The Dead Scout's Handbook of Afterlife Survival

Chapter Seventeen: Eden

The first 150 miles of their venture breezed and sometimes wheezed by. Charlie and Rebecca found purpose in hunting, while Cayden discovered how to alter the radius of his heating ability, allowing Sarah to mask their tracks. They camped in ravines, icy riverbeds, caves, canyons, and anywhere else below line of sight. Rebecca learned to float on her chair just in time to glide over the jagged rocks bottoming out the looming peaks. The mood shifted from enthusiasm to weary boredom and their chatter fell from deep conversation to occasional mumbles of how bleak everywhere looked. With stories long since exhausted, and games abandoned for safety, weariness settled in. Though beautiful, this was a frozen, inhospitable tundra holding more similarities to the previous world Cayden remembered.

At this point, out of sight of Jackson, an undisturbed white blanket, too thick for Cayden to melt, covered all surfaces aside from the rock walls. Shoes frequently crashed through the ice-crusted snow top, burying their legs to the hips. Only with finesse weight shifting and obscene remarks, did they manage to move on.

The cold was empty, and bitter, and unrelenting, and their crunching steps rebounded completely alone off the cliff sides. Each evening, as the sunset colored the chalk and blackboard landscape, the trees cast gnarled shadows, the icicles hung like teeth, and the world appeared hungrier and hungrier until the sunset died and the darkness fed their fears with heaping uncertainty. Then, the light would rise the next morning and all would be right for another miserable trek.

All this changed upon arrival at the junction where their passage veered northeast. Martha warned them about this point, and the reason readily clarified itself.

Upon reaching Eden, the first thing Cayden noticed was the quiet, more pronounced and unsettling than the lifeless landscape they had spent the last hundred miles in. The second concern rose as an animal-hide sign climbing two, stone-slab pillars, contrasting with its own dripping scarlet letters spelling the word EDEN. Maroon ceramic and rusted metal walls, unworldly as they were skeletal, sprouted forth from the frosted earth to form shacks spreading for almost a mile along a single road. Stretched over their sharp ends, pale leather hung to mold the roofs. Gnarled, bone, tawny, and ash spines jutted from the soil without organization. Nearby the shanties, bordering the dark, uneven, dirt path, clay bowls littered the ice. Murky liquid, frozen, bubbling, and forever seeping from pots, cracked in the searing chill. The snow below Cayden's shoes melted as he strode past, rising as mist along the hushed road.

Sarah glanced at Cayden as he loosened his scowl and tightened his cheeks to hide the snarl trying to part his lips. A lopsided smile covered any traces of rage or fear and she casually nodded at him. "Fire users?" Cayden asked.

"Maybe some." Martha replied. "Regardless, they're dangerous. The lettering on that sign isn't paint, and the skin draped over the roofs didn't come from animals. Even Gregory avoided these people. He used to say that a cult named the Church of Sanguine established this place. In the city, they preached optimism through difficult times, though I suspect they got the name from something else. After being banned from Pirene, they relocated to terrorize travelers for the better part of a decade. Anyone from the Jackson Hole area, with or without powers, passes here before deviating north again, so from those born here who don't combust, they've had access to ample...construction material."

"There are enough houses to fit a thousand people," Charlie said. Hundreds of the creaking, shambled, and desolate shacks lined the street ending in a massive church at the far side of town. A crooked steeple tilted the top of the angled roof, which possessed such dilapidation that its ability to stand could only be the work of underlying architectural genius or plain, old magic.

"It was busy at times. Gregory passed by often and said quite a number resided here. The point is we can't trust anyone here and should avoid strangers at all costs."