Chapter Six: A Tad Creepy, Even to Me
Guardians of the Twilight Lands -- The Sixth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment
Rachel lay back on the pillows, her arm resting gingerly atop the comforter. The longer she remained, however, the darker her thoughts grew as the events of the last few days caught up with her. Her heart bled for her mother, who had endured so much—two decades of recalling her daughter without being able to tell a single soul. The pain of this was almost too much for Rachel to bear, and she was just thinking about it. How had her mother endured the experience?
Then there was her sister Amber, so martial and cold. Everything in Rachel wanted to reject this person who treated her so coldly, but if she did, the forces that had ripped apart her family would triumph. Rachel had forgiven the Master of the World for taking her sister but that did not mean that she did not wish to repair the damage.
Her thoughts drifted to the wishes she had made on the first three stars of evening a few weeks earlier, and her subsequent discovery that some stars were evil. The very notion that there were bad star disturbed her. How much control did they have over the lives of mortals? Was it evil stars that had separated Amber from the family? Were they the true guilty party in the death of her Elf, Queen Illondria of the Lios Alfar?
The Guardian had promised she would discover what she should wish upon, since stars were not safe. She wondered what this might be.
This thought reminded her of Siggy’s comment about the dead flittering like bats and sent an icy chill down her spine. Where was Illondria? Nastasia had returned her shade to Hoddmirmir’s Wood, but what had become of her since? Elves were nigh immortal. Was she flitting like a bat in Hades’ Kingdom, or did they get their own afterlife? What about the Heer of Dunderberg—the original storm goblin? Did he still exist? Did many people meet such an end—mingled with a fey and transformed into a monster? Is that how the Egyptian sorcerer Mambres turned into an ogre? Would this happen to anyone she knew? To her?
What did happen to people after death? Some became ghosts; Rachel had met quite a few. Some who had died were dragged down to a place of eternal torment. She had seen this happen to Remus Starkadder. But what happened to good people? Did they really flit about like bats in Hades? Old Thom had disappeared in a brilliant beam of light. So had John Colman, the Dutchman who had merged with the storm goblin to form the Heer of Dunderberg. She could have misunderstood, but she thought she had seen his friends beckoning to him from on high.
Where had these two ghosts gone? A beam of glorious light hardly sounded like Annwfyn. Could they have gone to the Elysian Fields or what the Irish called the Fortunate Isles? The early Greeks had believed that only those related to the gods achieved this honor, though later poets had expanded the citizenship of Elysium to include the heroic and the worthy. But who judged which souls were worthy? Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus? According to lore, Saturn was the ruler in Elysium, but Saturn had fallen and become the gruesome demon Moloch, who demanded child sacrifices. Was he the one who decided who could enter the pleasant afterlife? That did not sound promising.
Where was her grandfather? Rachel shivered. During the first week of school, her math-tutor-turned-evil-fire-breathing-dragon had implied that her beloved grandfather’s final resting place might not be a pleasant one. Could he also have been dragged down like … Rachel covered her head with her good arm. That thought was too terrible to finish.
A dark shape winged by the infirmary window. Its shadow fell over Nurse Moth’s face where she sat at her desk near the back wall, but she did not look up. Rachel thought back, reviewing her memory. The corner of her eye had caught a glimpse of an unusually large black bird, a Raven with blood-red eyes. She waved in the direction it had flown.
“He is a tad creepy in his Doom of Worlds form,” Rachel murmured aloud, “even to me.”
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