24. Dante
DANTE
The Forest Virgil had referenced is a malevolent thing, dark and towering.
It reminds me of the Manhattan I'd walked in my first moments here.
It contains that same oppressive emptiness, that same sense of something watching from the shadows.
Surely the broken, splintered Christmas tree from my loop could have grown in soil like this.
Virgil has remained quiet since the child. Withdrawn.
I can't match his mood. Couldn't if I wished to.
That light. It was like it draped over me, seeped into me through my skin, my breath, places I didn't know I had anymore. Every ache of body and spirit lifted at once—every fear, every doubt, every old hatred I'd been carrying like stones in my pockets. All of it, gone. Just for a moment.
Now I understand why Virgil walks souls toward this light.
Because if that is what awaits at the end, it's worth everything.
Every miserable step through this wretched realm.
Every torment I suffered in life. Every cold night I spent hungry, every betrayal I swallowed, every time I chose safety over vulnerability and told myself it was wisdom.
Worth it. All of it.
Virgil doesn't believe he can reach that light.
He's so deeply entrenched in his loop—this belief that he's damned beyond redemption—that he can't see past it.
But I'll be damned twice over if I let him stay behind when I go.
I didn't claw my way through every circle of my own personal hell to abandon the one person who made the journey bearable.
A wind crackles through the tree limbs, causing them to rattle together. My watch ticks softly at my wrist, and I'm startled when the noise of the Forest swallows its sound. That quiet rhythm has been our singular companion in this silent world. Its absence feels like losing a heartbeat.
"Blast." Virgil stops walking, his expression tightening. "I fear we must delve deeper into the Forest than I'd hoped."
I eye the malevolent trees’ twisted trunks, their gnarled branches reaching toward us before I step alongside him and into their shadow's embrace.
Something approaches. We need to evade it.
The knowledge settles into me like ice water.
Satan hunts us both. Constance schemes in his service.
Demons prowl these paths with hunger I've now felt firsthand.
And I don't know how to protect Virgil. Not truly.
Not until we reach the light and I convince him to shed whatever false beliefs anchor him here.
The last of the light's warmth drains from me at the thought.
We hunch close together, weaving through ancient, wicked trees. Their forms are crooked and lightning-struck, bark split open to reveal heartwood black as char. The canopy above blocks what little light this realm possesses, leaving us in a darkness that feels almost solid.
Something pulls my attention to the side. Not a sound—something else. A sensation like a cry that bypasses the ears entirely and lands somewhere in the chest.
"Virgil," I say.
"Hmm?"
"I think something is over there." I gesture toward a gap between two massive trunks. "Perhaps... could it be another child?"
Virgil looks to where I point, then frowns.
The expression carves years into his face—deep furrows across his brow, lines bracketing his mouth.
It doesn't diminish him. I see it now for what it is: the marks of a man who cares deeply.
Who diverts from his path to bring stories of hope to frightened children.
Who walks alongside some hopeless soul and helps him escape his self-imposed prison.
"I'd hoped you might not sense this one," he says quietly. "But if you do, then I fear you must face it before you can ascend."
"I suppose you won't tell me what lies ahead?"
Virgil turns toward me fully. There's something in his eyes—something as rich as aged wine and deep as a well I once lowered a bucket into as a boy on a rare visit to my grandparents’ farm, before I understood that some depths have no bottom.
I'm certain I can almost name what I see there, but the word hovers just beyond my reach.
"If you asked it of me, I would tell you," he says. "Though knowing may hinder more than help."
"Then we follow your rules." I hold his gaze a moment longer. "But you'll stay with me?"
"Until you no longer wish me to. As I vowed." There's resignation in his voice. As though he's already mourning something that hasn't happened yet.
We walk deeper into the trees. The path narrows. Branches scrape against my shoulders.
My mind reaches for something—anything—to offer him. Some fragment of the world he's lost. Words are all I have. The only currency that can reach him here. It feels important that I choose the right ones.
But words, at least of the poetic variety, have never come easily to me. I've spent decades repressing that impulse, laying it down as a sacrifice at the altar of efficiency. Soft things don't survive in the worlds I've inhabited.
