The Book of Warlock

The Book of Warlock. Epilogue

  They didn't call this place the Underworld for nothing. On his inter-dimensional, intergalactic travels, Valentino had often seen the collected array of realities stretching out in its vast ring, each one a bubble, a pocket of possibility, all connected to the astral plane as though it was a thin, fragile wheel hub holding everything together. The astral plane was a strange area outside of space and time. The doorway of dragons.

If you stood upon the edge of oblivion, where the next dimension's boundary touched upon this one, and moved your gaze down, below the realms of the living, you would see a reflection of it all. A mirror image.

There was no corridor leading to this place, no living thing could enter it. Dragons could, though they would not want to. This was the realm of the dead. There was nothing to collect here, no physical objects whatsoever; only the ghosts, the reflections, of them.

Souls of mortals who had passed manifested here as the last traces of the energy that their living forms once held, and they filtered down to this deep place, before being recorded and recycled, and delivered back up above into the mortal realm as new life. Energy could not be created or destroyed, after all, only transferred, and all life was simply a form of energy.

The glimmering speck of Hemlock that had drifted down from the universe, the world, that he had tragically died in, was around in the underworld somewhere. Valentino could wander for aeons and never find him. You never quite appreciated just how many things died every hour until you saw the shining dust descending into the mirror face like a twinkling blizzard.

It all funnelled down to be collected in Purgatory, the processing centre. Sentient minds would be sent off to their final resting place. Their energy duly returned to the world in which they came. It was all overseen by cosmic curators who were collectively known as demons. They were serious, busy creatures, neither alive nor completely dead, existing in a curious state of suspended animation, but they were important. They kept the flow of energy running constantly, and in turn this kept time turning too. You couldn't have one without the other.

They had built a city for themselves, a metropolis by the name of Pandemonium, with a burning pit at the centre. The dragon did not quite understand the workings of it, or the reason for it, but there were other powerful creatures out here in the wilderness of eternity, and he did not wish to meet them to ask them.

Gods, the mortals named them. There was a possibility that Gods had created dragons. In the bleak times before life had existed in the universes, Valentino had carefully followed the other dragons around for something to do, and had come to the conclusion that dragons worked very much the same as mortals, only instead of dying and their energy being turned into something new, dragons died and were immediately replaced with themselves. For all Valentino knew, he could have died a hundred times. A hundred million times. The mortals had a similar system to this called reincarnation, though reincarnation resulted in a different form, and no recollection of the life they had left, only the energy – the soul – was the same.

The one constant throughout all of this living and dying was: paperwork.

Valentino approached the tall, glass-faced building, its neon light radiant in the darkened sky, and approached the main reception desk. The wrinkled, horned demon on the other side was appropriately grumpy, as demons always were. "welcome to Hell Afterlife Ssservicess, oh great majessstic ssscaled one, and what can a lowly minion sssuch asss I asssissst you with?"

"I wish to speak to an administrator. Mortal filing system."

Vibrant green eyes regarded him slyly, weighing up the possibility of telling the winged visitor to sod off, and not getting incinerated by dragon fire in the process. Letting a dragon into the building probably wasn't a wise idea. The demon coughed, glancing at Security, who promptly turned his back on the scene. The Dragon, it was clear, was the receptionist's problem, now.