Ahead, a valley opened up, surrounded by massive limestone mountains with sharp ridges and rich green woods. A river flowed from it and cut through the middle of the tall grass plain. Horse-like animals trotted alongside the water, their long manes black and silver. I was hypnotized by their beauty, muscles twitching beneath milky white skin as they burst into a gallop and fled from Death and the World Crusher’s presence.
“She showed me everything. Every world that had been made. Every mountain and every cave. Every body of water. The woods. The deserts. The endless beaches of gold or white or black sand. Some beaches had pink sands. I saw the jungles and the flowering orchards. The sweet water streams and coppery fishes jumping and swimming against their currents. It was so beautiful. Everything around me was beautiful, and I did not wish for it to end. An ending meant the return to nothingness, and I knew I would never go back there,” I read, feeling the fear of such a finale.
“Death promised she would never send me away from this realm. We walked a fine line between life and the physical demise of things. Beyond our world, Purgatory and the Afterlife awaited, each governed by their own forces and elements of pure power. Aside from our world, the Word’s domain had captured my attention. The land of the living. The home of beating hearts and wandering souls. Yes, I loved it all.”
I sucked in a breath and forced myself to look away, desperately searching for the feel of paper against my fingertips. “Tristan,” I called out and felt his arm tightening around my waist, his body against mine. I could not see him, but I knew he was there.
“Tristan,” I breathed, thankful to have something to hold on to.
Closing my eyes, I gave everything a minute to just… fade away.
Once I was ready, I opened them and found myself on the hovering lectern with its black marble finish, the black leather tome splayed beneath my palms, the World Crusher’s writing etched across the white pages.
The Ghoul Reapers were breathless and staring at me, but I had returned from whatever haze I’d stumbled into, my husband beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked, and I nodded slowly, tearing up as I realized how much I had already experienced through only a few pages of the World Crusher’s life.
“She has lied so much,” I managed, resting my head on his shoulder as I allowed myself to cry for a few moments. “I’m tired of it, Tristan. I want to know everything the World Crusher went through. I want truth and light. No more darkness and misery. No more.”
“And you’ll get that and more, I promise,” Tristan said, stroking my hair. “Just… just take it easy, my love. I feel it, too, remember? You’ve connected us both to the World Crusher’s tome.”
I let out a heavy sigh. “I can’t stop now. You realize that, right?” I asked. “Now that I’ve started reading… I must see this through to the end.”
“I’ll be right here with you.”
Eneas cleared his throat. I looked at him and found the Ghoul Reapers lounging on white marble chaises against the eastern wall of the temple, the nocturnal winds blowing through the wide-open doors. Outside, the moon’s milky white light covered everything in pearl dust. “Unlike us, you’re fortunate to be a First Tenner. You’re strong enough to resist her fury. We weren’t as lucky,” the Ghoul Reapers’ leader said.
“I’m truly sorry you suffered like this,” I said.
The faint smile that fluttered across his lips told me he knew I’d meant it. The World Crusher had been locked down here for too long. I needed to understand why. I hoped Death had been justified in making such a difficult decision. My five million years on Visio had been raw hell, yet I only had an inkling of how it must have felt for her here, doomed to an eternity between the pages of an old book, where her only solace was writing the tales of her existence.
Death’s secrecy and dishonesty had angered me beyond repair. But even now, I struggled to find reason in her endeavors. This had to make sense. It had to.
Unending
The more I read through the World Crusher’s pages, the stranger reality felt, like a foreign dimension I no longer belonged to. This Reaper’s emotions were intensely conflicted as she existed alongside Death, learning the values of a beginning and an end, of all the realms that made up the vast universe, and of the forces that governed each plane.
Because she had not even had the impression of a life before, the World Crusher didn’t understand some aspects of existence. There was no empathy for the living in her mind, and so the loss of someone’s beloved left her cold and uncaring. It ultimately affected how she engaged with the living. She was also developing a problem with authority, increasingly displeased with how she was told to handle certain things in her developing job as a Reaper. As the years went by, she stayed by Death’s side, watching souls being reaped and sent to Purgatory for judgment and the eventual Afterlife. Time did not exist beyond this realm. It was the one thing that made sense to World, because there was no time where she’d come from, either.
“I listened carefully to every word that Death said to me,” the World Crusher wrote in her sigil book. “I learned from her actions, and I worshipped her like a mother and a goddess. I didn’t always agree with her, and at times I went against her. But in the end, she prevailed, one way or another, though usually through thoughtful argument, not
