23. Virgil
VIRGIL
We walk in silence for a time, only Dante's feet quietly crunching dried leaves that have swept over the faint path, his watch ticking into the realm's stillness like a heartbeat neither of us possesses.
Finally, I find my voice. "So. You know, then. That he is looking for you."
"I've been informed," he says, voice carefully flat. Then he steps closer to me. Something about the gesture feels almost protective.
"You're bound to this path now, regardless of what we do.
" I frown at the realization settling into my bones.
If Satan searches for him, separation offers no safety.
Dante would be more vulnerable without me, not less.
It cuts into me, knowing I've drawn the old god's dark attention toward this man.
Some naive, hopeful part of me—one that should have shuttered centuries ago—still wonders if we might cross his territory without notice.
But I know we shall not.
A wheel has been set into motion, and there is nothing left for us but to follow it to its conclusion.
Birds circle ahead of us against the bruised clouds. I'm no longer certain if I see the world through my own eyes or through Dante’s perception. At some point, the boundary between those two blurred beyond recognition—his mind and mine bleeding into one another like a river meeting the sea.
"We shall see this through," Dante says, responding to the thoughts I haven’t spoken aloud.
I throw my hands out before me in frustration, then pause, staring at them. The long fingers, the rounded knuckles, the elegant lines I once used to hold a stylus, to shape words that would outlast empires. Useless appendages now. They can save nothing. Stop nothing. Pen not another word.
"Attachments are dangerous here, Dante."
He cocks his head in acknowledgment but doesn't look my way. "I've gathered as much."
"It would be better for you if you attempted to... diminish any depth of feeling you might have developed. Toward me."
He chuckles, rueful and warm. "And how about you?"
"I don't attach to the souls I guide more than necessity demands. It is dangerous for both parties."
At this, Dante's eyes catch mine. One glance, and I know that he knows. He knows that is usually the truth. But this isn't usual. At some point along our journey, I have grown connected to him, entangled in a manner I neither understand nor know how to sever.
"What is our greatest risk?" he asks.
"Your destruction."
He shrugs. "I don't think I fear it much. I told Constance that becoming nothing doesn't bother me, as an idea. And I believe I told her the truth."
He means his words. They crash into me. I'm already aware of the grief nipping at my heels when I imagine his ascension—the joy of his freedom braided with the ache of his absence. But destruction? Watching him come apart like that woman in the bog, his essence scattering into nothing?
I think it would capsize me entirely.
"Ah," Dante says more quietly. He walks closer, close enough that our shoulders might brush if such a thing were possible. "This—it would bother you, were I to come apart as that soul did?"
It takes me a moment to scoop words from the chasm of my mind. "It would."
"Then I shall be careful, Virgil."
He says my name like he's binding his words to it. Like a vow.
"Yes, then. I suppose we carry on." I force my voice toward steadiness. "I fear we must walk by the Forest, but we should—"
I stop. Speaking and walking both.
Because I feel something pull at me, a sensation so rare it's like hearing a language I'd forgotten I once spoke. A tug like the bonds I’ve shared with those I've guided, faint but unmistakable.
Everything in my mind tells me to keep to this hidden trail, to deliver Dante to safety as quickly as possible. But—
"Dante, I must make a detour."
"Is something wrong?" He looks back over his shoulder and winces in a way that seems unconscious, probably beyond even his notice. He's reliving Malrec's torment. That happened because we strayed from the path, and here I am asking him to do so again.
"There is someone I must help. I wouldn't ask this of you if it didn't matter greatly to me."
Dante studies me for a moment, his dark eyes steady and deep, absorbing light the way rich soil absorbs rain. "Then, as I said before, lead, and I will follow."
Yes. That is precisely what I fear.
But I do as he says, veering off the path and into dark grass that rises to our knees. Dante moves through it with a rustling whisper, parting the blades like water around a ship's prow.
I see the object of my attention, and my nonexistent heart contracts.
He's younger than the last one—six or seven at most. His large, frightened eyes surface above the grass like a fawn separated from its mother, surrounded by wolves.
"My god," Dante hisses. "Is that a child?"
"It's rare, but it happens. When they've absorbed too much of their caregivers' pain. When the loops passed down to them prove heavier than their small souls can overcome.”
Dante's composure cracks. He has weathered every misery of this realm with remarkable composure, but this—this is the thing that shakes my unshakable companion.
"Let's see if he'll allow us to approach,” I whisper, and Dante nods. We move slowly through the grass. The child's pale blue eyes surface once more, then he bolts, vanishing beneath the swaying blades.
"I say we stop here, Dante," I announce, letting my voice carry, too loud, deliberately relaxed. "This seems a good spot for a rest."
I lower myself into the grass, though my body doesn't bend a single blade. Dante settles beside me, stretching his long legs out and crossing his ankles. He, unlike me, makes an impression on the earth.
