As we walked towards eternal judgment, a nauseating sense of vertigo and dizziness bore down on me like a hammer stroke from a Campeador. Time and space were warping here, but it was less like the glorious freedom of a Silver’s leaps through rifts or the unsettling photonic lightning transportation that was more standard to the empire, though I hated that last form. Both of those felt natural in a way, even if they were accomplished by the will of men. The Dominium had taken the natural gifts of the gods and the natural universe and had shifted the rules slightly, inverting what should be and what could be with a bit of willpower and material energy. It was like buying off nature with a hefty sack of gold. What was happening now on our trek through the Underworld to the three Judges was a violation of the universe.

Not a folding, not a bending, not a stretching, but a breaking of reality and logic. As we walked this long but narrow road of obsidian bricks, we walked it not just with the group I had come in with on the Ferryman’s boat but with millions of other dead souls. They paced and stumbled beside me and above me and through me and below me, phantom copies of the road I walked on being duplicated innumerable times to accommodate the masses. If I tried to focus too hard on seeing the other roads, all I could see was black as the obsidian ground existed on every possible angle and plane and my movement became restricted the air became as much stone as it was mist and dust and shadow.

When I turned back, at first all I saw was one Charon and one ferry and one river, but if I focused on the screaming and wailing of natural law generated by the compression and overlapping, I could see other subrealities, other Charons and other ferries and other rivers, so many that a single boat ride could bring the entirety of the Dominium’s dead to the otherside. The myriad versions of reality were separate and the same simultaneously, many times and many spaces compounded into one time and space. No doubt to one of these other migrants to the land of the dead, the road I was on and the group I was with would seem to be the false copies of the “real” one they stood one. If they could see it, that was.

“Do you see everyone else? The other versions of this road?” I asked Pollixa. It seemed obvious and omnipresent, but I had come to the deadlands much more conscious than she had. Maybe most people couldn’t.

Pollixa grimaced. “Yeah. It makes me want to be sick. I keep feeling people overlapping with me, their limbs brushing up against my organs.”

“What about you, Fish?” I said to my other companion.

He swiveled his head and stared at me without comprehension. Fish’s expression was a blank as his mind and his appearance. Even if I had known Fish in life, as I had known Pollixa, which was unlikely, it was inconceivable that I would be able to identify them. Putting aside the changes that came from the Paths, it was hard for me to put down any more identifiers on the shade besides that he was male, a young man, and had lighter skin and dirty blond hair. His face was so blurry and missing chunks that had dissipated to smoke and mist that it was like looking through semitransparent glass at somebody that a mad Doctor had surgically altered haphazardly with a blunt scalpel.

“Why do you bother with him?” Pollixa asked me, playing with a strand of her red hair.

I shrugged. “He’s got enough in him to stick with me instead of just moving forward mindlessly like a zombie with the rest, maybe he’ll snap out of it like you did if I keep talking to him.”

“I kind of doubt that.” She said. “If our deeds and renown are what preserve us in the afterlife, this… ‘Fish’, as you call him, can’t have been very important.”

“Oh, I’m sure Fish was important to the people he knew when he was alive. Not everyone can be remembered equally by humanity.” I said.

I went to throw an arm around Fish’s shoulders to complete the fraternal gesture but thought better of it. I had named him Fish for a reason, and I wasn’t keen to dip my soul back in the burning power of the Styx again to clean myself of his slime if there wasn’t a captive audience around to unsettle.

I noticed that the Infernal Beast guards weren’t duplicated or overlapped, they existed in the multiple realities and offshoots of this road as singular entities, which made for humorous moments if I focused only on my group’s version where they would seem to be poking black metal spears or bone scythes at patches of air, corralling other unseen spirits into line.

Things with the bodies of bats but the green skinned faces of infants flew overheard, shrieking and swooping over the heads of the ghosts. Yellow excrement dropped from one and splattered over souls. I thought about throwing a rock at one. Disgusting things.

After an hour of marching, we came to an obvious landmark, the gates of the main part of the Underworld which were guarded by Cerberas, the three headed hound of Hades. Cerberas was jet black, as large as an elephant, fanged with bronze teeth that dripped with coal black saliva, and had a venomous snake as a tail. Chains of Jovium bound him to the entryway and he lounged beside the vast gate of warped iron and bone. Two of his heads slept and the third glared at the stream of souls pouring past him, his awake head growling periodically in a menacing tone that was undercut by the fact that his other two heads were snoring.

If I was going to escape, I would have to get past that dog somehow. Heracles had wrestled him, Orpheas the musician had charmed the beast with music and Sibyl had drugged it. I would have to figure out something as well.

Steeping through the gates were like stepping into another world, a dark reflection of the Classical Age of Man in Grecia and Roma, obsidian and onyx instead of marble, monsters and dead men browsing agoras and forums instead of mortal citizens, temples no living human would have dared erect to gods and spirits that no living human would have named or worshipped, fountains of bronze that sprayed blood. Even without the press of others around me, I couldn’t have escaped the path I was on, some strange gravitational pull was drawing my soul to the Hall of Judgment.

It was an indignity that I could not even see my judges as they pronounced my sentence, nor truly hear them, they kept on packing more and more ghosts into the circular hall, pressing us together so firmly that mist and ether became as solid as steel. I heard the crack of a gavel, as loud as the Skyfather’s bolts, as one of the Judges of the Dead pronounced our sentence and then felt my essence stretch in all directions until we popped into existence in the gray Fields of Asphodel.

“Gray indeed.” I muttered as Fish, Pollixa and I stood in the otherworldly meadow that stretched on beyond the surface area of an entire planet, the majority of humanity’s lifeless remnants sequestered here. The shades of the dead drifted around, ancient and worn, drained of all color and life.

“What do we do?” Pollixa said hopelessly, sitting down and sending up a plume of dust when she hit the ground, the strange plants crumbling to flakes under even the slightest amount of weight.

“We break out.” I said determinedly.

“You, me, and Fish against all the forces of the Corpsefather?” She said, raising an eyebrow. “We’re outnumbered.”

“No,” I said, scanning the never-ending lands of Asphodel. “They are.”

“What?” Pollixa said.

I waved a hand. “Look around. Over ninety-nine percent of humanity for as long as life as has existed has gone to the Fields. We’re surrounded by the largest army in the history of the universe.”

“If we can get them to follow us.” She said skeptically.

“If.” I agreed.