Hell's Company

Epilogue (Edited)

"She has returned!"

Those ringing words were first I heard as I entered the Pale, screamed not in horror, but in joy. Everything was mild, pleasant, and muddled. Joy felt like a foreign concept to me, like I had only learned about it, never felt it.

The judges huddled around me, no longer too bright to see, but like my dreams; nearly translucent skin, billowing white robes, and long white hair. The light seemed to pass through them. I looked down at my hands, faintly surprised to see they were the same.

"Kin..."

"Welcome home."

"What is going on?" My voice didn't sound like my own. "Are Lucielle, Michael, and Luca okay? Did I save them?"

They seemed uneasy and concerned about my later questions.

"Yes, you saved them."

"They will be fine."

A wave of relief washed over me, faintly. That brought me to ask another question, one that I already knew the answer to. "What am I?"

All the voices at once answered me. "You are one of the Fallen, the first. You disobeyed and fell to Earth and the Five watched you live your human life and became jealous, deciding to fall as well. Because of their willingness to fall, we made them fall further, beneath the crust of the earth, to the realm of the evil souls. With them ruling, we foresaw the balance in Hell tipping, crumbling, and you were repurposed because you are the key. You have been reincarnated lifetime after lifetime as we patiently waited until one of your reincarnations was eligible for damnation, so we could send you to Hell to complete the prophecy and restore the balance. Once it was completed, you regained your status and ascended. We raised you from Hell."

Brief flashes of my past lives surfaced in my memory, only for a moment, and slipped away. They were always short, no afterlife in which to take a brief reprieve. I was faintly surprised to see that I had spent them as male, female, and varying degrees between, but the judges had no gender until they fell. I was too good in life? Back to the human world I went, with no knowledge of my true self that had been lost in my first human lifetime. "Why was it not obvious that I was one of you when I first arrived?"

"It took time for you to regain your power: the mortal lives drained much of it and being in Hell did not help it further. It steals the power of light, slowly siphoning it away from you. It should have been clear early on, from your attack on us before you fell, your inability to be marked, and your immunity to Hell's disease. That, of course, does not include the fairly obvious sign as you regained your strength: your ability to destroy a human soul."

I pondered over this information, all seeming plausible. "What am I to do now?"

"Your purpose is at it always was, if you remember it. You should."

I did. It was to watch over human souls, judge them, sort them, and either damn them or welcome them to Heaven. All overseeing in this pale afterlife, clouds, mist, and fog. I did as I was told, because that's what I remembered. I was not allowed in Heaven, only the Pale. We belonged to the Pale and we were part of it.

The Persephone Flemming of my previous life drifted away as time went on, what felt like an eternity. She felt like a fleeting dream, some other world where that couldn't possibly have happened. A Heavenly Judge, turned mortal and sent to Hell? That couldn't be. I was losing my sense of self. I became we. We served a purpose and nothing else. We were robotic in nature, nothing more, nothing less.

We observed the comings and goings of mortals in their lives and afterlives. Their existence seemed ultimately insignificant, but odd, intriguing, and different from us. To love the sunshine, to feel pain, to fear death, how strange and frivolous it all was. Everything was observed from a very distant haze, like looking through misty glasses, except everything was crystal clear.