Crack.

A small twig snapped underneath the foot of the woman. She moved slowly but unerringly through the lush forest. Though she moved in a straight line nothing in the forest ever seemed to be in her way, almost as though the plant life was moving itself just enough to let her by. Sunlight came down in patches to reach the forest floor, birds chirped, insects hummed, and all manner of larger wildlife were active but seemed oblivious to the human woman in their midst. The few that did notice her immediately turned away and left.

She was an oddity. Alone, nearing the culmination of her pregnancy, eyes hollow as they stared blankly through the trees, feet barely picking up enough to clear the next step, an air of death clinging to her. A plain white robe wrapped around her, belted across her belly. It was beginning to appear dirty and had some tearing around the bottom hem where she had walked through or tripped across something.

Crunch.

An acorn broke under her foot. Though at one time she had worn leather shoes of some kind, there was nothing but meager strips left of them that did nothing in the way of protecting her feet; feet that were dry, cracked and bleeding. She stumbled and fell once again, noiselessly, and after a few moments stood quietly to her feet and continued walking in the same perfectly straight line she had been walking for the past 3 days. Though the world around her teemed with life and beauty, her eyes never left their destination, as if she could see something no one else could.

Finally, her goal came into sight, and had her eyes not been lifeless, she would have been in awe. A willow tree stood atop a small rise, and around the hillock was a depression roughly five feet across and three to four feet deep filled with crystal clear water. The willow stood nearly sixty feet tall, and its canopy spread out in a nearly one hundred foot radius from the trunk in every direction. The massive roots ran through the pool of water surrounding the tree and then spread out across the ground deep into the surrounding trees. Anyone could see that the air shimmered with magic around the tree that shouldn’t exist.

As she continued forward the leaves and branches moved ever so slightly so she could walk through them without being touched. Reaching the pool she stumbled and fell into the water. After a moment where she didn’t move some roots came out and lifted her above the water, completely still. The small amount of life left in her eyes left her as she stared at the beauty of the tree. Had there been anyone nearby to hear, they would have heard a voice whisper ever so softly.

“Oh my precious child, what they have done to you I…I am so sorry. I will keep my promise.” Roots began to come out of the dirt from the direction of the tree, slowly wrapping around the woman who had grown completely still, dragging her underneath the base of the trunk as the ground opened to receive her. “Though the world changes and dies, your son will be part of a new future.”

As the woman completely disappeared and the dirt settled, these final words hung in the air, “…if there is any hope left…”

* * *

He lay quietly in the darkness, eyes closed, content to enjoy a moment of calm and peace. Though he couldn’t explain it, it felt a lot like floating in a pool, weightless, just being carried along by the force of the water. There were no real emotions to be felt…there usually weren’t. Numbness had consumed him long ago.

As he began to wonder how long he’d been in this state, somewhere between waking and sleeping, the question became moot at the arrival of extremely loud Tejano music playing next to his head. His eyes shot open and he bolted up. Well…he tried. His eyes didn’t open, and his body didn’t move.

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“Bahahahaha, if you could have seen your reaction! I mean…you can’t, because you don’t exist, but if you could read souls, oh man, that was great. I’m glad someone was here to see it this time, unlike when that happened to you in high school.”

The voice seemed to just…exist…in his head. He felt like he tried to look around to no avail. “Who’s there!?”

“Oh wow…you’re talking to the voice in your head…that can’t be a good sign. You should get checked.”

He paused. “I’ve talked to myself most of my life, and you are most certainly NOT the voice in my head.”

“Prove it.”

Before answering, the increasingly confused man thought to himself, “this feels like a scene out of a bad movie.”

The voice responded. “Gasp! This IS a scene out of a bad movie! How did you know? What gave me away?”

“…OK I know I didn’t say that out loud…”

“There is no ‘out loud’ or ‘in your head’ here. This is a soul space.”

“A soul space? What does that even mean?”

“Oooohhh…it means you’re dead bro. I’ll give you a minute to process that one.”

Silence.

Was he dead? Could he be dead? Surely he’d remember right? Could he remember anything else?

Name: Michael Rayburn. Check.

Age: 32. Check.

Reference to being awoken by Tejano music in high school: he was sleeping at a buddies house before finals and he had said he’d sleep with the alarm (back when people actually used alarm clocks) and he had been unprepared to find out that his friend didn’t use a buzzing noise, he used full volume music from a country whose language he didn’t speak. Check.

Friends name: Christopher. Check.

So his memory worked. What was the last thing he remembered?

…nothing…and then his head began to hurt. Head? Soul? That was going to be confusing.

“Let me just stop you there big guy. There are different types of deaths, and I’m afraid yours was the traumatic kind that leads to ill-formed memories and a big blank spot. Sorry hombre, you’re not going to be pulling that up any time soon. You’ll probably come back to it eventually, but you’ve got some work to do to get there.”

Suddenly there was a small white light glowing in front of him. “In the meantime, I’m here to be your guiding light. Ha! Get it!?”

Michael looked at the light for a second before responding. “so…what…you’re my guardian angel? You’re nothing like any angel I ever heard of.”

“OK first off no angel is anything like any angel you’ve ever heard of. Secondly no, not an angel. A wisp…but you know…not like the ones on your world that were actually combusting balls of oxygenated gas produced by dead stuff…a real wisp. Hmm…to be fair you don’t have a reference for that either. Any whose, I’m sure we could chit chat forever, but you’ve got a date with destiny! …That is a phrase from your world I will never understand, though I do like it when it’s used ironically to describe a stripper.

“So here’s the scoop, the big guns upstairs decided that your soul has some marvelous potential, but somewhere along the way in life you lost a lot of it. So now, you’re getting a second chance! A chance to live and learn and be the best you that you can be. No, it’s not like purgatory, you’re not working off sins or anything like that. You’re going to a real place, another world, a dying world that, for all intents and purposes, could use a hand. Aaaaand since records show you as at least not being a bad guy, here’s your chance to help some people!”

Michael just silently took in all the words being thrown at him, trying to get a grasp on any form of reality, but the only thing that his mind kept coming back to was, “are all wisps this a-holeish? I mean, apparently I’m dead and you’re just laughing at me, making jokes, and throwing some hefty stuff at me and you don’t seem to care about the effect it’s having on me at all. You’d be fired where I come from for bad customer service.”

“Yeah, I used to answer the phone when people would press 0, but I got early retirement. I’ll level with ya…most spiritual entities rank up over time. Me? There’s a reason I’ve never been promoted. Lucky you though, right now we’re a liiiiittle short staffed due to a solar event in another system, so they’re pulling in everyone. Someone looked at you and decided I was the right ball of light for the job, so congrats! Not everyone gets to enjoy this level of sadism. Time is short however, and you’re needed elsewhere.”

He needed time to process. Michael tried desperately to buy himself a little more time before he was shunted off. “According to you we’re in a soul space, I would imagine time is a lot more relative and dynamic here than the linear you’re making it sound like.”

“Seriously? You live in a world where you don’t even understand the 4th dimension and you want to school me on how it works? Please. Technically you were due 374 years ago, now shut up, you’re going. Oh! And don’t forget to leave a good review! All feedback is welcome.”

With that the light disappeared, the voice stopped, and Michael felt himself going dark again, wondering if Yelp was a thing in the spirit-verse.