Elysium: Book Six of The Liminality

Chapter 1: The Mists of Abdiel

It's not the whingeing hordes of moldy people that bother me. I can handle the wind, relentless as it is, and the dingy skies under that queer squinty orb that passes for a sun. These particular annoyances of the after realm they call Lethe I can tolerate. The thing that gets to me the most, that I can least abide, is the insidious dampness.

Now I grew up in Florida. I know humidity. I know the walls of water that subtropical thunderstorms can throw down. I know cold too. I spent one entire winter in a New Hampshire prison picking up trash on work details along sleety highways. But these slopes of Mt. Abdiel can do wicked things with water in all its forms.

Mist saturates every pore of your clothing and condenses into trickles. Rocks weep. Ledges seep. Boulders scale over with flakes of ice and spikes of rime.

The orb gives off so little radiant heat that even on a sunny day, I can never fully dry my clothes. I used to strip them all off, dangle them in the wind and wait till the orb was down to its last slivers of light. They would still feel clammy when I put them back on.

The wetness spawns copious growths of moss and lichens that drape and smother everything. And where that shit won't grow there's algae sliming all, even the backs of people, particularly those who haven't budged from their resting places in some time. If only these sedentary souls had the shelf-life of Old Ones, Lethe would be way prettier.

But they don't. They rot. Unlike in the Liminality, flesh rots here. Not fast. It's not a bacterial decay. More like a gradual weathering. Wounds fail to heal. Sores don't scab over, they just get larger.

There's nothing to be done but sew them up, patch them over with scraps of cloth and get on with things. Makes for some gruesome sights. Lots of friendly zombies here who don't want to eat you. They just mind their own business.

The one saving grace is that I can turn off the discomfort whenever it's too much to bear. Senses are optional in Lethe. Pain and cold are a choice. That's how people manage to put up with all that damage and decay. I only resort to numbing on days when I'm feeling particularly desperate. Usually I opt to feel the bad with the good. Otherwise, what is the point of an afterlife? I might as well become a Shade.

***

The morning mists are extra thick today. The gorges are all socked in and the ridges were just shadowy suggestions of solidity behind the cloud banks. I can always hear the ocean no matter which way the wind is blowing. Those waves never stop crashing.

I suppose it's a good thing I can't see past my outstretched hand. The rare clear mornings where everything comes into view only reveals in stark detail how little progress I have made up this mountain and how much farther I had to go to reach the top.

Why do I want to reach the top? Well, certainly not for the view. Fritz, my Guide, told me that achieving the summit was the ticket to my getting to Elysium, and I can only assume that it doesn't rain and mist twice a day in Elysium the way it does here.

Gaia's there, too, supposedly. Her silence makes me anxious. I don't know if I should be more pissed or scared that she hasn't gotten in touch with me. She said she would. But maybe it's beyond her control. Maybe Elysium is as much a prison as it is a reward for polished souls.

Fritz says there's a place near the top called the 'Table of Accession' where the transition is made. Why a stairway to heaven begins with a table kind of baffles me, but I guess I'll find out why soon enough. Maybe it's not a literal 'table.'

At least the slopes up high aren't quite as crowded as they were down by the dunes. There's elbow room up here and I can escape the running commentary on my climbing technique from the moss-draped veterans who never seemed to budge from their spots on the ledges.