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It was wrong. My skin crawled as we walked through, many of them moaning as we passed; not because they were trying to get our attention, but because that was all they could do. Eventually we came across a woman who reacted to our presence, she was lying inside a tent, on the ground, and looked up at me, stretching her hands out toward me.
Her mouth was moving, her eyes bright, vibrant, and alert. But the sounds she made, I couldn’t understand her.
It was as if she had lost the ability to speak.
My heart… I felt like it had stopped beating. My breath caught in my chest as I watched her try desperately to form words, and the dawning realization that she was no longer able to. I knelt beside the woman and took her hand in mine as tears streaked down my face.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t.
The woman’s eyes filled with tears and began to glisten. It wasn’t until she pointed at the young child curled up in a ball on the other side of the tent that I realized there was one there. The child was awake, but she was non-responsive like the others. I went to reach for the child’s hand, but Abaddon was there first, placing his hand gently on her head.
A soft pulse of golden Light went out from his fingertips, and, almost instantly, some of the color returned to the child’s cheeks. She blinked, sat up, and stared intensely at Abaddon.She wasn’t afraid of him. Instead, she marveled at every detail, reaching excitedly to try swing from his horns.
“Are you… my father?” she ventured.
Abaddon frowned, pulling back slightly to keep his horns out of her reach. “Your father?”
The child didn’t reply. She could only look at him, expectantly, hoping that he would answer her question. “I am not your father.”
The little girl frowned, deflated. “Then, where is he?”
Abaddon glanced at me, then he looked at the girl again. “I am not sure… but if I find him, I will return him to you.”
The girl paused, momentarily distracted by his wings as they brushed against the fabric of the small tent, then asked, “Are you my father?”
“D-die…” the woman croaked, calling our attention once more. This time, I did as Abaddon had done—holding her hand to send the faintest trickle of Light into her skin. It began to glow, and her eyes lit up. She closed her mouth, smacked her lips, and looked at me with purpose.
“You’re going to be alright,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”
The woman swallowed. “I want… to die,” she croaked, her voice hoarse and raspy. “Please. We cannot die.”
My heart crunched again. I wiped my eyes with the back of my free hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you, but I’m going to fix this, I promise.”
“We suffer…shesuffers… please, end our suffering.”
There were moans now heard throughout the camp. When I turned my head to look around me, others were looking in our direction, hands outstretched, their jaws slack. They were groaning, trying to make words, but where an individual voice failed, the clamor of the group did well enough to fill in the blanks.
They wanted death.
All of them.
“Abaddon,” I rasped. “What’s happened to them?”
“It is Heaven no longer,” he said. “You were right … this is Purgatory.”
“But how?”
“You won’t get answers from them,” came an old, wizened voice from outside the tent. We exited the tent, reluctantly leaving the woman and child who had both slowly started falling back into their stupor. An old man sat on a stoop, at the lip of a broken building that at one point would have had beautiful stained-glass windows and the most impressive golden façade. It was nothing, now. Ruined. The old man considered us carefully as we approached him, clearly more aware of his surroundings than the others, and still able to speak.
“You can see us?” I asked.
The old man nodded. “You are angels come to rescue us from our damnation, yes?”
“I… I want to. I hope to.”
“It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen any of your kind. I’m grateful for your efforts, though I fear they are in vain.”
