CHAPTER 44

The light from the lamp post flickered, and she realized that she was moving closer to it. She let out a sigh, relieved to see something other than a yawning void around her.

Her limbs were transparent until she stepped into the light of the lamp. The lamp post stood on a round patch of cobblestone roughly ten feet in diameter. Curious, she crouched down and looked at the edge of the island she was on. The ground flickered and expanded with the light of the torch, and she tried to feel the edges of the ground with her fingers, only for her hands to vanish once they were outside of the light.

"Light equals matter. Okay." She walked around the edge of the island, but learned nothing new, then turned her attention toward the lamp.

It was ornate, and roughly ten feet tall. The flame inside was far too bright to look at directly, so she focused on the wrought iron structure beneath. Intricate patterns shifted along the length of the lamp, and the flickering light above cast twisted shadows down its length.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

The voice startled her, and she spun on one foot, her back slamming against the lamp.

"You!" she hissed.

"Me." Oliver stepped out of the darkness, wearing a white button down shirt and dress pants. His red skin was paler than usual, and his tie had been undone, hanging limply over his shoulders. "Or, at least as much me as I ever remember being."

"So you survived." She stepped around the lamp, putting it between her and the demon. Mike and Yuki had rescued her from an eternal damnation with the demon by putting a dagger through his head and then popping the dimension he was trapped in, like bursting a bubble. With nowhere to go, it was assumed that Oliver had simply ceased to exist.

"And you'd be right, in a manner of speaking." Oliver grinned, without a hint of malice. "Of course I can hear your thoughts. You are literally just a soul right now. It's like reading a book for me."

"How are you here?"

"I'm that little part of me that Oliver left on you. Maybe, in a way, I'm technically just an offshoot of the original, or what's left of him." He held up his hands to reveal that, despite the light's presence, they were semi-transparent. "I'm afraid that something like this is beyond my own knowledge, at least, until you ask me about it. Upon your destruction of my dimension, the universe hung on a coin toss involving the fate of the demon you knew as Oliver. Should he be freed and dumped back into the material plane? Or was his place in eternal destruction? His opinion could hardly be asked, as that cursed blade kept him from waking."

"So he is gone."

"He is, but he isn't. The Void is funny like that. By nature, non-existence is a paradox. I can have an empty box, or a full box, but the Void itself cannot be an empty box, because that would imply that something exists in the first place. I guess you could say that he went to the same place that your dreams do when you're awake."

"You mean like the Dreamscape?"

He laughed. "Hardly. I mean your ordinary, run of the mill dreams. When you meet a stranger inside of them, where have they come from, and where do they go? Did they truly live full lives until you chanced upon them, and have they died upon your awakening?"

"This sounds suspiciously like an effort to get me to discuss philosophy with you."

"Or maybe it's an attempt to get you to ask the right question so that I may decide what my fate is to be." He circled to the left, but Beth moved, keeping the lamp between them. "You see, I'm not sure what I am. I'm a ghost of a shadow of a memory at best. In fact, I have no true memory of a time before this moment. I am still everything that Oliver was, but everything I know, I know from your memories. Now I wonder if I'm simply a figment of your imagination."

"Then I guess you want to know what comes next?"

He nodded. "When you wake, do I die? Will I persist again? Is my eternity conscripted to this all too brief and bleak existence, or is there some hope of salvation?"

"Sounds like you're wrestling with the same shit people do every day." Beth leaned against the lamp post, pressing her cheek against the cool metal. "Until I met everyone at the house, I wondered those same things. Is there life after death? What happens to people when they die? All that fun stuff. Those questions account for a majority of mankind's decisions, in my opinion."

"Oh?" Oliver sat down, as if on a chair, but none was visible. "You have my curiosity."

"Do we have souls? What's the meaning of life? If I do this, do I get into heaven? All those things. You can either live in existential terror over every decision, or simply accept that you just don't know. Approach death in the same way that you approached birth." She arched an eyebrow. "Welcome to being a fucking human being."

"And what would you have of me? Should I not know what will happen when you leave this place? I'm not even sure what this place is." He looked over his shoulder into the darkness. "Nor am I sure how we are here."

A loud buzzing sound filled the space, loud enough that they both covered their ears until it was over.

"What the fuck was that?" Beth growled.