Termadril hulking form cast a shadow over Beth. The edges of her body blurred and her face was only partially familiar, as her features were a disorienting blend of the peasant girl she possessed and her own. A roiling sense of disgust festered within him, it was wrong. The peasant girl’s soul had been deformed, bent to Beth’s will and never able to return to the cycle of reincarnation.

He hated being Beth’s handler, but that was the duty of the Dragath Amora - the portal keepers of Hell. He sighed, lifting up her incorporeal form, wisps of her body trailing as they walked deeper into the darkness of Hell. She would be unconscious for at least a week, as her escape from the priestess had been crude and reckless. “She’ll pull through” Termadril reassured himself, “she always does.”

–

The correct ghost term for leaving a possessed body is ‘relinquishment’. A more accurate term would be ‘soul shredding’, because it felt like being jammed into an industrial sized paper shredder. Post soul mutilation, a ghost must tape the segmented parts of their mind back together. Most could not endure the experience, their souls remaining mangled, never fitting into a coherent form again.

I was currently in the state of recovery, my soul floating in a sea of paper strips; each strip resembling different parts of my past self, current self and prospective futures. Intermingled in my sea were foreign memories of the peasant girl I had possessed, causing the tide and currents of my soul to churn uncomfortably.

The art of separating myself from the memories of the peasant girl is theoretically straight forward - divide my memories from the memories of the possessed body. If you had only possessed a body for a week or two, these memories were easy to differentiate as they felt foreign, like pebbles in my shoes. The problem arose when a ghost possessed a body for longer, like a month or a year. Those pebbles disintegrated to dust becoming unnoticeable, the path treaded on so intermingled that the two souls warped. However, when the possession ended, only one soul could remain. This left the ghost with the arduous task of sifting through every memory, reliving their entire life, as well as the life of the possessed person.

I had only met a few ghosts who had survived a long-term possession, none of them felt whole - despite retaining their “true” soul. A melancholy haunted their eyes, as though their sea of paper strips had been burned asunder.

The peasant girl’s memories were easy enough to distinguish, so flushing them out was a simple act of patience. I mindlessly ripped out the parts that were not me, tossing the remains into oblivion. It was the kind of monotonous work that lent itself to meditation.

My meditations often started with reflecting on my past life; the rise and fall of Beth Mackel-Lee, the tech entrepreneur turned murder victim. Life back on Earth had been on a meteoric rise. My business partner, Paul, and I had met in college in Intro to Computer Science. It was not an encounter warranting attention, just a mutual resignation to boredom as the class rehashed topics we had both studied back in high school. We began sharing ideas on how we could revolutionise education, and streamline the process so that universities wouldn’t require students to sit through classes that were essentially redundant. Especially when the courses were charging thousands of dollars for content I could find on Youtube. Don’t get me wrong, I think education is valuable, but just because we were all about the same age, didn’t mean we all shared the same depth of knowledge.

So we programmed an app that amassed your knowledge and tailored the courses offered by school to maximise the “knowledge to equity” return (what we dubbed KTO). After a few years in Paul’s dad’s basement office, we began to find success. Our hard work paid off and we could apply the underlying technology outside of education - corporations looking for employees that matched their profile, regardless of degree and experience were very interested in KTO. Before we knew it, basements became skyscraper offices, and our team of two became two hundred.

Then we started preparing for an IPO, which should actually stand for Infinite Problems Ongoing, because every issue that could worm its way out of the floorboards did. The foundation of our business was rickety and Paul had not been clandestine in his code sourcing. Every computer programmer that Paul had jipped came at us with lawsuits, so I made an executive decision to buy out Paul. That discussion had ended with Paul shoving me off the roof of our office building. 42 floors later, all that remained of our IPO was a smattering of Beth on the streets of Lower Manhattan.

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My mom always said, “Life’s unfair, get used to it”, but I could not “get used to it”. In fact, as I fell, I felt a rage so wrathful I tasted blood and ash in my mouth. I screamed like a banshee, cursing Paul to the fiery pits of hell.

