25. Virgil
VIRGIL
Dante bursts from the Forest like a flock of birds startled from a branch, bright wings catching sunlight. He moves so quickly he nearly runs, and I bustle alongside him, matching his pace stride for stride.
I should remind him that we need to be discreet. That the ruler of this realm hunts us. That drawing attention to us will only hasten the confrontation I've been dreading.
But this moment—this grief-drenched, brutal, newborn thing—is too tender to shatter. It's still blood-covered from birth. I remain silent and stay at his side, as I vowed, as I will until he escapes this place.
He's so close now. So unburdened.
I don't know how to feel about that. Happy, certainly.
When I first encountered him walking his endless loop through that cold Manhattan of his own making, I thought it impossible he might reach this point.
He's proven my judgments too hastily rendered, my not-yet-extinguished hope worthy of its long endurance.
Yet I also know what his progress means. He leaves soon.
And some part of me, a part I've tried to smother since the moment I entered his mindscape, is realizing I'm not certain I can bear it. The losing of him.
He marches up a hill and stops at its crest. Before us, hell stretches toward the horizon, an endless expanse of shadow and ember, the distant glow of fires that never warm, rivers that run with something darker than water.
The sky pulses with that sickly orange light, and far below, the path continues toward a river I know too well, and beyond it, the territory we must cross.
The mountain rises in the impossible distance, its peak lost in clouds that shimmer with something almost like hope.
Dante doesn't look at any of it.
He sits, pulling his knees against his chest as a child might, and I lower myself beside him. He places his dark head against his knees and begins to sob.
The tears come unrestrained. Soul-deep. Wrenching. His shoulders shake, and his cries echo across the barren landscape until they almost reach some place within me, almost vibrate into bones I no longer possess.
I'd wanted to see this man happy. To see him smile truly. I realize only now that this was what he actually needed first.
Grief.
For him to grieve what he'd always avoided. Always repressed. The childhood stolen from him. The love he'd sacrificed. The decades spent building walls instead of bridges. The father who was never capable of being what he needed.
His tears continue, and I feel so desperate. Never in all my centuries have I felt so hopelessly incorporeal. So uselessly ghost-like.
But I remember how he'd held his hand out to mine. Asked me to place my palm against his, even knowing it would not truly connect.
I hesitate a beat, then move closer and wrap an arm around his shoulder.
As though he felt it, he turns toward me, rolling against my form, his face pressed into his hands as he weeps.
If my chest had any substance, his face would rest against it, warm and solid, his tears soaking through my sweater.
If my heart still beat, he would hear it, hear the way it would quicken at his closeness.
I hesitate no longer. I wrap my other arm around him.
It is awkward, in a way. I can't feel him at all. My arms rest on nothing, and I must hold them suspended in that strange, aching manner. But it's also... correct. In some way I cannot name, the intention matters more than the physics.
His tears break apart, great heaving breaths interspersing the sobs. Then slowly, slowly, they subside. He shifts slightly, a small movement, like a warning that he's about to rise. I slide my arms away, and he sits up.
His face is swollen. Blotchy. His eyes bloodshot, rimmed with red. His nose raw from wiping.
He's beautiful.
Just like this. With the horrors of hell stretching out around him, his face puffy and sticky from tears, his sweater rumpled, and his dark hair disheveled, falling across his forehead.
He was beautiful when I first saw him, in that intimidating, perfectly pressed manner. A young god, all sculpted planes and sharp edges. The kind of creature who could, with time and unchecked ambition, become like the old god who rules this realm.
There is no god before me now.
Instead, there is a man. Broken and imperfect and humbled. Harmed and harmer both. Afraid, and causer of fear in others.
That is a different kind of beauty. It is real.
Not an image, nor a statue of some long-dead deity meant to inspire worship or terror.
Instead, it's the kind that wakes in the morning with bleary eyes and tangled hair.
That stumbles and admits it. That reaches for another hand, even knowing it cannot truly be held.
It's human. And I have missed humanity so desperately.
Dante sniffs and drags his sleeve across his eyes. He clears his throat and looks out at the hellscape before us, the rivers of shadow, the distant fires, the mountain that waits beyond everything.
"Thank you, Virgil."
"You're welcome."
A long silence follows, filled only with the steady ticking of his watch. It never stutters anymore. Never freezes.
Time has returned for him.
His journey is nearly finished.
"Is my mother here also?" he whispers. There's an ache in the words. A crack in his voice.
"No." I shake my head. "I don't sense any other strong connections to you in this realm. Perhaps, if she came here once, she's already passed through."
It's an odd thing that he has no other bonds lingering in this place. Most who arrive have at least a handful of others whose lives they touched, for good or ill. But Dante isn't that man. He spent most of his life doing the opposite, building an existence that required no one else.
"Good," he says quietly. "She... she wasn't perfect, but..."
