Page 16 of Where Light Cannot Follow

Cliché until you live it. Until you cry yourself to sleep while hunger gnaws at your stomach. Until you cower in your father's presence so completely that his disappearance brings relief despite knowing you'll likely starve. Until you're reduced to stealing green tomatoes from your neighbor's pathetic garden, eating them so fast they leave you vomiting for an entire day.

"Your dad's gone, Mikey." Mom's voice again, eyes watering.

"This isn't real."

The room shudders. The television’s jingle warps, stretching into a metallic whine. The edges of the living room begin to blur, colors bleeding into one another like wet ink. Virgil stands beside me, releasing what sounds like a relieved breath. "You broke the loop."

Tears stream down his face, along his jaw. One catches on his lip, following its curve.

"Can we leave?" I ask, rolling my shoulders back. I am not that boy cowering and begging. And I will never be again.

"I'm so sorry, Dante." Virgil's gaze sweeps the scene. It’s somehow more pitiful knowing he witnesses it. The empty shelves are stacked with broken plastic cups and grease-stained pizza boxes. A painting hangs crooked on the wall, some yard-sale special of two cherubs embracing. The refrigerator hangs open behind us, empty and glaring fluorescent white light onto the sun-faded flooring.

"Save your sympathy." I straighten, putting distance between myself and the recliner. I'm not Mikey Dante anymore, the starving child from a rust-bucket town whose father abandoned him. I'm Michael Dante, a man who has doors opened for him, suits custom-tailored, and a refrigerator stocked with chef-prepared meals. "He survived."

Virgil blinks away another tear, his expression solemn. "Until he died and went to hell."

I release a disgusted sigh, then notice a door across the room. A door that doesn't belong. That must be the exit. "I've already survived hell once. I’ll do it again.”

8

VIRGIL

The click of Dante's watch hand advancing echoes through the swamp as we step back into the mire. He doesn't notice as he sweeps his arm across his nose against the stench. His expression scarcely changes. This man has mastered the art of schooling his features, hardening his heart into something impenetrable.

Now I understand why. Whatever hesitation I carried about helping him—the weary suspicion that he would choose his cage like so many before him—dissolved the moment I witnessed his first genesis scene.

All aspects of modern human life fascinate me. I'm a soul centuries removed from living—from tasting food, feeling sea-spray carried on wind, the warm kiss of sunlight after endless winter. The mortal world has transformed in ways both wondrous and bewildering. Chariots gave way to carriages, then to motorcars that continue evolving with each passing decade. Every soul that arrives carries fresh memories of these marvels, each iteration somehow more astounding than the last. And I witness it all secondhand, borrowed from others' minds, filtered through their remembrances.

It is the only window I have left to that world.

Dante walks ahead now, shoulders squared, spine rigid. He doesn't look down at the muck his shoes squelch through. When a creature from the deep disturbs the tea-black water, its scaled hide breaching before vanishing again, he doesn't even flinch. Such discipline can conquer empires. It can also build prisons no one else can see.

Some things about humanity remain unchanged across millennia.

Human passions—jealousy, bitterness, desire, secrets carefully guarded.

Human genius—artistry, hope, hunger for beauty in even the bleakest circumstances.

And the capacity of some to neglect their children.

In my time, people abandoned infants to exposure, leaving them to die from winter's brutal cold. Others who were abandoned when older or collected by gangs or makeshift families ran half-wild through streets, begging at bath houses and marketplaces. Pickpockets. Street performers. Or worse.

They all wore the same brazen expression—the whooping thrill of surviving another day—possessed by the wild belief that life might prove kind, that tomorrow would bring mercy.

That expression serves only as armor, though.

The Dante in his genesis scene didn't wear it yet. Instead, his form flickered between the man before me and the soft-faced child of his past, bearing an expression I recognized with painful clarity. A boy named Felix wore that same look when he stumbled into my home, soaked through as a storm raged overhead.

I'd taken him in, offered shelter and education, a place at my table. He received safety that Dante never knew, yet his wounds still carved deep scars. He never descended to this wretched place. A singular mercy among my sea of sorrows. But Marcus, when he arrived here and became the first I guided free, told me of Felix's fate. The boy had kept my tomb honored, managed my library, and worked diligently even after I was gone.

The expression Felix wore that first storm-swept night, the same one young Mikey Dante bore, was one of hope shattering. Wide eyes and pursed lips speaking of innocence departing a body far too soon.

My voice emerges barely more than a whisper over the swamp's ambience. "It is a fearsome thing, I understand, finding oneself alone and self-reliant as a young child."

Dante whirls, coat spinning around him like ruffled feathers. "Do not speak as though you comprehend anything about it. One glimpse at my life reveals nothing about me." His eyes blaze with such intensity that they gleam ruby-bright. "I’m not a man who wallows in the past. What's behind us is finished. Lingering over it produces no gain. That's what my mother did." He practically spits her title. "Dwelt on wrongs done to her until she drank herself to death."

It's the most he's spoken at once, certainly with the rawest of emotion. Pointing out how deeply this still impassions him, proof that he hasn't moved past it, would serve no beneficial purpose.