I suppose, if there was a lesson to be learned here, it was that Andalon was a master of understatement. She’d said a lot of ghosts were on the way.

She hadn’t been kidding.

Fortunately, a feedback loop came to my rescue. Whenever the numbers of ghosts went up to the point that I started to freak out, I’d split in two like a cell in mitosis, creating a new dopplegenneth in the process, which meant more hands and more help, and that brought the stress back down.

Barely.

Like with my first two dopplegenneths—my ghost-self, and my original, physical self—all these new dopplegenneths were decoupled from one another. We didn’t have to deal with each other’s sensory input, and, like with my physical body, I could relocate the me that I happened to be to any one of the other ghost-bodies at any given time. At first, I’d tried to keep tabs with the situation by switching my point-of-view every minute or so, so as to evenly spread myself around, but that ended up stressing me out enough that a fifth dopplegenneth came into being because of it. Also, all the other dopplegenneths had been doing the same thing. Eventually, it came to the point where we all agreed that we would stick to one ghost-body each and trust one another that I would do the right thing—I, meaning they.

The end result of all this was that the screensaver’s grassy plain was shaping up to be a kind of afterlife ranch resort, like Big Sky up by Crownsleep, only without the snow or the cold. I’ll be honest: if this was what the afterlife was going to be like, Lassedile teachings of what Paradise was couldn’t have been more wrong. Then again, I was the one making and maintaining this Paradise, so perhaps that was to be expected.

For my faith—both Lassedicy in general, but specifically Angelical Lassedicy—to understand the “purpose” of Paradise—or, really, anything at all—you had to understand the createdness of mankind and the world we inhabited. Across its many variations, Lassedile philosophy was united by a belief in teleology—the idea that, in creating the world, the Godhead had given every component of reality an innate purpose. Everything was a symbol, reflecting or embodying some aspect of the divine plan; it was allegory on steroids.

As created beings, all the mysteries of our existence had their answer in our Creator and Its intentions. We were the Angel’s subjects, cogs in a vast mechanism whose totality we could not truly grasp while in the grip of this mortal coil. To Lassediles, Salvation was nothing more or less than realignment with the Divine Will. We were like a defective compass, broken by sin. The Church and its many denominations taught that true happiness came—and could only come—from being reunited with our Maker, cleansed of the impurities that tainted our lifetimes. Reality was an autocracy, ruled by the Godhead.

And that had consequences. It meant that, ultimately, human beings were subjects, meant to be ruled. It meant that fulfillment, actualization, goodness, joy, beauty, and truth would not and could not ever come from within ourselves, the world around us, or our connection with one another. They came from God, and only from God, and to the extent that life and the world appeared to be good, it was only because of the fragments of divine Light that shone within all creation. And though logic and reason could illuminate portions of the Godhead’s plan, man’s ultimate purpose was submission. We were receptacles for divine love, and that love would fill us and raise us to true glory. That which was without God had no merits of its own. As scripture said, “it would be better if they had not been born.”

Or so I was told.

In the Colonial era, it was not uncommon for mayors and magistrates to host debates, where Munine and Trenton sages would get to trade blows in front of an onlooking public. In that day and age, Trenton’s lands were the site of a struggle of civilizations, and both sides were eager to prove the superiority of their doctrine.

Lassedicy believed in one world and one god; one life to live; linear time. For Daiism, on the other hand, the world was but a cycle. Time, like the world, was round. Gods and demons came and went, no different from mortals. All were trapped in the endless cycle of rebirth, trapped by the delusion of the belief in their own selfhood.

For Daiists, the question of salvation came to be known by the Daikenja’s words: the Gateless Barrier. To the Rosoku school—the oldest, and most influential of all the Daiist schools, and the only school to originate in the faith’s Munine homeland—the way through the Gateless Barrier was chronicled in the ancient wisdom text, The Lengthless Road, where generations of scholars expounded upon the mysteries first discerned by the Daikenja himself.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

To this view, life was something to be escaped. Suffering, attachment, and dissatisfaction, were weights that held us down. There were similarities between Daiism and Sunbasked Lassedicy; I always thought that was likely why they were so heavily persecuted in the Second Empire. Both religions explained salvation as liberation. Yet what awaited the liberated soul at the end of the Lengthless Road was not paradise, but… emptiness. The illusion of the self would finally be broken. Our loan of existence would be returned to the world, like a flame being snuffed out, or a hollow bubble, glistening in the sun.