"Have I ever told you the story of the painted fox, Dante?" I ask, again, too loudly.
"I don't know that one," Dante replies, catching on immediately.
"Well, there was a fox—a happy, joyful thing with a great bushy tail and clever climbing skills. But he was caught by villagers. You see, they were plagued by thieves stealing their grain, and they decided to blame the fox."
"Was it the fox stealing from them?" Dante asks with such conviction that I wish, more than ever, that I could touch him. That I could place an appreciative hand over his, give his knuckles a squeeze of gratitude.
The child has grown quiet, but he's still near. His fear pulses like an erratic heartbeat.
"No," I reply. "It wasn't the fox's fault, but they blamed him anyway.
And they painted him with tar and bright dye, marking him as a thief, making him vivid red and sticky.
His fur clumped together, leaving him freezing in the cool mornings and his skin exposed to the midday sun.
Because he was so brightly colored, he couldn't hunt.
His prey spotted him from great distances.
This left him so frightened he stopped playing, stopped dancing in the sunlight, stopped chasing anything at all.
He grew weak and hungry. Then the weather shifted.
Rain came. Deluging rains that felt as though the gods wished to drown the world. "
Dante frowns at me, uncertain whether this story suits a child's ears. But the boy has crept closer, and his eyes watch me with careful awareness.
"One day, when the sun returned, the fox crept from his burrow and clung to the forest's edge, head bowed in shame.
A stork approached him. 'Why do you act so strangely, fox?
' the stork asked. 'It's this paint upon me,' the fox replied.
'It marks me and harms me.' 'What paint?
' the stork asked. The fox was near a still lake, and he looked down and caught his reflection.
The rain had washed away the color and the sticky tar, leaving his fur free and glossy once more. "
I stop speaking, letting the quiet settle between the three of us.
The child remains still for several minutes. Hesitantly, he creeps forward until he's nearly beside us.
"What happened to the fox, then?" he whispers, then immediately ducks his head again.
"Oh," I say, as if I've only just noticed him. "I haven't thought of the ending yet. Do you have any ideas?"
The boy straightens slightly. He has a smattering of freckles across his nose and an aged bruise mottling his pale skin beneath one eye.
"I think the fox wouldn't be frightened anymore."
"Why's that?"
"He'd know the paint wasn't there anymore. That it had never been him. It was just something that happened to him—oh." He lifts those pale blue eyes, and they widen. "Oh," he says again, more softly.
And then it happens.
The light encircles him. This only ever occurs for children, who somehow can ascend before reaching the peak.
Perhaps because they have so little holding them here in the first place.
The light is as bright as I imagine watching the sunrise from the roof of the world. Pure ivory, clean of any color.
The child smiles, everything that weighed him down washing from his expression like the rain clearing tar from fur. He laughs aloud, bright and free and startled by his own joy.
Then he's gone.
Dante leaps to his feet, and I rise beside him. He rushes to the spot where the child stood, and whirls back toward me.
There are tears in his eyes. A smile stretches his cheeks, leaving deep impressions, crinkling the corners of his eyes in a way that makes him look older and younger all at once. Similar to a man who lived a different life. Who knew peace. Who knew love.
"Did you feel that, Virgil?" He laughs, and it echoes across the emptiness. Tears slip down his cheeks, and he doesn't wipe them away. "That felt like—like—"
"Heaven," I offer quietly. "That is what ascension feels like, Dante."
I do not tell him that I cannot feel it.
That I never have and never will. That I've watched countless souls absorbed into that light—crying joyful tears, laughing, dissolving into a completeness they'd never known in life.
But I've never felt the prickling warmth, the lifting of the heart, the pull I know the light possesses.
Dante’s shoulders rise and fall with great breaths. He stretches his arms out as though he might grasp lingering fragments of it. He spins once, slowly, almost playfully.
It isn't strange. I've seen so many react this way to that light, to the call of it. But somehow I expected things to be different with him.
It troubles me that it troubles me.
I can already imagine that joy on his face when his own time comes. How tears will fall uninhibited down that handsome face as he's absorbed into the light himself. His eyes will be lifted toward his completion, not cast down to where I remain behind. Where I always am. Where I always will be.
"We should carry on," I say, and my voice sounds distant even to my own ears. I need to deliver him before I grow any more attached. Already this will pain me like nothing I've experienced since my death. Adding anything further will only deepen the misery to come.
"As I mentioned, we have to skirt the Forest first, but we should make short work of it. I don't wish for us to traverse the obvious paths where others might search for us."
Dante's eyes have lost their otherworldly wonder. He studies me now, frowning. "You're worried about this forest?"
"We won't enter it," I say, but I offer nothing more. For I am worried. "Unless we must."
Dante watches me a moment longer, as though he might press. Then he simply nods and falls into step beside me.
He doesn't ask what I'm truly afraid of. Perhaps he already knows.