13. Virgil
VIRGIL
Dante gulps in air as we emerge onto the bog once more, gasping like a fish too long from water. His chest rises and falls with a rhythm his body remembers, even though his lungs are only figments shaped by emotion.
"Here," I say. "Follow me."
He does so without protest or question. We turn a corner, slightly off the path, to where an ancient bench sits half-swallowed by rotted vines and dead flowers.
It's one of the many oddities I've discovered in my explorations through the centuries—remnants of other souls' imaginings, perhaps, or simply the detritus that accumulates in a place built from grief.
"Sit."
Dante follows my command without so much as a glance at the seat. He doesn't worry over his expensive clothing or his dignity. He folds into the furniture, shoulders collapsing inward.
I lower myself beside him, careful to ensure we don't touch at any point. My lack of physical presence, my inability to offer even the simple comfort of a hand on his shoulder, would only unsettle him further.
I've witnessed hundreds of genesis events from souls I've guided through the bog.
They're part of the reason I must, at times, retreat into solitude.
Absorbing the secret shames, the darkest moments, the worst choices of a person's life alongside them, feeling each pain fresh as they relive it, is like approaching a blade and running until it pierces through me. Then withdrawing. Then running again.
But this was different. Painful in the manner of brushing against stinging nettle with the burn only intensifying, continuing to bloom, and ache long after contact.
I cannot decide if it's the content of his genesis that has affected me so, or simply the fact that such events happened to him.
I find myself wishing I could have witnessed a different Michael Dante.
One who had only ever been loved, accepted, embraced.
Of course, ironically, I would never have met such a man.
He wouldn't be here. It's the pain that traps us in this place, after all.
"I had a love in my mortal lifetime as well," I say, addressing the sagging tree before us rather than Dante. I suspect he won't respond well to being studied too directly at present.
Frogs croak their endless chorus. A wind presses the branches of the dying tree downward in a slow bow. Small insects skate across the water's surface near our shoes—my white sneakers untouched, his leather ones caked with mud.
"Did you see him again here?"
I chuckle softly. "Musa never came here. It is perhaps the one true mercy I've received in all my miseries since."
This draws him out of himself. He shifts toward me, almost close enough to touch, and carefully I slide farther away.
He registers this with a frown but doesn't comment.
It isn't distance I wish to create for my own comfort, but for his.
He scrapes a hand back through his dark hair, ruffling it from its usual severity.
"Not everyone comes here?"
"Not those who lived free from most loops. This place—hell—does not exist, Dante."
He sighs, but it emerges tangled with a laugh, and he leans back against the bench more casually.
If I could forget, for a moment, that we sit in a stinking, sulfurous swamp—even if I cannot smell it—in the depths of the very place I'm claiming doesn't exist, and that we're both dead, I might almost believe we were two friends resting after a run through Central Park.
I guided someone once who told me about marathons and training for them.
It seemed a dreadful pastime, and I informed him that the first man to run a marathon, Pheidippides, collapsed and died immediately after.
That had only made the man I guided laugh.
Dante leans slightly closer to me, though not close enough to touch, and I know he's intuited where the boundary lies. "So this bench we sit on doesn't exist?"
"That is a more complicated question."
"I'm glad you've returned to your riddles and nonsense." He chuckles, but something haunted still lingers beneath it. "I thought you might be preparing to preach to me about forgiveness again, or whatever notion has caught your fancy."
"This concept of preaching comes after my time." I lift my face to the gray sky, watching a cluster of gnats swarm and disperse. “In my era, we believed more in the practice of teaching through asking questions.”
"Is that your role, then?" Dante looks almost amused, his eyes glinting with a lightness I didn't think I'd ever witness in them. "To teach me?"
"I fear not. I told you, I am no moral authority. I lived a spiritually impoverished life and am not here by accident. I guide you only because I've traversed this land so many times that I know how to avoid many of the pitfalls. But the journey is yours alone."
Dante stares into my eyes, searching for something hidden there, that ghost of a smile still lingering on his lips. His expression shifts to something slightly more serious. "Did something happen between you and Musa, then? In your lifetime, I mean?"
I laugh, but even to my own ears it sounds mournful. However, after all he’s allowed me to witness of him, I can’t rightfully withhold my own story.