"Yes," I say. Because nothing more is needed. People are complicated. Love—especially with parents—is a terribly complicated thing.
"I spent my entire life chasing that man." His voice is haunted and liberated in equal measure. "I wanted to be just like him, Virgil. Even after everything. I wanted to prove I could be him, but better."
"I understand."
"It was all..." He exhales, shaky. "All such a bloody, pointless waste, wasn't it?"
"I wonder about that," I say carefully. "I'm not certain any experience is truly wasted. But I confess I'm not certain of much."
Dante sighs and turns toward me. "How do you bear it? Being so unsure about things?"
I smile. "The more one learns about any subject, the more one realizes how little one truly knows. I guided an astrophysicist through here once. Do you have any idea how terrifying existence becomes when you understand the scope of human reality?"
I shake my head at the memory—a kind, quietly panicked man who couldn't stop talking about the fragility of everything.
"Did you know the water covering Earth is proportionally no thicker than the skin of an apple?
That our sun is merely one of four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone?
That we spin on a small rock hurtling through a universe containing more galaxies than grains of sand on every beach that has ever existed?
Any one of a thousand variables shifts by a fraction, and life simply ceases. Yet we hunger for it anyway."
"We do," Dante says. He rests his chin on his knees again but turns his head to look at me. "How I wish I could live once more, Virgil. I'd do so many things differently."
"So many who pass through here long for that."
"Do you?"
The question catches me unprepared. I smooth my hand over the cashmere sweater I wear, the one I cannot feel, straightening wrinkles that don't exist. A habit from a life two thousand years gone.
Then I lift my face again.
"I do, Dante. If I'm honest with you, it's something I've hungered for every day of my existence here. I often think if I had one more chance, I'd gather enough memories, enough moments that truly matter, that they might be the light I carry with me into this darkness upon my return."
Perhaps I should have offered him a platitude instead. Kept the focus on his journey. But he'd asked, and I'd given him the only thing I have left to give—words and truth, or at least truth as I know it.
Dante's expression softens. He smiles, a quiet thing, gentle and tentative, almost unnoticeable. Then he lifts a hand, palm up, and hovers it in the space between us.
Hellfire pulses in the distance. A creature shrieks somewhere far below. Ash and something older than ash dance in the air around us.
I place my hand above his.
He looks at our hands hovering together, appearing clasped, though nothing connects, and his smile deepens.
"I wish we had more time before the light, Virgil. I do not fear it—the disappearing. But I wish it wouldn’t arrive so soon.”
His dark eyes lift to meet mine, and with the motion, they brighten. He's so open now. So unafraid in a tremulous way, like a newborn colt attempting its first steps, uncertain of new legs but too alive not to try.
I hesitate another moment. Then I whisper words I should not. Words that could damn us both. Because getting Dante out of hell, into the light, escaped from this place—that should be my only aim. That should be all I want.
But instead I say, scarcely loud enough to carry, "There's a place I would show you. If you don't mind a slight delay."
Dante curls his fingers slightly closer to the form of my hand. "I'm dead, Virgil. I have nothing but time."
I rise alongside him, my hand firmly back at my side. A wretched, nauseous feeling churns through me. We are so close. We need only cross the river, quietly navigate his territory, and then we'd reach the mountain. To interrupt Dante's progress for the sake of my own selfish desires...
"What did you think about what my father said?
" Dante asks, hands in his pockets as he walks alongside me.
He's as relaxed as though we're strolling through Central Park in autumn—a rare and treasured sight I witnessed once in another soul's memories—rather than moving through the darkest region of hell.
"Which part?" I ask carefully. Not one word uttered by that man held any merit as far as I could tell. Had I stumbled across him as a soul, I never would have bothered offering guidance. I'm uncertain what that says about me.
"The part about Stoicism. That's from your era, is it not?"
We make our way to the end of the hill, and I'm still debating whether to take Dante to this place I long to show him, or whether I should rise to nobler instincts and lead him directly toward the mountain.
But his question shatters my anxious spiral entirely.
"That is most certainly not what Stoicism teaches."
Dante is smirking at me.
"What?" I ask.
Then he laughs, rich and pure and startled out of him. The kind of laugh that crinkles his eyes and nose. That transforms his face into something so human, so achingly real, that I feel something crack open in my chest.
"I knew you wouldn't enjoy that," he says. He nudges an elbow in my direction. It doesn't connect, of course. It passes through me like light through water.
But oh, how I wish it would.
I find myself laughing differently, too, a sound I haven't made in longer than I can measure. It feels strange in my throat. Foreign. Like speaking a language I'd forgotten I knew.
"You're infuriating," I tell him.
"So I've been told." He grins, and for a moment—just a moment—hell doesn't feel quite so dark.
We walk on together, toward something I shouldn't show him, away from the path I know I should keep.
But I find I don't regret it. Not yet.
Perhaps not ever.