17. Virgil
VIRGIL
I'm unmoored. Lost.
Physically, yes. Despite scanning the narrow path we walk through this boggy forest, I see nothing familiar.
These swamps stretch on forever, as far as I've been able to discern.
I worry I'm leading us deeper into the mire rather than back toward some anchoring landmark.
Yet I march on. Ahead, the path continues to widen in small increments at least. Behind us lies the sucking, dark water that almost claimed Dante entirely.
But that's not what has me most unsettled.
It's Dante's words.
I turned toward you. I know that's what I felt.
He felt me.
I know it wasn't physical. There was no graze of finger, no weight of my hand coming down on his shoulder, no warmth of my body reaching his.
But he felt me nonetheless.
Felt my presence.
Of the endless number of souls I've guided, there have been a few teary goodbyes at their ascension. Even more expressions of gratitude.
But I was their guide. A voice to push them through their hell.
Not a presence they recognized. Not something they reached for.
At some point, as Dante sank, I started shouting his name in a manner that would have made my voice go hoarse if such a trifle were still possible for me. But no—my voice, the thing I sacrificed everything for, remained strong right to the end.
And then he'd broken the loop, and I'd been helpless to assist him. Unable to offer a hand to pull him free. Unable to shake him when he was enraptured by it.
I am nothing but words.
Yet he felt me.
Dante has remained silent as we've woven our way through knobby cypress knees and curtains of Spanish moss that hang like shrouds at a funeral. As the path widens, he falls into step beside me.
I'm not worried, truly, about us getting lost. After all, we have forever. No need for sleep, food, or time that might run out. We could wander for years if need be before finding our way back to the main path.
It's not that which concerns me about our misdirection.
It's the other things in this place.
The dangers far crueler than death. Horrors that Dante doesn't know exist in this realm. Not yet. If we don't watch our direction, if we stumble into the wrong corner of these wetlands, he might face things just as brutal as his genesis moments, but entirely new.
There's nothing quite like the cesspit of a hundred haunted souls trapped in loops while demons stir their misery for their own sustenance.
I shudder just as we reach a point where we must duck beneath a low-hanging branch. We emerge onto a wide floodplain where bent necks of creeks wind through the skeletal, wind-scraped expanse.
"Recognize anything?" Dante asks.
It takes me a moment to find my voice. "Not yet. It may take some time. But stay close—we don't wish to get separated here. This part of the realm shifts frequently."
"How does that work?" Dante tucks his hands behind his back, but not in the authoritative and defensive manner he once employed.
More contemplative now, like a philosopher pacing the agora, discussing some spark of interest. "Everyone who dies brings their beliefs with them here, and that shapes the environment?”
"I'm not entirely sure." We step over the emaciated trunk of a rotted tree.
"But the best way I've come to understand it is that this realm is similar to a net.
Anyone who holds fast to their pain, their regret, their loops—they get caught in it, blocked from ascension.
Once you release the things you don't need to carry, you can slip through the openings. "
"Huh." Dante licks his lips as though they need moisture, as though his body is real. He seems prepared to say something more when a splash, a violent breaking of the water beside us, seizes both our attention.
A slender arm breaks the surface, silt and debris sliding down the ivory form.
A woman's head rises next to it, gasping, choking, gagging. She submerges again, then bursts forward with a scream.
"Gods," I gasp, right as Dante says, “Christ.”
For a moment we're both frozen. Then he jerks his head around. "Find a limb or something we can use to pull her out."
"Dante," I whisper as the woman struggles beyond us, water flying around her. "You cannot help her."
He's already moved forward and is heaving on the end of a fallen log, wrenching a large branch free.
His still-damp shirt clings to the muscles of his form as he completes this task, and warmth spills into my stomach at the sight—followed instantly by shame.
Of all the moments to feel this, this must be the least appropriate.
"Give me a hand, Virgil," he shouts, urgent and expectant. He believes I'll help him. That I can.
Instead, I stand and watch, listen to the woman's drowning struggles, her screams muffled by water filling her mouth.
"Virgil." Dante's voice snaps. Then he stops and stares at me. "This is desperate. She is drowning. How can you not help her?"
"She cannot drown," I say. "She's dead."
Dante's brow furrows. He turns and yanks the branch free with a grunt.
"She's in the swamp, Dante. You can't help her at this point. She'll drag you in with her."
"You helped me out of there,” he replies, heated.
"No," I whisper, more to myself than to him. "You helped yourself."
But I don't interfere. I spent what I imagine were centuries trying to extract people from these waters.
My inability to physically interact probably saved me from drowning alongside them.
I step forward, watchful. I trust Dante's sense of self-preservation, but if he pulled himself out of his own drowning only to join someone else's, I'm not certain I would recover from it.
He throws the branch out to the woman. "Here, take hold!"
She thrashes uselessly. Strikes the log with such fervor that it jostles Dante backward. "Grab on, damn it," he shouts.
She does.
My lips part in surprise. I hadn't expected that much. Dante heaves her forward, and she grasps at him with hungry, desperate fingers.
"Dante," I warn—but a moment too late.
She catapults them both backward, pulls him in with her. He hits his knees in the water but perceives himself as strong enough to stop the momentum of her weight dragging him down.
I rush to the water's edge, but helplessness clings to my body harder than the woman ripping her nails into his shirt.
I cannot interact with this world. If I could, I would of course have fruitlessly helped him haul that branch to the water and attempt to save someone drowning in herself, even if only to make him happy.
“Shed your shirt," I shout.
Dante grabs the fabric between the woman's frantic, clawing hands and rips.
Buttons scatter. Fabric tears. With a thrust, he pushes himself back up beside me, breathing hard, staring down at the woman thrashing with the branch and his ruined shirt now clutched in her embrace.
She's not using them to stay afloat, though, more like she’s engaging them in a silent ballet of destruction, bent on annihilating both.
"What," Dante says through heaving breaths, "is wrong with her?"
"She's drowning in a loop, Dante."
"Is that... is that what I was like?"
I shake my head. "No. You were much more... contained. But drowning just the same."
He waves his hands toward her in a desperate sort of gesture, and I try very hard not to think about the firm curves of his arms, the sculpted abdomen that would make Apollo himself envious. I've never felt attracted to one of the souls I've guided. Admired beauty, certainly. But nothing like this.
"How do we help her?" he asks, voice scraping his throat in a way that's only possible because he's imagining himself hoarse.
"We cannot. Not at this point. She must break the loop on her own. She's crafted a fantasy, and she's more attached to the story than the reality, more attached to her denial than to facing her own pain and complicity."
"My god," Dante says again, his eyes flat with horror as he stares at the woman still thrashing in the water.
She continues her fruitless fight for a few more moments, then slips beneath the mud-dark surface. A few bubbles pop in her wake. The water stills.
"Is she—is she gone?" Dante asks.
"No. She'll reemerge at some point. Then drown again. And repeat until she breaks her loop."
The sharp lines of his face are etched like stained glass, unyielding as he stares unblinking into the swamp. "And if she never breaks it?"
"I don't know," I whisper. "Perhaps she does this for eternity."
“Christ above.”
"Indeed." I wait another moment, then gently urge him forward. "Come. I'm afraid I do recognize where we are now, but we'll have to witness more of the same before we make it back to the path."
Dante continues his endless, sorrowful staring for another moment. Then he blinks, nods, and starts walking alongside me.