As I crossed the plaza to the gates of the Sanctuary, my stride grew heavy, every step a chore. My senses retreated, erecting a wall between me and my surroundings. Things kept shifting in my head and clicking into place. These changes felt solid and permanent, like continental plates realigning.
This wasn’t depression. I knew depression. This was simply existence shoving its ugly mug into the fore. This was illusion falling like scales from my eyeballs.
According to Lille, Frelsi’s founders were attempting to shape this place into their common vision of Heaven. But if this was their idea of paradise, I sure didn’t want to see their vision of Hell.
There had to be something better out there. I mean, not all of the afterlife could be this warped. Could it? There had to be something more than the Liminality and the Deeps. A bona fide Heaven must exist, a place without privilege, where every soul could find some rest.
The problem was, no one here seemed to know anything about this other place. But why should they? They didn’t belong. Heaven didn’t want them. The Freesouls may have figured out a way to beat the system here, but that didn’t make them any less ignorant about the real Heaven.
Root was just a way station for suicidal souls—who, as far as I knew, constituted a tiny fraction of the human race. It was some kind of spiritual plumbing, a toilet for flushing those who didn’t deserve the gift of life into the cesspool that was the Deeps.
But where did all the others go, the people who died of more natural causes like murder or calamity or embolisms? People like Dad.
There had to something better, some alternative to the Deeps. I doubt it looked anything like the harp and angel Heaven-in-the-clouds idea of pop culture. But why wouldn’t there be some final resting place for all the well-adjusted, good-hearted souls who make up the majority of our species? And it shouldn’t matter whether or not they followed one faction’s idea of the one true faith. Should it?
I wondered about those ‘Old Ones.’ Maybe it was just some accident of mummified and contracted facial muscle, but every last one I had ever seen looked pretty darned content, even when they lay in the feed trough of a Reaper’s trench. Wherever their souls resided, it couldn’t be too horrible a place, even if it was only inside their own heads.
I reached the end of the queue of Hemis leaving the Sanctuary. Looking at all those hopeful, striving faces, I felt like an atheist at a prayer meeting. How had Frelsi managed to delude all these souls into sacrificing their labors for such a sketchy cause?
Sure they had folks up here who could make you look young and pretty and Weave any object you desired. But did these souls really aspire to spending all of eternity in a gated community of tree houses? Other than the fresh breezes, how was this place any better than Luthersburg?
The sun dipped low, gilding the outer wall and glinting off the roofs of the shanties visible through the gate. Those leaving the Sanctuary with empty packs and carts now outnumbered the crowd waiting to get in. I jostled my way through the weary mob, anxious to leave this nasty place.
My charcoal C had long been reduced to a smudge, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a ticket to exit the Sanctuary. No one cared who left this place.
Despite Mom being here, I would not be coming back anytime soon. Maybe the place would be bearable with Karla, if we had nowhere else to go. I could probably tolerate the fires of Hell with Karla by my side, if there was a Hell and if it had fire.
But there was no guarantee I would ever see her again. A lot depended on what happened with Edmund on the other side. That, I couldn’t bear to think about.
