Page 59 of Where Light Cannot Follow

"My god," Dante hisses. "Is that a child?"

"It's rare, but it happens. When they've absorbed too much of their caregivers' pain. When the loops passed down to them prove heavier than their small souls can overcome.”

Dante's composure cracks. He has weathered every misery of this realm with remarkable composure, but this—this is the thing that shakes my unshakable companion.

"Let's see if he'll allow us to approach,” I whisper, and Dante nods. We move slowly through the grass. The child's pale blue eyes surface once more, then he bolts, vanishing beneath the swaying blades.

"I say we stop here, Dante," I announce, letting my voice carry, too loud, deliberately relaxed. "This seems a good spot for a rest."

I lower myself into the grass, though my body doesn't bend a single blade. Dante settles beside me, stretching his long legs out and crossing his ankles. He, unlike me, makes an impression on the earth.

"Have I ever told you the story of the painted fox, Dante?" I ask, again, too loudly.

"I don't know that one," Dante replies, catching on immediately.

"Well, there was a fox—a happy, joyful thing with a great bushy tail and clever climbing skills. But he was caught by villagers. You see, they were plagued by thieves stealing their grain, and they decided to blame the fox."

"Was it the fox stealing from them?" Dante asks with such conviction that I wish, more than ever, that I could touch him. That I could place an appreciative hand over his, give his knuckles a squeeze of gratitude.

The child has grown quiet, but he's still near. His fear pulses like an erratic heartbeat.

"No," I reply. "It wasn't the fox's fault, but they blamed him anyway. And they painted him with tar and bright dye, marking him as a thief, making him vivid red and sticky. His fur clumped together, leaving him freezing in the cool mornings and his skin exposed to the midday sun. Because he was so brightly colored, he couldn't hunt. His prey spotted him from great distances. This left him so frightened he stopped playing, stopped dancing in the sunlight, stopped chasing anything at all. He grew weak and hungry. Then the weather shifted. Rain came. Deluging rains that felt as though the gods wished to drown the world."

Dante frowns at me, uncertain whether this story suits a child's ears. But the boy has crept closer, and his eyes watch me with careful awareness.

"One day, when the sun returned, the fox crept from his burrow and clung to the forest's edge, head bowed in shame. A stork approached him. 'Why do you act so strangely, fox?' the stork asked. 'It's this paint upon me,' the fox replied. 'It marks me and harms me.' 'What paint?' the stork asked. The fox was near a still lake, and he looked down and caught his reflection. The rain had washed away the color and the sticky tar, leaving his fur free and glossy once more."

I stop speaking, letting the quiet settle between the three of us.

The child remains still for several minutes. Hesitantly, he creeps forward until he's nearly beside us.

"What happened to the fox, then?" he whispers, then immediately ducks his head again.

"Oh," I say, as if I've only just noticed him. "I haven't thought of the ending yet. Do you have any ideas?"

The boy straightens slightly. He has a smattering of freckles across his nose and an aged bruise mottling his pale skin beneath one eye.

"I think the fox wouldn't be frightened anymore."

"Why's that?"

"He'd know the paint wasn't there anymore. That it had never been him. It was just something that happened to him—oh." He lifts those pale blue eyes, and they widen. "Oh," he says again, more softly.

And then it happens.

The light encircles him. This only ever occurs for children, who somehow can ascend before reaching the peak. Perhaps because they have so little holding them here in the first place. The light is as bright as I imagine watching the sunrise from the roof of the world. Pure ivory, clean of any color.

The child smiles, everything that weighed him down washing from his expression like the rain clearing tar from fur. He laughs aloud, bright and free and startled by his own joy.

Then he's gone.

Dante leaps to his feet, and I rise beside him. He rushes to the spot where the child stood, and whirls back toward me.

There are tears in his eyes. A smile stretches his cheeks, leaving deep impressions, crinkling the corners of his eyes in a way that makes him look older and younger all at once. Similar to a man who lived a different life. Who knew peace. Who knew love.

"Did you feel that, Virgil?" He laughs, and it echoes across the emptiness. Tears slip down his cheeks, and he doesn't wipe them away. "That felt like—like⁠—"

"Heaven," I offer quietly. "That is what ascension feels like, Dante."