There was a lot of friction between these two ideas, and over the course of history, that friction was responsible for the deaths of numberless millions. That knowledge had always weighed heavily on me. There was a cruel irony in it. Both Lassedicy and Daiism viewed one another as mutually exclusive and wholly incompatible with one another. Yet, on closer inspection, they both turned on a common axle: annihilation. Both faiths saw our identities—our living selves—as a patina—a crust, one that covered up our true nature. Both faiths saw the lives we lived as things to be unmade—boiled away. The only difference was in the means: one would have our identity dissolve into the aether, the other would see it scrubbed away in preparation for our subsumption into the divine.

That had always seemed so sad to me. Did our life have such little value? I’d be lying if I said I could fully stomach either viewpoint. Life was too unique to be mere transience.

And, I guess that’s where I came in. By a twist of fate, I’d been put in charge of at least part of the afterlife. And can you bet your axe I was going to do things my way. All the convolution? Gone. The erasure of identity? Gone. This Lengthless Road was going to be as simple as pie: plain old wish fulfillment. From here to eternity, things were going to be one big playground, for everyone to flourish; it was going to be Shrovestide morning every morning.

In gaming terms, I’d gotten a class upgrade. Was I still a neuropsychiatrist? You betcha. But now, I was more. I was a sculptor of flesh and dreams, and I did it all on my own—unless you counted my other dopplegenneths as getting help from somebody else, which I did not. Andalon had expressed a bit of concern at my third and fourth divisions (this left a total of five of me) and offered her help, but I—we—politely, but firmly told her that we wanted to figure it out on our own.

“It’s not that I don’t want your help,” I’d said. “I do. I just want to see if I can figure it out on my own. If I’m turning into a wyrm—and I am—and if a wyrm’s job was to save people—and it is, right?—”

—She’d nodded in agreement—

“—Then, gosh darn it, I need to be able to do it on my own,” I’d said. “I don’t want to be powerless anymore.”

Besides, none of this afterlife space was really real, so it was basically a sandbox for me to experiment in.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” I’d asked, and she’d answered happily: “Andalon does not know!”

We attended to the desires of the dead one at a time. For once, things weren’t about me.

No.

It was about a dowdy, long-faced woman named Esmé. She was a downtrodden soul. Not even the phantasy sun’s golden light could unsour her, or bring a smile to her sullen face. She’d spent her life under the heel of other people’s expectations, a dowdy cubicle worker who spent all day making marketing calls, while getting insulted from both sides—from the voices that yelled at her through the phone, and from the coworkers that flung cheesy puffs at her from across the room. All the while, Esmé just wanted to shine. She wanted to shine and be seen, brimming with the beauty and poise that biology had denied her.

So I gave it to her. I gave her beauty. I sculpted Esmé into a page from Polovian legend: the queen of the ancient wood. I made her tall and regal. Porcelain skin, unshakeable grace, an aquiline face; red, rambling tresses alive with autumn leaves flowed down and past two spiraling wooden horns, onto a trailing gown as black as Night. The gown was embroidered by golden spiderwebs that glistened in the Sun.

It wasn’t about me.

It was about an old man named Spence who wished he was, once more, as young as he felt. He’d died an artist, jaded and bitter, unable to produce the images he liked because no one would deign to buy them. He dared to believe in wondrous things, even though his clients just wanted him to design cereal box covers.

So I gave it to him. I gave him his youth—setting him to my daughter’s age—and I gave him his wonder. He wanted a dragon as a friend. And who wouldn’t? A partner to stay with you for good and for ill, who could—and would—carry you skyward like someone from a fairy tale you’d read long ago? It was like finding one’s soulmate, only more plausible.

So I gave him his dragon. I gave him a dragon as green as the screensaver’s hills, a dragon with wide wings and soft scales and a froggy laugh that could be heard for miles. And the best part? One of the ghosts volunteered for the role. Her name was Eunice; she was fond of cats.

Yes, it wasn’t about me—it wasn’t about the keeper of Paradise; it was about the denizens that dwelled within it. It was about them. And there were so many of them.