God's Gone AWOL

[10] Ashes and Wind

Cold and desolate.

These were the words that came to Bentley's mind as she first looked upon the barren, grey landscape before her. The dark blue sky reminded Bentley of the cold winter mornings back on Earth —except there was no sun to provide any warmth, just frothy white clouds moving rapidly with the never-ending air currents. Down below, the landscape was like a frozen desert filled with nothing but heavy silver rocks and ash-like sand. The chilly wind rushed over the rough hills in a ceaseless motion. If she still had her physical form, Bentley knew her hair and clothes would have been fluttering uncontrollably about her body. It honestly felt as though she were standing in a graveyard, minus the typical sanctuary-like comfort.

Physically getting inside the gateway went as smoothly as possible. For the first time in a long while, there were no complications associated with her plan, and no unexpected obstacles that stood in her way. She simply dove into the stream of departing souls as they swam towards the gate. Before she knew it, she was already on the other side, surrounded by a spiraling flow of white as every dying creature in the Earthly realm moved onto to their mysterious versions of the afterlife.

At first, the current was a little overwhelming. Since death was a constant thing, uncountable numbers of souls left their mortal bodies every single second. Bentley was just a singular drop in a vast ocean of unconscious movement, but thanks to the fact that she had hung onto her cognitive abilities before departing, she was able to navigate her way out of the mess. Soon, she had regained her footing atop a small rocky hill where she could take a look at her surroundings properly.

Behind her, like a terrifying beacon of light, the ever-flowing pillar of incoming souls stretched high into the sky before gradually breaking into soft clouds beyond the tornado. Purgatory wasn't the final destination after death, this was common knowledge. All of these boundless souls would eventually move on to other universes or whatever was beyond creation as everyone knew it. But in the meantime, they would sit here in this chilly realm until they were released by... well... Bentley didn't know who made the final call on each departing soul, nor how they were selected to leave. Nobody else knew for that matter. Perhaps it was God, perhaps it was someone else. There was no way for the living to tell.

Of course, when Bentley died, she hadn't moved on to Purgatory. Even in death, she had to be an exception to the rules. The time she spent in the grave was much more like an extraordinarily long and dreamless sleep. There was no dark void to stare into, nor a false reality to keep her mind prisoner. Truthfully, she felt as though she simply did not exist for those eighty-five years. There were no thoughts in her mind, no feelings, memories, or desires. She was nothing more than a powered off computer, incapable of existing as anything more than a pile of particles buried in the earth.

She didn't know why she hadn't moved on the way she should have. There were only two reasons that she could think of. Maybe it was because extraordinary things always seemed to happen to Bentley, and some anomaly coincidentally occurred that messed with the cycle of death somehow. Or perhaps whatever mysterious force that raised her up from the dead had somehow managed to stop her soul from leaving her body. Perhaps it had been planning her resurrection from the beginning. She was more inclined to believe the latter.

Regardless of what happened in the past, there was no doubt that this was Bentley's first time seeing Purgatory in person ...And boy was it weird. She felt as though she was standing on an entirely different planet —which in a way, she was. It was like nothing she had seen before across both of her lives.

However, as much as she wanted to just wander around and take a look at the view while she was there, Bentley actually had a mission to complete. Once she had finished processing the world around her, she decided to scale some higher ground in an attempt to locate the gateway to Heaven —or Camael and her army if they had already managed to breech through the realms. Either way, she was destined to face off with that whole lot someway or another.