Chapter Twenty-One
Nico
I walk with them as Rast finally lets go of Farren and looks incredibly uncomfortable about the whole situation. Which, to be honest, makes me chuckle.
He could do with some of this kind of uncomfortable.
The fucker always was uncomfortable with shows of affection.
My gaze catches on Farren. I find my gaze being drawn to her far too regularly.
She waited.
I have no idea if she actually heard me or whether it was just a coincidence, but she fucking waited. She didn’t pull away, and I could see the thought cross her expression when Rast didn’t move. He really fucking needed that hug. So I told her to wait, and she did.
And Rast, fucking hell, he hugged her back.
I never thought I’d see the day when that happened.
Having said that, I’m experiencing a lot of stuff that it never crossed my mind that I would experience, so who the fuck knows anymore?
I certainly fucking don’t.
Ricollio was an arsehole. There’s no denying that, but he was a good man still.
No one deserves to go out like he did. He was as loyal as they came, which is mostly why he had a problem with Rast. Rast questioned everything.
He pointed out the things that didn’t make sense.
He made people like Ricollio question things too, and Ricollio didn’t like that.
He believed what the compound cunts told him and followed their commands without question.
Or he tried to, unless he heard something that Rast said that made him question everything. Ricollio wasn’t ready to listen, and there was a strong chance that he may never have been ready to listen.
For him to die like this, being betrayed by those who he fought so hard to protect and obey, is horrendous and makes me hate the compound cunts even more than I already did.
I put my hands in my pockets and kick at a stone on the ground, frowning when it doesn’t move at all, and I just make myself unbalanced, nearly landing flat on my face.
That was definitely one of those times that I’m grateful that no one could see me.
Okay, maybe grateful is the wrong word.
I’d give my left nut to be seen or at least heard.
Wishful thinking is putting it mildly.
I’ve listened to some pretty interesting conversations since I’ve been with them.
The revelation about Mayhem was pretty interesting but didn’t surprise me in the slightest. There’s something that lurks just under the surface with Mayhem, and I think they are all lucky that he’s on their side. He would be a formidable enemy to have.
I like him.
Then there’s Zev. When Zev brought up the dead, after he had his vision, my heart hit my feet and then jumped up to my throat, beating double time.
I felt for sure that he knew, that he had seen me in the vision, or hell, one of the others had seen me and he saw it in his vision, and then they carried on talking, and things that should have clicked into place for me didn’t.
Farren made a connection that I never did when I was alive, and it just made me even more curious about her.
Not that it’s hard to make me more curious about her. There’s just something about her.
I must have gone to Tèarmann. I had to have gone there, and they were sort of right.
It is locked down like Peanasachadh, but in a different way.
We can still see Peanasachadh, you can visit it, touch the walls, and you can even hear some of the inmates still.
The guards take their jobs seriously, and those souls who didn’t manage to escape are still facing their punishments.
The difference is that now, for reasons unknown, anyone standing close enough to the wall can occasionally hear what’s happening behind the walls. It’s never conversations, only screams of pain and terror.
The thing that I always found curious though is that it’s soundproofed within too. So the guards who not only work there but live there too, don’t have to listen to the sounds all the time.
That would be enough to drive anyone insane.
It’s a really disturbing place to go, and other than the yearly checks to see if anything has changed, no one goes there. I do find it strange that the Others said that it was patrolled by the Abyss creatures, but we never ran into the Abyss creatures when we patrolled.
I wasn’t there.
I know for a fact that I wasn’t there. There was no torture, no screaming, nothing like that at all. The souls that had been there for a long time immediately offered me some support and advice.
Unfortunately for me, as soon as I managed to walk through the light and ended up back here, I forgot everything that they told me they said. I know that they told me something important, and I know that the knowledge strengthened my need to get the fuck out and back to warn Rast.
I don’t know what I had to warn him about though, apart from what I already needed to warn him about.
The fact that I lost my memory also means that I don’t know where it is. They’re stuck there, I know that, but I don’t know where they are.
What Zev’s question led them to realising is quite honestly insane, but I’m a ghost, and they shouldn’t exist. The souls that got day passes to come into the rest of the realm weren’t ghosts. They were souls, and they were staying in the realm of the dead.
I’m in the realm of the dead, but I wasn’t, at least, I don’t think I was and passing through the light to get back here has meant that I’m a ghost.
How do I know I’m a ghost?
Good question, self, because who the fuck else would ask me? That’s right, no one, because no one can see or fucking hear me.
Huh.
Maybe I have lost it.
It’s entirely possible, and it wouldn’t surprise me.
My point, if I was even trying to make one, is that I don’t know how I know that I’m a ghost. I just do.
Just like I know that the bad souls don’t end up in Tèarmann.
I don’t mean the ones who die in all the other realms. Our realm has been closed down since it descended into darkness. No, I mean the bad souls that are killed in Siorraidh.
They aren’t in with the good where I was, and I have no idea where they are.
At least I don’t think I do. For all I know, that could have been one of the things that I forgot as I crossed over.
I have to say this is not the turn of events that I expected when those lying fucks sent Rast off through that portal.
