When I first came into Ellie’s world, my task was simple. Never before have I seen someone so frail. There was no way she was going to turn her life around. Ellie lost her mother almost four years earlier. In that time, she went from an energetic young woman, with most of her life ahead of her, to this sad, broken, mess, that barely had the strength to get out of bed each day.

Since her mother’s passing, she had tossed out all hope, thrown away her dreams, and pushed away nearly everyone who had ever loved her. Yet something kept her living, just one more day. Whether she chose to accept it or not; deep inside her ashen exterior, burned a fire; a tiny little morsel of life that kept pushing her forward. Without that light to guide her, this tale, would be a macabre short story, about a cat, feasting on her recently deceased owner’s decomposing body. It was because of that fire, that I was waiting for her in her apartment that day. She had a spark… my job was to snuff it out.

I know what you’re probably thinking at this point.

“Ok, this is one of those stories where person ‘A’ was hired to kill person ‘B’ then through a series of seemingly unrelated random events they find love and live happily ever after”.

Well, I have you know… that’s actually not far off from the truth. This would be one of those stories except… no one hired anyone. And person ‘A’ can hardly be defined as a “person”. As for falling in love and living happily ever after…

As I was saying; I was there to put out her spark. It’s what I do and frankly, I was damn good at it. I should be, I had been doing this for a little over five thousand years. Yes, five with three zeroes. You could say it’s my “soul purpose”. (Groan…)

“Oh, I know! He’s the Grim Reaper!” You might be thinking.

Wrong! I am not the Grim Reaper. First of all; not a real guy. Secondly; despite what you might think; metaphysical beings, outside of a few freak incidents, are quite limited in how we can interact in the physical world. In Short; “Harvesting souls”; Not A Thing!

So where does that put me? Not the Grim Reaper; Harvesting souls is out; limited earthly powers. How on earth and beyond, am I supposed to douse a living being’s spark, and why would I want to do something so vile?

First the how: How does anyone douse a spark?

Water.

Speaking metaphorically in this case. Yes, a lot of water at once can be devastating. However, even a little bit of water over a long period of time can be highly destructive. It can erode mountains and structures. If you have a leak in your dike and you don’t have a little Dutch boy to plug it with his finger, you’re gonna wake up one morning to find your house under 20ft of brackish water. Don’t even get me started on water torture… Like water, I was going to put out Ellie’s spark, through constant subtle sustained emotional torment.

You know when you’re listening to music with your headphones on and you think you hear someone say your name? You look and no one is there. Imagine something like that, but, instead of your name, it’s constant reminders that you are a failure. Then there’s this classic; you’re lying in bed, you’re just about to nod off when that embarrassing thing that you said last week pops into your head and circulates in your thoughts. We have ways of helping you recall those delightful memories, long after everyone else has forgotten them. These are just a few tricks we, figuratively, have up our nonexistent sleeves.

Now that I have established “the how”; I present to you “the why”. (You may want to get comfortable. This is going to require a significant amount of explanation.)

I guess the first thing to note, is that I exist in the metaphysical world or “Afterworld”. The metaphysical world consists of 3 domains. The first is the domain of the Neverlived. That’s me; a Neverlived. This; the domain where I reside; is an exact duplicate of the living world. That’s because it occupies the same space. We call this domain “Terra Insignis”, or simply Terra. Inhabitants of the living and non-living world can exist like this because we exist at slightly different frequencies. There are 2 key differences between the living and Neverlived; the Neverlived only have metaphysical bodies, so the living can’t see them; The Neverlived can see and hear the living, unfortunately, unless we are in the living world, anything that the living say is just garbled nonsense. Therefore there is no way for the living to speak directly with the Neverlived. This is super annoying. It would make my job a million times easier if we could just understand what they were saying. Therefore; Cats. “Ugh!”

Cats are just the worst. Cats are one of two creatures that exist both in the living and Neverlived worlds. In the living world, cats don’t talk. In the Afterworld, they do… Sort of. They do it through a form of selective telepathy; which wouldn’t be so bad except that everything they say, is said in the most condescending way imaginable. If you ask them anything, sure, most of the time they will answer your question, albeit in a way that sounds like they have a million and one other things they’d rather be doing. That is the most palatable way they might respond.

