Inbetween - Book 1 of the Guardian series

Chapter 3 - Learning to be dead

"So, this is like purgatory." Amelia tried. 

They were back at her 'world'. Apollo sat at the harp and played with it, more or less back to silence, while she walked around the dust and prodded at it, watched a skeleton crumble under her fingertips, explored the dried up ocean. It had been an ocean once. It came right up against the platform the ruins sat on. 

"Something like, I suppose." Apollo replied from above her. Stroked the harp gently with his fingers. 

"Are we the only two people here?"

"No." Apollo glanced down at her. She was walking around, wearing the clothing he'd gotten the tree to grow for her, exploring the world that represented her spirit. It was depressing. Dry. Barren. Empty of warmth. But the ruins meant that something had been here once, something beautiful. "This rain-" He glanced up at the sky, at the drizzling rain, "-shouldn't cause you illness. There's no illness here."

"I was going to ask about that."  Amelia admitted as she dug her feet into the dry sand. It didn't matter how much it rained. It never reached the ground. "So no hunger, no thirst, no illness. Do we feel emotion and pain?"

"You can't avoid emotion." Not unless you were like him, and tired of it, of this, of everything. "Injury, only if we need to. If we want to. Injury still can happen in the living world and we can be killed. But we don't die. If we are fatally wounded we're returned here and we just have to wait till we heal again." Apollo had experience with that. When he was younger and more active in his involvement in the world, not always wisely, he had gotten injured more than once. "I don't recommend you try it."

"I don't see why I'd get injured." She muttered. Jumped across a gap. It was easy. Like she could fly. "Can we create things;?"

"One day. Do you want to see the others?" Apollo stood up, pulling his cloak over himself as he did, gazing out. A bridge appeared.

Amelia didn't even bother to say 'yes'. She ran back up the slope, taking pleasure in how she could run now without feeling puffed, finding that some part of her was starting to accept it. Not completely. She still felt anxiety over Dylan's fate. Fear. It wasn't okay, abandoning him, and this Apollo hadn't really told her much. She still felt like she had to do things. Finish collage. Graduate. Marry. She wanted to have a couple of children. Not a horde of them, nothing like that, but she'd always liked the idea of adopting a child and having one when she had a good income. 

The outfit he'd given her had amused her. It was sort of old fashioned, though high enough for her to run and jump in, a warm blue silk chitin she had belted around her middle, with the fabric gathered on her shoulders under silver pins. Under that she'd been given pants, thick warm pants, dark chocolate brown and with a rough texture that felt kind of nice under her fingers. They both had this leaf pattern woven through them with silver thread, as if something tiny and delicate had just woven in and out, and feminine. It didn't cling to her body badly. It was Greek. Like him, she thought as she ran up the hill, a style that Apollo seemed to cling to when he was here. 

When she'd seen him as a young kid he'd always been 'normal'. Normal clothing. Normal smile. Only the glow gave him away as being something else. But here? He was Greek. He wore the tunic that Greek men must have worn and had bare legs. 

Apollo waited for her patiently as she made her way up the ruins, climbing up the side of the hill, and she stepped onto something that looked like a bridge.

The movement was almost instant. Suddenly, they were surrounded, and she was yanked out of the way of a pair of children as they raced past, Apollo quick to pull her sideways.