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FLUPPIT HAD DREAMS of hell. The myths from the Bridge-folk and the River-folk told of going on and on down the river once you’d died. Eventually your soul would reach the Abyss where you’d run out of river and swirl round and round the edge of the pit that was said to fall forever until the water from the material world filled everything. As a damned soul, down was the only way. And the deeper you went, the hotter the water surrounding you became. You boiled and suffocated and swirled, forever. Her mouth was open to scream but nothing came out. All she could feel around her was the oppressive swelter of the water, she knew who surrounded her: the remains of those who’d boiled in hell before her. The flensed skeleton of every damned soul churned in a jangling jig. A carnival of corpses where she was leading the dance, the eye of the storm, the partner around whom everyone else pirouetted. As they did, the vortex fought a losing battle to keep its velocity against the increasing mass, a stately rallentando of bodies pressing in and as they slowed, they became less decayed, less lifeless, like the inevitable course of entropy reversed—the egg unboiled, the bowl unbroken. The heat undeath of the universe. And with the standing ranks of bodies, now alive, pressing in, came a new smell—a fresh smell, a scent of moss and leaf.
Now she screamed. The smell was real, as was the press of bodies.
“It’ssss okay,” a voice by her ear said. She flinched from the sound and tried to shuffle away from it. But she touched more bodies from the other direction and flinched. “Don’t f-anic.” Easy for him to say. “We want to h-elf you.”
“Where’s Sari?”
“Your v-rend? Sshhee is sssafe.” This caused an outburst of the weird clacking that she’d heard in her dream, bones rattling. Except now she was awake, she could process it better. Not bones rattling, rather teeth chattering. “Ye-sss, that i-sss true. But let u-sss make her safe fir-ssstt.”
“What?” Fluppit sat up abruptly. “What’s wrong?”
She heard a hiss from in front of her, she guessed that was a sigh. “Your ffr-iend. Sshee i-ssss gra-fely ill. The poiss-on, ffrom the ss-vider?”
Then a different voice on the other side of her, a female voice, less accented, more obviously folk, “You killed it.” It was a statement, not a question. “You are very brave.” She also didn’t seem to have the speech peculiarity the male had.
Fluppit didn’t feel very brave, she felt very scared, “Take me to her.”
The male sounded flustered, “It i-sss nott—”
“Let her see her friend,” said the female.
“It could—”
“It is the kind thing to do,” the female said.
After her initial assessment of the situation, Fluppit began to think that the power dynamic here was not what she first thought.
A small new pup’s voice, also without the speech affectation, chirped next to her, “Come on Spider-killer, I’ll take you!” A small hand grasped at hers.
The female spoke again, “Give her some Air-space Chick-chick. She’s pretty overwhelmed, I’m sure. She’s had quite an ordeal getting here.”
Fluppit took the pup’s hand. It was small and warm, somehow warmer than the surroundings, which had an oppressive blanket of heat everywhere. She had just enough time to register that, then she was dragged as far as her right arm would let her. It hurt everywhere, but she tried not to make a noise. Instead, she followed and said, “Where is ‘here’, exactly?”
The woman chuckled, “Oh, how rude of us! You are in the lands of the Fire-folk.”
The child laughed too, “Welcome to Faerie-land!”