"Musa was my physician. I suffered from chronic illness.
" My gaze drifts to the middle distance.
"But I know how it feels to have the man you love beg you not to do something, and do it anyway. He pleaded with me to remain in Neapolis with him. To stop traveling. To stop writing the Aeneid.” I swallow against the tightness in my throat.
"But I was so hungry for my name to mean something, Dante.
I wanted it to echo through history. Not die quietly alongside my gentle pastoral verses. "
I pause, watching the water insects trace their endless patterns.
"Musa found joy in the smallest moments.
The perfect stew. The first warm sunlight of spring.
The salt-smell of the breeze off the bay.
I died attempting to return to him. Passed on the ship, in fact, the Aeneid imperfect and unfinished.
" I shake my head slowly. "Friends who arrived here later told me that Musa grieved hard for several years, then moved on with his life.
He was revered by his patients while he lived, but forgotten by history. "
"I'm sorry. That's a shame."
"Is it?" I ask, turning back to Dante. "Musa lived a full life. One that didn't trap him in this realm at its end. I think he fared far better than I, with my hunger to leave a mark upon the world. A hunger I've paid for with my soul."
"I suppose I'm the same as you in that."
He isn't—not entirely—but I won't say so and discourage him. Not when color has returned to his face, when his lips have curved upward again. One of the many differences between us is that he can still leave this place.
"When you say hell isn't real, you mean this is all in my mind. Am I correct?" His voice has gone soft as velvet. It reminds me of the younger version of him, wearing ill-fitted clothing and holding a man he loved so deeply he didn't yet know how to name the emotion.
"Yes," I say. "I've found it's better for people to discover that truth on their own."
"But you said the Devil is real?"
I shrink down instinctively, my eyes scanning the leaden sky, then relax when I remember we're probably still too far away for it to matter.
Nonetheless, I drop my voice to a whisper.
"He is. And be mindful of using his name—any of his names—in this place.
Names have power here. They have power everywhere, truly.
Let us not summon someone we have no wish to deal with. "
If things proceed unremarkably, I'll lead Dante to the ascension without ever encountering that being.
Something about the idea of Dante leaving—going on and abandoning me here in his wake—makes me inexplicably melancholy.
I've released souls to their freedom thousands of times.
A scream in the back of my mind reminds me: not all souls, not always.
But most made it to the summit of the mountain and then into the light.
It rarely stirs envy in me, much less sorrow.
Yet I recognize that precise feeling resonating through me at the thought of Dante departing this space.
And beneath the sorrow, relief. The idea of him no longer lingering in this realm where demons like Malrec prowl, hunting to feast upon those brimming with pain and self-loathing. Souls precisely like Dante. The sooner he's free of this place, the better.
"I suppose we keep walking?" he asks, as though he can read my thoughts.
"Do you see the door?"
"Ahead."
As soon as he names it, I see it too, and hesitate. "Ah."
"That doesn't sound like an encouraging 'ah,' Virgil. You are far too easy to read. You wouldn't survive a single negotiation in a boardroom."
"I'll keep that counsel in mind should I ever find myself in one."
The door is silver, twin to the copper we just passed through. The genesis doors don't usually appear so quickly. I'd expected at least a few more temptations before we faced this one.
Dante rises warily. "Just tell me whatever it is."
I stand beside him. "It's nothing as horrible as you’re imagining.
This is the genesis of what could have been.
What your life might have become." A raindrop plops into the water beside us, and I look up, startled.
There is never any weather here. "I just—" I force myself to continue.
"I wouldn't have you experience it if I could spare you.
I would not have it break your heart, as it's wont to do. "
Dante's posture relaxes at my words. "I've already had my heart broken, Virgil. I can take it."
I look at this man, this person who has absorbed heartbreak after heartbreak and hardened himself so he'd never have to be vulnerable again. Never hungry. Never abandoned. Never manipulated or used. But in constructing those walls, he lost something. Something this door is about to reveal.
I nod for us to move forward, keeping my eyes fixed on the silver surface. Part of me wants to step between him and it, declare that there might be another way around. Another part knows he must face this, and that I couldn't physically stop him even if I wished to.
He reaches the handle and turns it without a flinch of hesitation.