Rast didn’t tell the others everything, but some of that was because he didn’t know everything.
He wasn’t supposed to survive it. That was the whole point.
They were sending him through it to get rid of him because he was starting to ask too many questions and getting too close to the right answers.
I don’t know why they went to such lengths to get rid of him, they could have just kept him in the cells and carried on the torture.
He wasn’t causing them any trouble in there.
People were starting to listen to him though, and that scared the fuckers.
It’s hard not to listen to Rast. He’s got this way about him that makes you want to hear what he has to say.
I tried so fucking hard to warn him, but no matter what I did, he couldn’t hear me, and it made no difference, he still went through that damned portal.
His need to help this realm completely eclipsed his usual judgement, that and then the torture that they had put him through left him not firing on all cylinders.
I have no idea how he’s still alive after everything that they put him through.
The only reason why I haven’t completely lost it while he’s been gone, thinking that he’s dead and they succeeded, is for two reasons: one, Rast is the stubbornest motherfucker I have ever known, and he wouldn’t let himself go out that easily, and two, they did this bullshit ceremony, I heard them planning it.
They were going to tell Rast that they were turning him into the Ferryman, something that is impossible to do.
The Ferryman can’t be made. He is chosen by the Ancients in some complicated way that even those fuckers didn’t understand, and there hasn’t been one since the realm was set on the path of complete destruction when the King died.
Rast knows this, well, he knows that there hasn’t been a Ferryman. The fuckers are persuasive though, and they managed to convince Rast that they had been given the knowledge to make one, so that he could travel through the portal and save the realm.
Rast believed them because that’s the kind of fucker he is, under all of his stubbornness, his brashness, his standoffishness, under all of that, he wants to help, and he especially wants to help this realm.
The ritual was a fake.
I watched them make it up. They didn’t use something from a book. They didn’t want to risk Rast realising what they were up to. No, they went to great lengths to make it up and make it look as authentic as possible.
That’s how big of a threat they think Rast is, and rightly so.
The ritual was fake, and yet, Rast became the Ferryman. I’m not sure that they realise that. They know that something happened, the guy disappeared in a tornado of shadows for a moment, and then pouf, he was gone completely, but they don’t know what happened exactly, and it needs to stay that way.
In any other realm, they wouldn’t have had to go to such great extremes to get rid of Rast, they could have simply killed him.
Not that he would have gone easily, and he sure as fuck would have taken more of them than they think he would with him, but if it was planned carefully enough, they could have killed him.
This is Siorraidh though.
This is where the dead come, and even though this realm has been closed for thousands of years, those who die here stay here. They don’t go to the one that Hades is ruler of.
At least they’re supposed to. Obviously, that’s the way that it works, however, since the realm started to collapse, the dead have just disappeared. No one knows what happens to them.
They clearly didn’t want to risk Rast somehow still being able to get them if they killed him.
So instead they came up with this elaborate plan.
They may not have been sending Rast through a portal and turning him into the Ferryman, but they were trying to replicate the spell that the King used to use in order to send the creatures back to the Abyss.
I think their reasoning was twofold, if it worked, then they would have a way to send the Abyss creatures back, if it didn’t, then the spell was still relocating Rast somewhere, even if it wasn’t the Abyss, simply from the amount of magic that they were using to do it.
I think that had managed to build in a failsafe so if it didn’t send Rast to the Abyss then it sent him to Peanasachadh.
The Punishment side.
The side that no one is supposed to know how to gain access to, they had figured it out, or at least they were using Rast as a test subject. The bottom line is that if the spell went wrong, then Rast would die, so even though they were trying to avoid that, if it happened, then they would be happy.
They’re cunts.
When Rast disappeared, they thought that it had worked. I had nothing to do, so I watched them. They tried to send one of the Abyss creatures back to the Abyss, thinking that they had actually pulled off the spell that only the King could do. It was quite amusing watching them fail.
None of them wanted to test that he went to Peanasachadh, so instead they just assumed that’s where he went. After all, there were only two options.
Something in me just knew that he wasn’t there. I can’t explain it, and I never had premonitions when I was alive, so I’m assuming that it was a knowledge of the dead kind of thing.
No one knows what really happens to those who die in this realm. The dead who are good, or hell, even the dead who are bad.
I know what’s happened to the dead.
They’re still here. I’m still here.
There is a small pocket where they all go, and none of them can leave, not that it would matter because no one can hear or see them anyway. Not anymore. They’re stuck in a kind of in-between. All of them are in there.
At least all of them except me.
Because gods forbid I do anything fucking normal.
I simply walked through the wall of light, and I was here, back in the darkness. I heard a couple of the others try to follow me out, but no one could do it.
I still don’t know why I was let through.
That is the limit of the knowledge that I have, everything else was lost as I stepped through the light.
I don’t even know where it is, I don’t remember where in this realm I stepped out into.
I just know that there was a pocket somewhere and that the bad souls weren’t there.
Of course, the first thing that I did when I managed to get through the light was to go and find Rast, which is where I found out everything about what is really going on with the compounds, and I have been trying to tell him ever since.