Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
The ghost again whipped her gaze to the door as if spotting something, and her once neutral, somewhat disinterested features seemed to blacken. Her eyes narrowed and the earlier color in her cheeks drained. "You'll have to test it out, I guess." She whirled towards Arielle and cringed. "I... have to dip out for a bit, but I'll be back. Don't get too adventurous while I'm gone, okay? Better if you stay within the house for now."
Before Arielle could intercept her, the ghost whooshed through the front door, disappearing out into the night.
The air, once charged with a heavy, leaden atmosphere, turned weightless, less constricting. Arielle inhaled a whiff of the not-so-stale oxygen and deflated as she exhaled it, still unsure how she could breathe at all.
She had tons of material to process, and not enough answers to satisfy her. This specter knew so much, but only shared at her own pace. Who was she to decide when Arielle was allowed to find out more? It wasn't fair.
"And she knows about Jade." Arielle paced into the living room, to get away from the haunting energy that still plagued her in the entryway, too close to her place of death. "Jade is in... the Soul Realm?"
Did that mean Jade had found peace after her departure? She'd accepted it? Arielle would have expected her to fight, to cling to limbo, to try to communicate with her two best friends and reassure them before moving on. To become one of the ghosts she'd been obsessed with while alive. Yet instead, she'd set the record for figuring out her unfinished business and took off without a care?
It didn't make sense. That wasn't the Jade Arielle had grown to love. Did death change people? Had Jade's loss of life modified her personality somehow?
"Maybe she lied." Arielle spun around to gape at the doorway, imagining the punk-rock specter staring back at her, twirling her hair, her eyes filled with malice, her demeanor nonchalant and uncaring. "But she saw me die, she's been dead a long time, she wants to help me learn... so why would she lie?"
Despite her nefarious-like appearance and her odd words and her ominous attitude, this ghost was helpful. She'd popped up when Arielle had needed her, when she'd first woken in a panic, thinking she'd been dreaming. She'd given some information to digest, and took her time so that Arielle wouldn't drown in knowledge she didn't comprehend. It wouldn't be logical for this being to lie.
And yet Arielle wanted to push her. She wanted more than she could handle, after years of waiting to understand what happens after death. Years of watching her loved ones die and wondering what happened to them afterwards, where they went, if they were still conscious in some other realm.
Now she knew there were other dimensions. "The Void," she said, twisting towards the window, where the ghost had left the curtains slightly parted for her. "The Soul Realm." She vaguely recalled the ghost glossing over the potential of other realms, but Arielle didn't want to over-saturate her brain with all the options. Not yet.
What was the Soul Realm? The ghost had mentioned moving on, recycling; what the heck did that mean?
She lazed over to the window and looked out at the nighttime grounds. Barely any moonlight shone through the overhead leaves, leaving most of the area in a somber obscurity that unsettled Arielle the longer she floated there. A part of her yearned to disobey the specter, to sneak out and explore the spooky forest, tempt her boundaries in its depths. Would her perimeter permit her to stray from the house, from the woods, maybe return to the rest-stop where she'd abandoned her car?
Was her car still there? Could she find the energy to pick up her phone, send messages to her dad, to Stella's grandma, to Jade's mom? To apologize for abandoning them, to beg forgiveness for what her stubbornness had caused?
She snorted. "I couldn't even touch these curtains," she rolled her eyes, "so how would I grab my phone?"
They'd likely already towed her car anyway, returning it to her dad. And her phone had to be in some sealed bag in a locked drawer in FBI headquarters.
She stilled, fixed on the glass in front of her.
The FBI is involved in my death... how eerie is that?
She wondered why such a high-profile agency had its fingers all over her departure from the world. Did they think she'd been murdered? Or was there something else she'd missed? Another element that qualified her as an important investigation that sent FBI agents and paranormal people to look into?
She'd never been fascinating in life. A simple girl, with simple tastes, and a strong will to live despite the constant deaths in her surroundings. What about her disappearance had them so frantic?
"Why me?" Her gaze fluttered to the outdoors again, and she rubbed her upper arms as a glacial shiver skidded from her toes to her temples. "Wait—" she zoned in on the devouring darkness, on the end-of-the-road vibe that seemed to loom outside. "Is that my limit? Is that why I'm freezing right now?"
Spooked, she yanked herself from the drapes and scurried back to the entryway. Hopefully, the ghost would be able to clarify the sinister sensations when she returned from wherever she'd rushed off to.
At least the tremors subsided once away from the window; but replacing them were Arielle's migraine and her stomachache.
"Ugh, I thought physical feelings were supposed to stop?" She massaged her scalp and pressed a hand to her gurgling tummy, grimacing. And as she flipped from the front door and gaped up at the balcony, her agony worsened, doubling, possibly tripling in intensity. "Whoa, what's up with that?"
She couldn't look outside, or upstairs, couldn't dawdle anywhere without some sort of discomfort taking over her. Was she doomed to suffer this much in her ghost-life, and forever?
What she truly needed was to figure out why she'd woken in the Void in the first place. What barred her from entering this infamous Soul Realm? Unfinished business?
"My only unfinished business was not getting answers about the afterlife." She turned from the stairs before her bellyache incapacitated her. "But I have those now. I'm in the afterlife, I'm dead. So... why am I still here?"
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