“You missed me?” The hint of incredulity in Jeremiah's voice was almost visceral, like the first cool breeze of autumn that promised more chilling winds to come. “I assumed your darklings would occupy your thoughts in my absence.”

  “Those moments when you vanish are empty spaces in time for me,” Ruth admitted, her voice tinged with the wistful honesty that only comes from baring a vulnerable soul. The air between them was electric, yet neither made the move to break free from the other's gravitational pull. “I thought maybe you could fill those spaces. Stay.”

  “Stay?”

  “Here, in the house I've claimed in this fractured reality. We could be fragmented together. Less lonely,” she rambled, each word picking up speed as excitement bubbled in her. “You wouldn't have to leave me so often, isn't that something worth considering?”

  Jeremiah’s eyes softened like melting wax, casting a warmth that contradicted the cool world around them. “You don't know how tempting that is, Ruth. But I can’t.”

  A wave of disappointment surged through her, making her step back, distancing herself from him. Her bare feet met the velvety touch of midnight-blue blossoms that spread like a living carpet below her. “I shouldn’t have asked. It was stupid.”

  “No,” he said, capturing her hesitance in one syllable. “Don’t misunderstand.”

  “How can I? You've other worlds to haunt,” she responded, a tinge of bitterness slipping through.

  “Ruth,” Jeremiah moved closer, encircling his arms around her midsection. His cheek came to rest against her hair—wavy locks infused with the complex layers of her character, capturing her essence in a way words could not. “The very idea that you’d want me to stay is more alluring than you can imagine. But I can’t.”

  Frustration pulsed through her. She rotated within his arms to face him, pressing her hands to his chest as if she could push an answer out of him. “Don’t placate me with poetic words. I need an explanation.”

  His eyes, in that moment, were a labyrinth she desperately wanted to navigate. “I'm your guide, your protector, the keeper of your fragmented world's order. Being close to you, physically and emotionally, blurs the lines of my purpose. It compromises my objectivity.”

  A sigh escaped Ruth’s lips, drawn from a place deep within her. “But you're not objective now. Don't pretend this is a one-sided vulnerability.”

  Taking a step back, Jeremiah unwound his arms from her, his eyes reflecting a world of unspoken words. “You're correct, and therein lies the dilemma. Until I'm assured that you can stand alone, I can't afford to lose myself.”

  At that, Ruth halted. An inkling of doubt shaded her thoughts. Was she manipulating Jeremiah, unintentionally pulling him into her sphere of influence, as she did with the simulacrum and her darklings?

  An instinctual step back was her reflex, her hand rising to her chest as if she could shield her heart from her own self-doubt. “Fine,” her voice broke ever so slightly. “You should go.”

  She half-expected a rebuttal, some token resistance. Instead, he simply nodded, turned, and with two steps, evaporated into the framework of their surreal existence.

  In that moment, Ruth felt a loneliness far more visceral than the absence of his physical form—a vacancy of companionship that not even her darklings could fill.

  And then it was just Ruth, in that liminal space of solitude, where the air felt heavy, like the wet velvet of a dark theater curtain.

  She found herself lingering in the space where Jeremiah had been, that ephemeral ghost of a presence. Eventually, she meandered toward the edge of the second floor, letting her legs dangle over the abyss, as if she were teetering between two realities.

  She couldn't discern how much time had stretched its languid limbs before the simulacrum—her imitation of Asher—appeared beside her. He sat close, their hips aligning like two puzzle pieces reluctant to fully connect. With a sort of canine affection, he nestled his head against her shoulder. "You're not mad at me, are you?"

  She looked at him, caught off guard. "Why would you even think that?"

  "We've stopped meandering through our garden labyrinth together," he noted, an edge of sadness slicing through his words. "And you always seem to be lost in your own world now. Is it because I fled the house when that creature came? I was afraid for both of us."

  She sighed, a rush of air laden with a tinge of annoyance and, admittedly, guilt. "You're not the one in the wrong here."

  "I notice things," he replied, disappointment coloring his voice. "You don’t call me by name anymore. You shy away from intimacy. We were supposed to marry, yet now you treat me like a stranger in our supposed Eden."

  The weight of his words cracked her fragile veneer of serenity. She sprung to her feet, spinning away from him. "I need to tend to the darklings." Her words came out taut like a pulled string.

  His expression darkened further. "So you are upset with me."

  "This isn't about you," Ruth asserted, her hand resting on the doorknob. "This is about me navigating my own labyrinth of thoughts, okay?"

  "Then enlighten me. Please," he insisted.

  Ruth paused, as if suspended between two gravitational pulls. In that moment, she understood how Jeremiah must have felt—bound by duties and desires, struggling with the disclosure of inconvenient truths. Could she tell this effigy that he was just a shadow, not her real husband, an echo of a love she didn’t feel?

  It wasn’t that simple. Nothing was. The world was a pool, and her actions were pebbles tossed into it. Each decision had its ripples, consequences radiating outward, altering even the furthest reaches of her reality.

  She glanced downward, noting the pristine polish on her toenails, a small but enduring piece of her identity. She was in Hell, yet paradoxically, she remained undeniably herself. It was a kind of torture, perhaps, but one that seemed more humane than she'd expected from this netherworld. After all, the worst prisons are the ones where you're the jailer, the prisoner, and the key, all at the same time.

  "I need to check on the darklings," Ruth repeated with a finality that allowed for no debate. "This isn’t about you. At some point, we'll talk—really talk. But for now, I need space to ponder my own infernal thoughts, alright?"

  His eyes, large and dewy, met hers with a pleading intensity. "Are we still bound for marriage? Is that still our fate?"

  A strangled sound escaped her, a discordant note of sorrow and indecision. She turned her back on him and crossed the threshold, securing the door behind her with a resounding click of the lock.

  It was a hollow gesture. The simulacrum had his uncanny ways of maneuvering through the house, as if obeying neither celestial nor infernal laws. Still, locking the door granted her an ephemeral moment of respite, a flimsy shield against her own guilt.

  By the time she reached the garden’s mystical flower that guarded the key, remorse had unfurled its tendrils around her heart. A sidelong glance revealed him still standing there—hovering really, as if suspended between Heaven and Earth—silhouetted momentarily by a glint of light that broke through the ever-churning storm clouds. The wind rustled. Clouds converged. The heavenly luminescence vanished.

  But in that fleeting glimpse, he had not appeared as a counterfeit—an ersatz. He had looked celestial, like an archangel or her true husband, bathed in an aureole of divine light.

  Ruth inserted the key and unlocked the garden's gate, propelling herself away from her accursed home and toward the tower at the crux of her universe. The moment she stepped into its cavernous hallways, tranquility enshrouded her anew, bolstering her with newfound conviction.

  She'd endeavored to pierce the heavens before and had found herself ensnared in a sordid dimension of gambling and demonic hounds—a spectacular failure. But she was different now. She was wiser, more fortified, with battle-hardened resolve sculpted by this otherworldly realm. It was time to make another celestial ascent.

  The simulacrum, for all his semblance, would forever be a hollow echo. Jeremiah, with his cryptic words and evasive affection, would never fully belong to this place—or to her. Each would always be a reminder of her own intrinsic uncertainties.

  But Asher?

  Finding him would alter the very fabric of her existence. The question was not one of capability, but of timing. When, not if. With that thought bolstering her, she felt as if she could stretch her hand high enough to rend the veils between worlds, and resolved to ascend from her infernal labyrinth and grasp at the paradise that always seemed just a wing's span out of reach.

  And she knew she could do it.

 

 

  Qatarina Wanders, After Death Do We Part

 

 

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