Afterlife: Oblivion #Wattys2024

08. I Prefer My Corpses Without the Maggots, Thanks

POV Jane Doe.

I feel like I'm drowning, like the weight of Raphael's words is pressing down on me, squeezing the air from my lungs and the hope from my heart. I want to scream, to rage, to claw at my own skin until I can rip myself free of this nightmare. But I can't move, can't breathe, can't do anything but stand there and feel myself shatter into a million jagged pieces.

Because he's right.

Of course he's fucking right.

In a game of souls and shadows, there's no room for weakness, no place for the soft, fragile parts of me that I've tried so hard to protect. The parts that had looked at Lily and seen a reflection of my own broken, battered heart. The parts that had made that stupid, reckless promise to keep her safe, no matter the cost.

I should have known better.

Should have realized that in this world, in this fucked up afterlife, there's no such thing as safety. No such thing as redemption, or hope, or any of the pretty little lies I'd clung to like a child clinging to a teddy bear.

No, there's only survival.

Only the cold, hard reality of what I have to do, what I have to become, if I want to make it out of this with some small shred of my soul intact.

A weapon. A blade.

A fucking tool in someone else's game, sharpened and honed until there's nothing left of me but an edge, a purpose, a destiny written in blood and pain and the ashes of everything I'd ever been.

I feel something break inside me then, something deep and fundamental and irreparable. It's like a dam bursting, like a levee finally giving way under the relentless pressure of the flood. And suddenly, I'm drowning in it, in the fear and the despair and the sickening, gut-wrenching realization of what lies ahead.

I thought I'd known pain before, thought I'd touched the depths of suffering and come out the other side. But this...this is something else entirely. This is a wound that goes soul-deep, a scar that will never fully heal.

And as I stand there, trembling and broken and so utterly, utterly lost, I feel the last vestiges of my hope slip away like sand through my fingers.

So as Raphael pins me with that merciless glare, I feel something inside me shift - like the last piece of denial and resistance regarding my true situation has just cracked and sloughed away, leaving only cold acceptance behind.

My shoulders slump almost unconsciously, letting the hardass punk rock exterior deflate into something more...malleable. Not quite contrite, not yet. But at least able to recognize the new currency that survival will require in this warped realm.

I open my mouth to give voice to that tentative, begrudging surrender just as a long, deep note splits the air. The sound of it lances straight through me, like reality itself is parting to make way for whatever fresh hell is coming our way.

Some primal, instinctive part of my brain screams at me to run, to hide, to make myself as small and insignificant as possible before the oncoming tide of power and consequence.

Like a thunderbolt from on high, his voice shatters the silence. "Esteemed guests, denizens of the heavenly realms and dwellers of the hellish depths, lost souls yet to find their place in this vast existence, I bid you welcome to the grandest of spectacles - to the fifth annual Ball of the Afterlife Crucible."

It rips through me, through every atom of my being, until I'm nothing but a raw, exposed nerve, flayed open and bleeding in the face of that terrible, awe-inspiring presence.