But maybe if I stop holding so tightly, the right ones will surface on their own. Somehow I sense that Virgil doesn't need something grand. He needs something small and true.
I laugh when I land on what might work, and Virgil glances toward me, curious.
"Have you ever eaten an orange?" I ask.
"An orange?"
"A citrus fruit. It's… well, orange in color. Round, about the size of a fist."
"Ah." He considers this. "We had citron in my lifetime. Very bitter. No one ate them for pleasure."
"No, this is different." I'm smiling now as we navigate the darkening path.
It feels odd to smile in a place like this.
Odd in a good way. "I remember one afternoon specifically.
I was perhaps twenty-two, still in graduate school, still poor enough that small pleasures felt like luxuries.
The sun was setting between the buildings, painting everything in…
in amber and gold. I sat on a fire escape outside my apartment, my legs dangling over the railing, and a breeze swept through—the kind that carries summer's heat away and promises autumn. "
Virgil is watching me with quiet attention, the way he watches everything. Like he's memorizing it.
"I began to peel the orange. The mist from the rind caught the light as I worked—tiny golden droplets suspended in the air for just a moment before vanishing.
The smell..." I shake my head slightly, reaching for words that feel adequate.
"Like someone had distilled sunshine and green leaves and something sweet all at once. It filled the entire fire escape, that small space, until I felt like I was sitting in a grove rather than a rusting metal platform in Brooklyn.”
I pause, remembering. The weight of the fruit in my palm. The way I neatly peeled the segments away from each other.
"The pieces came apart perfectly. And when I placed the first one on my tongue...
" I close my eyes for a moment, let the memory wash over me fully.
"Sweet, but with just enough tartness to make your mouth water for the next bite.
The juice burst across my palate, bright and clean.
For just that moment, sitting there with the sunset on my face and the taste of that orange in my mouth, I wasn't worried about tuition or rent or my past. I was just... present. Alive."
I open my eyes. Virgil is smiling at me, a real smile, one that softens his entire face and makes him look like the young poet he must have been once, before death and damnation and two thousand years of grief.
"Thank you for that, Dante," he says quietly.
I smile back. "You're welcome."
A wail shrieks through the darkness ahead.
We both turn toward the sound.
The tree beside us heaves forward and releases another wail. I freeze completely. There's a face in the trunk—flaring nostrils, thick brows, a mouth stretched wide as it unleashes an inhuman cry that seems to vibrate through the ground beneath my feet.
"Is th-that..."
"Yes." Virgil's voice has gone flat. Careful. "They were human once. Don't speak to any of them. They ensnare easily, twist words into traps. Stay close to me. Now that we've entered the Forest, a single misstep could root you here alongside them."
I follow behind Virgil, mindful to place my feet exactly where his fall—or would fall, if he left impressions. "How did they end up like this?"
"They spent their mortal lives rooting themselves in the destruction of others. Poisoning everything they touched. So now they're rooted in turn."
I look ahead, toward whatever has been tugging at me since we entered these woods. My stomach drops. "Who am I here to see, Virgil?"
He turns at his name, as though he understands I cling to it like a lifeline thrown across dark water. His expression is soft amid the human-tree horrors that chatter and weep and babble nonsense around us. His gentle look is a landing space.
"Do you wish for me to answer?" he whispers.
"I think I already know."
He nods and says no more.
We walk deeper into the Forest. The trees press closer here, their bark-faces contorted in expressions of rage or anguish or something in between.
One stretches a branch toward me like a beseeching hand—please, I didn't mean it, I was only doing what I had to do.
Another snarls as we pass—you think you're better than us, don't you, you'll see, you'll end up here too.
A third simply weeps, her face barely visible beneath the moss consuming her features—my children, where are my children, I only wanted what was best for them.
I keep my eyes forward. My feet on the path.
We round a bend, and my body stops before my mind registers why.
This tree stands apart from the others. Still. Solid. Not thrashing or wailing, but watching with a predator's patience.