. It’s your destiny.”
“How do you know about that?” he yelled over the roaring underworld.
“Long story.”
“I don’t care about any stupid destiny! I’m not leaving Cottontail. Or you.”
“I’ll take good care of Cottontail. For once, it’s okay to be your self-centered, egocentric, and greedy self. You have this amazing opportunity. Don’t you want to finally be free of this place?”
Of course he did. More than anything. But Cottontail deserved to leave more than any soul he had ever met.
“With the things I’ve done in my life,” he said, “your Angel friends are just gonna send me back here anyway. I’d be of no use to them after I tell them what I know.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The Nothing said after my second fall, that a true friend would leave and that I should watch for that friend’s return.”
“But you’re still standing,” said Cross. “You haven’t fallen. Stop listening to the Nothing. It lies.”
“Not about this.” She wrenched his shirt and planted her lips on his.
The kiss caught him by such a surprise that he allowed it to go on without his input for a while before he kissed her back. Their union overpowered the gusting wind. Not even the Inferno exploding for a third time affected them. The ground shook, but they did not fall. Lightning struck around them but did not move them. Neither of them was afraid of the underworlds wrath. They defied its vengeance and discovered paradise in the midst of its rage.
The Raven embraced him and whispered into his ear: “We have work to do.” She shoved him away from her and kicked him hard in the stomach.
He fell backwards into the green pit, flailing. He tumbled for much longer than he should have. The green light swallowed him, engulfed him with a great whoosh, and caressed him. It molded him and shaped him.
Without any pain, his body stretched and became stringy until he snapped in two. His spirit and soul separated. He was in two places at once and the two entities that were him shattered. Orbs swirled all around him. The orbs were him, and as the orbs, he was larger than every underworld put together, larger than Earth or any planet, larger than the cosmos itself. All the pieces of him banged back together like enormous billiard balls, but with a silent crack.
Lights streamed past him. He had the sense that he was flying. He didn’t feel any wind brush his skin. Did he even have skin? He couldn’t see himself. What he could see was flickering stars as he soared through the cosmos.
It all struck him as familiar. He had made this journey before. Somehow he had forgotten about it, which was odd because he was the one soul that remembered everything. Between the moment Kate had shot him and when he arrived on the Charon, he had left earth and flew through the Heavens just as he was doing now.
A blue orb grew bigger as he drew closer to it. White blobs drifted along the orb’s surface. They were clouds. They floated over the blue and brown areas, which were oceans and continents. The orb resembled the globe of the world that Mr. Carson owned in his study except more colorful and wondrous.
This must be how God sees the Earth. It was the most beautiful sight. He wished Cottontail could have seen it.
Earth enveloped him. He zoomed through the clouds, heading straight towards a world he hadn’t seen in more than five hundred years.
Son of a bitch. Here we go again.
As soon as he set foot on solid ground, he would follow the Raven’s instructions and warn the damn Angels about the Nothing. Then, if necessary, he would resurrect the dead to free the Raven and Cottontail.
Rest in peace, my ass.
I spin in my office chair, ride shopping carts down the aisle, and tell lies for a living. In that order. I'm an author of fantasy novels, living in Baltimore, MD who believes magic should always be magical because it's, well, magic.
On the Internets I go by "mlmjr" (my initials).
mlmjr.com
about.me/mlmjr
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#BurnInHades
Table of Contents
Copyright
Map
Title Page
Chapter 1 - Cottontail
Chapter 2 - King Cross
Chapter 3 - Ebony Bird
Chapter 4 - The Man Who Remembers
Chapter 5 - Diamond Tooth
Chapter 6 - A Cross to Bear
Chapter 7 - Soul Mates
Chapter 8 - Labor Vincit Omnia
Chapter 9 - The Peacemaker
Chapter 10 - Lost and Found
Chapter 11 - Midnight Dreary
Chapter 12 - Crux Ordinaria
Chapter 13 - Through a Glass, Darkly
Chapter 14 - Trials & the Tribulation
Chapter 15 - Chasing the Most High
Chapter 16 - Revelation of Charles Hill
Chapter 17 - Last Chants
Chapter 18 - Grum
Chapter 19 - The Dreameater
Chapter 20 - A Match Made In Naraka
Chapter 21 - The Saviors of Jnana Yoga Ladder
Chapter 22 - Burning Bush
Chapter 23 - The One Who Forgot
Chapter 24 - Veritatis Splendor
About the Author
BURN IN HADES Page 35