Death

The Declaration of Innocence That Seems Rather Dated

"Declare your innocence before the gods of the tribunal."

I opened my eyes, and I was sitting on a chair, my feet padlocked to the legs. All around me, in an auditorium-type way, a multitude of men and women sat, glaring at me. I looked at their faces, all of them, and recognized them as pictures from my wall. Fiery Eyes was among them, and I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn't look at me.

I looked down to see a book on my lap. It was worn and torn.

The voice who had first awoken me spoke again. "Declare your innocence before the gods of the tribunal. Recite first the Declaration of Innocence, and then proceed to the second part of the 125th spell," he said.

I looked around, but none of the people were speaking. Who was ordering me around? I decided to comply, because for some reason I hadn't died a fiery death, and opened the book, searching for Spell 125. Sure enough, when I found it, it was the Declaration of Innocence.

"Um, hail to you, great god, Lord of Justice," I began, looking in horror at the long spell that I had to read. "Wait, what is this? If Fiery Eyes is here, then... the tribunal... am I dead?" I asked.

"Declare your innocence before the tribunal," the voice said again. I shook my head.

"Answer me! Am I dead?" I asked.

The voice spoke again, in a long-suffering tone. "You are dead, yes. Because of your status as demi-human, you have been allowed to skip many of the trials in the Land of the Dead. The Egyptian gods will try you first, and you will then go on to the others. We haven't tried anyone in a very long time, because they usually get stuck somewhere along the other gods' routes, and there they stay." He seemed angry, and once again, did not match my expectations. Frankly, he was kind of whiny. I was dead! So what if he didn't get to try much!

I looked through the rest of the spell. "I'm not reading this!" I exclaimed, my finger on one of the declarations.

O You of the cavern who came forth from the West, I have not been sullen.

"Since when is being sullen a crime? I demand that you bring me back to life right now! If you jokers hadn't sucked me down into the Underworld, I would be just fine right now! So maybe you should be tried, not me!" I shouted, my anger rising.

"You want me to say that I haven't eavesdropped, I haven't babbled, I haven't committed homosexuality? What in the Underworld is this? It's way too nuts! You want me to say that I haven't waded in water? Well, news flash, I have! And homosexuality isn't a crime anymore, Wememty-snake!" I shrieked, my voice getting higher and higher.

"It's actually Wememty-snake who came forth from the place of execution," said a thin, reedy voice from the corner of the auditorium. I whipped my head around to glare at him.

"Let me out of here!" I demanded, crossing my arms and tapping my foot on the chair leg it was padlocked to. The voice sounded irritated when next it spoke.

"Mortician, you are dead. We cannot let you out."

I slumped. Dead? How could that have happened. All I did was blow a hole in the roof. All I wanted to do was win the war of the dead against their mysterious enemy so that I could go home. These Egyptian reapers were blocking my way there. Not death, them. I knew that there had to be some way for me to be brought back to life, but they weren't telling me. It was time to see if they were afraid of the dark.

I closed my eyes and breathed in, remembering the shadows of the other dimension, the ones that had almost forced me to cover the world with darkness. I had nothing left to lose, absolutely nothing.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing in the dark space in my mind. The false version of myself wasn't there, though. Instead, I was looking at my reflection in a room with thousands of mirrors that I couldn't actually see, and my reflections moved with me. "Hello?" I called. There was no answer. "I want to be brought back to life," I shouted.

One of the mirrors undulated and swam with a dark light. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it was absolutely gleaming with a violet light. Then, a face appeared. Not my own, but the face of a girl with purple eyes and black hair and pale skin. Her jaw was angular, and she had an elfin beauty about her.

"You want to be brought back to life?" she asked, and her voice was like bells.

"Yes," I said, "but who are you?"

She smirked. "Don't you recognize me? I'm the piece of the dead demi-human that lives in your mind. This is what I actually look like," she said, stepping out of the mirror completely and doing a twirl. When she did, all of the mirrors shattered into thousands of pieces, the shards smoking away into the darkness.

"Why are you yourself now?" I asked. There was no sense of urgency. I could be resurrected, that I knew.

"Well, when you died, I was freed from one of my prisons. I no longer have to help you. But the other prison, your mind, is still here, which it shouldn't be. Demi-humans don't go through the trials of the dead. They dissolve into nothingness and split into several consciousnesses, like me. I'm a consciousness. So why haven't you done that? Answer: you're not dead."

I swallowed hard. "Why aren't I dead, then?"

"I don't know," she said, shrugging. I sighed.

"Thanks anyway. So, if I'm alive, how do I get out of these trials?" I asked.

Run.