The water beneath us gives way. I drop into the depths, and my head submerges. The world fills with the sound of being underwater. For an instant, I’m blind in the darkness, and I reach out instinctively for Magiano. For Raffaele. For Maeve and Lucent. I find nothing. The silhouettes of enormous creatures glide around me in a circle. As I continue to sink, I get a glimpse of one of the creatures’ faces.
Eyeless, finned, monstrous, fanged. I open my mouth to scream, but only bubbles emerge. I can’t breathe. The energy of the Underworld pulls me down, tugging hard on my chest, and I have no choice but to follow it.
One of the creatures glides close to my face. It is Caldora herself, the angel of Fury. She opens her jaws at me, and a low, haunting echo reverberates through the water. Even though I can’t see the others, I can feel their presence. I am not alone here.
Follow me, Caldora’s thoughts say, penetrating my mind. She turns away, and her long, scaly tail makes a loop in the water. I swim deeper and deeper with her.
Follow me, follow me. Caldora’s hiss becomes a rhythm in the water. Her voice blends with my own whispers, forming an eerie harmony. The water turns blacker and blacker, until the pressure builds and I can no longer see anything, not even Caldora swimming ahead of me, not even the silhouettes of other creatures haunting the waters. It is just deep, black, endless space, in all directions, until eternity.
I sink into the realm of Death.
How noble it must be, the pain of Moritas,
to stand guardian forever to silent souls,
to judge a life and choose to take it.
—Life and Death and Rebirth, by Scholar Garun
Adelina Amouteru
I don’t remember what happens, or how I arrive. All I know is that I am here, standing on the shore of a flat, gray land, its edges lined by the quiet, unmoving surface of the Underworld’s ocean. It is still as a pond.
I look up. Where the sky should be, there is instead the ocean, as if I were standing upside down on the sky and looking down at it.
I turn to face inland. Everything is painted in the same muted tone of gray. The pulse of death beats all around me, the silence ringing rhythmically in my ears. I find myself staring at a flat landscape littered with thousands, millions, countless numbers of towering glass pillars. The pillars are iridescent and white.
Each one is in the shape of a quartz and the color of moonstone, evenly spaced from the next, forming perfect rows that extend outward to the horizon and then tower high up into oblivion. Each pillar seems to shine with a faint silver-white light, a hue that sets it sharply apart from the uniform gray in the rest of this place. As I draw nearer to the first pillar, I see something inside it, suspended in the space of the stone. It is hard to make out the shape, although it seems long and blurred. I step up to the pillar and press one hand against it.
There is a man inside.
My hand jerks away as if the pillar were ice cold—I jump backward. The man’s eyes are closed, and his expression is peaceful. Something about his face seems timeless, frozen forever in the prime of his life. I study him a while longer.
This is his soul, I suddenly realize.
I turn away from him and look around at the pillars stretching as far as I can see. Each of these pillars is the final resting place of a soul from the mortal world, the remnants of that person long after flesh and bone have been reclaimed by the land. This is the library of Moritas, all who have ever existed.
My hands start to tremble. If this is where all the souls of the dead reside, then this is also where I will find my sister.
I look around me, searching for the others. It takes me a long moment to notice the beam of light illuminating my body, as if marking me as a moment of life in this world of the deceased. Four other beams are scattered in the midst of this maze of lustrous pillars, their glow distinct against the backdrop of silver and gray. They seem very far away, each of us separated from the others by what seems like an infinite amount of space.
Everyone enters the realm of Death alone.
Across this eerie landscape comes a whisper. It permeates every empty space around me, echoing up to the ocean in the sky. There is a darkness creeping forward, something greater than anything I have ever seen, a black cloud stretching from the heavens to the sea. It roils onward.
Adelina.
It is Moritas, the goddess of Death. I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this is her voice.
You have come to bargain with me, Adelina.
“Yes,” I answer in a whisper. “I’ve come—we’ve all come—to heal the tear between your world and ours.”
Yes, the others. The cloud towers before me. Your immortal energy has been missing from our realm for a long time.
My powers, I start to say, but the words falter on my tongue. Even now—even after coming all this way. The whispers in my head churn, angry that I would consider giving them up.
Step forward, Adelina, Moritas commands.
I hesitate. The cloud before me is a terrifying tangle of black bruises and curves, shapes of monsters all joined together. Terror freezes my body in place. I have walked through forests at midnight. I have traveled through the darkness of caves. But to step into Death herself . . .
Fear is your sword.
My sword, my strength. I take one step after another. The cloud looms closer, closer still. I take another step, and then I am inside it, consumed whole.
I walk in a land of black mist and silver-white pillars. Within each pearly structure, a person hovers in eternal sleep, and over them I can see a faint reflection of myself peering in, wondering how their mortal life used to be. My heart pounds rhythmically in my chest. I’m grateful to feel it, to know that I am not dead here. A whisper floats through the mist now and then, the voice of Moritas, calling out for me. I follow it, even though I don’t know where she is leading me. I pass one row of pillars after another. Their luminous glow reflects against my skin. I walk until I lose count of how many rows I’ve passed, and when I look over my shoulder in the direction I first came, I can see nothing but rows of these pillars all around.