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Another attempt to lift himself only caused a wave of dizziness to wash over him. His brain felt foggy, as if he hadn’t slept in days. His vision doubled for a moment as he reset his equilibrium and struggled into a sitting position. His arms and legs felt like lead, but the longer he sat up, the more he felt some sort of strength wash over him.
An unfamiliar sensation ran over his entire body as if something as soft as feathers was moving along his skin. He shuddered at the light touch before a humming noise grew loud in his ears. A sudden pop sounded in his mind and he jolted forward, grabbing the wooden seat of the boat in a white-knuckle grip.
What the hell was that? he thought as his vision cleared and he scrambled back. Ahead of him, a cloaked man perched at the front of the boat, steering with a long pole dipped into the water.
Devon glanced into the water–a river. He was not the greatest swimmer, having come from the old country where it was all farmland and small ponds, but he could make a decent go of it in a life-or-death situation.
Keeping the cloaked man in his peripheral vision, he craned his neck to determine the best exit from the boat. He caught sight of the riverbank. People ambled along the river, seeming to move without any real direction. The hair on Devon’s arms stood on end. This was not right.
His mind tried once again to play over his previous day and how he might have gotten here, but he only saw glimpses—of a street, blood, and black eyes. Flashes of memories that he could not be sure were all his.
Definitely had one hell of a drinking binge, he thought to himself.
He rubbed his eyes a moment before looking back out. He knew he had been nowhere near a
body of water this morning. In fact, he was sure the city his job was in was completely landlocked, with no rivers to speak of nearby.
Escape. He had to escape. To jump out of this boat before he got even farther from his base of operations.
Peering over the edge of the boat, he could see that the water was pure black, but looked relatively calm. Large white fish swam right underneath the surface. When he reached out to touch the water, a rough voice broke the quiet.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the cloaked man warned. “They have no coin, so they stay there. Your soul is allowed admittance, but if you end up in the river, I cannot help you. Those souls will pull you right in,” the rusty voice murmured, just loud enough for Devon to hear him.
As if summoned, a skeletal hand breached the water and reached for Devon, barely making contact. He fell back against the bottom of the vessel as the boat tilted dangerously to the side before straightening out again.
The ferryman let out a harsh, ragged laugh as he moved them further along the river with that long pole that never seemed to leave the water. Slowly, hesitant if he really wanted to know, he looked back at the people milling about the shore. He realized the people seemed to have an
almost eerie blue haze of light around them. There was no source for the light aside from the
people themselves. They looked like… ghosts.
As he watched the shore, more of them appeared, seeming to materialize from the darkness in their blueish, eerie forms. More and more filled up the shoreline, moving with purpose now. They crowded the river’s edge and kept pace with the boat. A few even mindlessly stepped into the river and immediately disappeared beneath the surface, caught in skeletal clutches. One, less mindless than the others, flailed as they tried to return to the shore to no avail.
Devon swallowed and tasted bile.
“They can sense your soul, so they want nothing more than to pull you down to wallow with them. Stay in the boat, and you will be fine. It takes a hundred years of wandering before they can cross the gate without coin, and you do not want to join them.”
“Coin?” Devon asked, watching as another phantom stumbled into the river. Her gown looked ripped and torn, the style from hundreds of years before the Great War.
The ferryman plucked a coin from a bag tied around his waist. “A coin means your soul debt is paid and you can pass through the gates.”
The ferryman’s hand holding the coin looked almost as skeletal as the hands passing underneath the boat. Devon shivered, but the skeletal ferryman either did not notice his reaction or did not care.
“You’ve no need of coin since you took the seeds. No one has been offered the seeds before,”
the ferryman explained as he put the coin back into the bag.
Devon suddenly felt a deep sense of dread wash over him. This was not the result of a drinking binge. He was not dreaming at all.
“I’m dead,” the statement rolled off Devon’s tongue as he thought the words. His entire body stiff with shock and disbelief.
“Not truly, but the Goddess will fill you in on the details. I am simply to deliver you to the gates. Thanatos will meet you there and will take you to the Goddess’ domicile. Should you get distracted and wander off, well, it’s eternity down here, and the wrong place means you cannot regain what you’ve lost.” The ferryman finished his cryptic message right as the river opened up into a giant cavern.
“Goddess?”
***
Persephone paced the length of her office. Thanatos and Hecate eyed her from where they sat by the fireplace, the wood banked with blue flame.
