“Tae… What are we doing here?”
“Hold on. Can you see them?” he asked, pressing Thieron’s blade against my forearm again. I sucked in a breath. Reapers appeared, one by one. There were hundreds of them, clad in long black leather tunics with white collars, their hair long and braided back with blue silk threads. They moved weightlessly around, raising spirits from the catastrophe’s remains and using their scythes to reap them.
“Oh, wow…” I managed.
The millions of people Taeral had mentioned. Many were still here, gradually sent into the world of the dead by the hundreds of Reapers that had been dispatched to this planet.
“They can’t see us,” Taeral said, “but we should keep our voices down. Just in case.”
I frowned at him, and he gave me an innocent shrug. “I’m not sure how good my stealth skills are with Thieron. I’ve never kept myself and someone else hidden from so many Reapers at once.”
This all had a specific purpose, so I didn’t ask him again about our presence here. It was all leading somewhere, so I pressed my lips into a tight line and allowed Taeral to guide me down the ridge and across the desert, our boots barely touching the crimson sand.
We moved past Reapers who were busy pulling souls from the rubble, telling them what had happened and explaining that they were dead. My heart broke all over again whenever I heard the people sobbing as they realized that this was the end. That their lives had been snuffed out by a single wandering object that had made its way into their world.
In the blink of an eye, it had all been obliterated. I was witnessing something I had never dealt with before. This large-scale tragedy was quite difficult to stomach, but I focused on what laid ahead—the purpose of our visit here.
Eventually, we reached the edge of the desert, where the earth broke and sank deeper, lava lakes glowing from below. Farther down from where we stood, I could see a Reaper with long black hair and piercing galaxy eyes helping the soul of a male creature out of the smoldering lava.
Moving closer toward him, I noticed that the Reaper kept looking around, perhaps hoping that no one would see him. His features were beautiful, almost ethereal, his skin pale and the blade of his noise perfectly straight. His lips were full and pearlescent. He was tall and well built, though not at all bulky. His frame was imposing, though his Reaper eyes were more intimidating than his physique. “What is your name?” he asked the soul.
“Bym,” the soul replied. “What… What happened?”
“I’m afraid the worst thing possible happened, Bym,” the Reaper said. “The death of the planet. The death of all of you. I’m sorry.”
The soul blinked several times, staring at his semi-transparent limbs and wiggling his fingers, as if just to make sure he still had them or felt them. The look on his face didn’t confirm or deny that sensation, but he was definitely curious. “Who are you?” Bym asked.
“I’m a Reaper. What were you doing in a prison?”
Taeral and I listened carefully, both of us intrigued by the question. Bym wasn’t that shocked, though, so there was truth in the Reaper’s words, for sure. “I… I was locked up.”
“For what?” the Reaper asked, occasionally glancing over his shoulder. The other Reapers were far away, moving deeper into the red desert. The air rippled above it from the heat. Thunder boomed in the distance—only it wasn’t thunder but cracks deepening into the planet’s surface, breaking and tearing and destroying whatever was left of this once-civilized world.
Bym lowered his gaze, saddened by his own fate. “For killing…”
“That’s Sidyan,” Taeral whispered. “One of the Reapers from the Calliope sanctuary. Not a bad fella. But he captured my interest a few months back. He’s the one I want you to meet.”
“Why did he capture your interest?” I murmured.
“Hold on. Give him a minute,” Taeral replied, a smile testing his lips.
“Killing who, exactly?” Sidyan asked Bym.
“Does it matter? I’m dead,” Bym said, sullen and grave and not at all happy with this ending.
“It matters to me,” Sidyan replied.
“Will it change where you take me? What is there beyond death? What will happen to me?”
“It depends entirely on your honesty, Bym. So, tell me… Who did you kill?” Sidyan insisted, his tone cold and flat. He definitely wasn’t playing around.
After a short hesitation, Bym sighed deeply. “My sister. Her friend. Her friend’s friend. My aunt. My mother…”
Bile rose up in my throat. I already loathed him. But what more could be done, given how he’d died here? Sidyan took a deep breath, unrelenting in his questioning. “Why did you kill them, Bym? Did you kill them all at once?”
Bym shook his head. “I took my time. I… I… Does it really matter?”
Sidyan touched him with his scythe. As soon as the blade made contact with Bym’s shoulder, the wretched soul bared it all as if the time of his confession was running out, and he needed, he desperately needed to tell it all.
“I reveled in each kill. It started with my sister, years ago, because I was curious what it would be like to take a life,” Bym said. “I loved it. I loved watching the life drain from her eyes. Knowing that I had that power. A month later, I took her friend. I took advantage of her grieving, and I slit her throat, slowly. Then another girl, and another… One day, I was itching for another kill. I’d gotten away with so many. I was so strong, so powerful… I don’t know what happened. My mother said something… something that upset me, and I killed her, too.”
“How were you caught?” Sidyan asked quietly, watching the other Reapers, a muscle ticking in his sharp jaw.
“My father walked in. Killing my mother had not been planned. It was impulse. Pure impulse. I lost control, I wasn’t careful.”
“Do you regret murdering any of them?”
Bym shook his head. “No. I would do it all over again if I could. When the earth started shaking, I thought this was my chance to escape, so I could keep slitting throats and feeding on the cries of these women begging for my mercy.” He gasped, his eyes wide with shock. “Why am I telling you all this?!”
“Because I made you tell the truth,” Sidyan said. “Come now, Bym. It’s time for you to move on,” he added, putting an arm around the spirit’s shoulders.
“Where… Where are we going?” Bym asked. “Is there a hell? Am I going to hell?”
It didn’t come as a surprise that other civilizations believed in afterlife punishment for their deeds. The Eritopians had similar faiths, as did some of the Nerakians and inhabitants of other planets I’d visited before the Exiled Maras had trapped me. It was a recurring idea across the In-Between that our actions were punishable by superior forces, one way or another.
The pixies, my species, believed that the universe gave back what you put into it. If you murdered, you would lose someone to murder, if not your own life. If you lied, then someone would lie to you, and so on. I remembered Amelia mentioning the earthly concept of karma, which was eerily similar to ours.
“What is beyond death cannot be quantified in such terms,” Sidyan said to Bym. “The universe does not sit in judgment of the living.”