The unfairness continued when, after feeling the impact of death, I awoke in a cavern filled with the screams of tortured souls and a blazing inferno that was every shade of blue, red and green.

“That’s NOT how curses work asshole!” I pointed accusingly at the pitch black sky above my head where I assumed God was. I wasn’t the murderer, so why was I sent to Hell?

A mirthful chuckle sounded from all around me, as a crackling deep voice responded, “Actually, that's exactly how curses work. The price for sending someone to Hell is unending servitude - you can’t ask us to take on another mouth to feed without giving us some manpower to do so.”

“Now, tell me, are you going to be co-operative?” The disembodied voice no longer resounded from all directions but was clearly behind me. With a sprain-inducing look over my shoulder, I looked to see the shadow of a man at least two meters tall standing behind me.

“Co… co-operative” I sputtered, reeling at the ridiculous situation. “I don’t even… with what?”

The shadow man snapped his fingers and an ornate full body mirror materialized in front of me. Against the backdrop of an infinite firescape, with grotesque scaled body parts protruding from particularly dark burning flames, was a wraith-like reflection of a teenage Beth.

A sense of indignant fury washed through me, “Adolescence again? Are you f**king kidding me!” She was indeed in Hell, no room for doubt left.

The mirror blinked out of existence as quickly as it appeared, and the tall man smiled knowingly, “My name is [insert the sound of air snapping and the earth trembling], and this is my domain” he nonchalantly waved at the surrounding landscape. “It’s not my job to orient you with how things work here, but it is a necessary formality for us to meet.”

I stared up at the demon blankly, missing too much context to begin feigning understanding.

The demon snapped his fingers again, and suddenly the world disappeared, the reality that I understood bent as the crushing weight of the universe’s existence began to melt my insides into galactic soup. Stars blinked at me, their eyes piercing. Their sentience was evident as they spoke words that formed into light that travelled across galaxies - messages I would never understand. Time became molasses and tangible and could be poured like a condiment on a waffle. The demon snapped one last time.

He continued, “You meet me in order to understand that I am your God. What you experienced is but a sliver of the reality within which I exist. My role is to structure the insanity into a form wherein you can exist. That is why I am also known as the Architect. It is not a name but a title, one that is held by far more Gods than you might expect.”

I was in the process of weeping and screaming and tearing out my hair while he delivered the monologue. It felt as though the very fabric of reality had been torn. It had been only a fraction of a second, but it was undeniably clear that the entity before me was indeed a God.

His voice faded as I lost consciousness, reality again slipping between my fingers.

The memory of my arrival began to fade as I exited my meditation, I felt grounded in my conviction, reigniting my desire to survive.

I reviewed my progress in weeding out the peasant girl’s memories, and gave a satisfied nod when I confirmed 10% completed. It would take about a week at this rate, which was considered slightly faster than average.

After my reincarnation, I took things in stride - as best one can.

It turns out that society functions the same on Earth as it does in Heaven and Hell. Its accredited to the fact that most demons and angels ascended from human origin, and thus their cultures bled into their new divine realms. However, I was not in Hell on the Earth I was familiar with, but had been reborn into a different cosmic cycle. What scientists called The Big Bang in my previous life was actually called a cosmic shift, when the reality of one universe split to form a new one. It was down one of these alternate cosmos that I currently existed in. One fun fact I learned is that reincarnation can only happen once per cosmos, thus life was truly lived once per universe.

Although I digress, it helps to understand that there are no “do-overs”, and that dying meant no reincarnating into the same world, with a chance to see your loved ones again. The finality of my situation made it easier to move past the previous death of Beth, but I would never forget it. A life lesson in betrayal and the fickleness of mankind that would take multiple reincarnations to fade.

Taking another deep breath, I re-entered my meditation, replaying memories was a method we were taught to reinforce our identity. The practice allowed the cleansing process after a possession to be more efficient. Thus, I continued down memory lane, as I reflected on my life so far as a ghost.