One thing that is excessively aggravating about cats is their affinity for riddles. Depending on their mood, they might respond to you in the form of a riddle. Do you know how hard it is to solve a riddle, that relates to a world, that you have zero experience with? The last time I got a cat-riddle, I ended up having to talk to 31 different cats to help decipher the riddle and the 4 subsequent riddles that I received while trying to solve the original riddle. As much as cats are despised on Terra, they are a necessary evil; we need them to help gather information from the living world.

“Why do you need to know what’s happening in the living world?”

Three words: The Sweet Hereafter.

The Sweet Hereafter; pretty straightforward; It’s where the majority of once-living human souls end up after they die. A.K.A. The Happy Place.

Before you start thinking “oh no, this is a book about religion and faith and preaching about Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, yadda yadda yadda…” Relax, this is not that kind of story. This is a completely science-based story. To those in the living world without the understanding of postmortem-meta sciences, you might try to explain things through religious and spiritual dogma. This is understandable, as it is impossible, to generate a scientific explanation, on something that no one, can provide direct evidence on. Plus, in the living world, the cats ain’t talking. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t many accurate accounts of the subject.

The current leading theory on the origins of the physical universe, in the living world, is the “Big Bang” which is a reasonable enough explanation. On Terra, we believe in the “Large Tear”. Much like the Big Bang, the Large Tear occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.

Before the Large Tear, the cosmos was (and still is) a finite ball of energy, expanding into infinite space. As the energy expands to fill the endless void, giant tears appear. Within one of these giant tears, the known physical universe was formed, and 9.3 billion years later; Earth!

At least this is what I’m choosing to believe. I honestly have no idea. There is no way to prove or disprove most theories in the afterworld. I mean it could very well be true, but, it’s beside the point. It’s what I believe and that’s good enough for me. In the Afterworld, it is generally better to believe a falsehood than nothing at all. There is comfort there.

A popular activity in the Afterworld is “messing with reality”. Some beings, especially those that have devoted their lives to science, have a hard time accepting an afterlife. When they come face to face with the Afterworld, they are forced to accept something that completely undermines their belief system; after that, they become accepting of any reasonable-sounding explanation that you feed them. Watching them come to terms with this new “reality”, is the height of afterworld entertainment. This is why you’re just better off picking something to believe in, if you think you’ll ever get to the truth, you’re just leaving yourself open to an endless supply of baseless anecdotes.

Though the genesis of the universe is up for debate, the following is not.

For the first billion years or so, Earth slowly cooled. Shortly after, the first signs of life appeared. From there, life on earth evolved, becoming slightly more intelligent with each generation. Then humans appeared. Before humans; creatures were born, they would dance around Earth for a little while, then when they died, their mortal remains would decompose and their essence would drift off into the ether of space.

However, humans were different. They like to complicate things. They have a natural tendency to overthink everything. Most creatures of Earth are more or less content with the time they have and couldn’t be bothered with the concept of an afterlife. Not humans. Humans will do whatever they can, to squeeze as many miles out of their mortal coil as physically possible. Some aren’t even content with that. At some point, in the not too distant past, they dreamed up the idea of an afterlife. Then one day (about ten thousand years ago), it happened. Humans evolved to the point, where if they chose, their essences, didn’t just drift off into the ether. They were able to inhabit the universe, long after they left the living world. They willed into existence an immortal soul. At first, souls just lingered on Earth, existing on a slightly different frequency as the living world. First one; then many; soon, the earth was filled with souls who just weren’t ready to move on. This was the birth of Terra Insignis.

Right around the time humans started developing souls, something highly unusual started happening in the cat world. Humans occasionally didn’t die. At least not completely.

Imagine being a Lion on the Serengeti. You’re roaming the plain in search of prey. In front of you, you see a human crouching in the tall grass. Your first instinct is to run away, but, you haven’t eaten in a few days and the human seems distracted. The human is so focused on the herd of wildebeests drinking from a waterhole; he too is searching for his next meal. So you crouch down and slowly sneak up behind him. Now in striking distance, your muscles instinctively tense. As you’re about to pounce, the human rises from his hiding spot; spear in hand; arm back as far as it will go; elbow bent 90 degrees. Still unaware of your presence, his back is now fully exposed to you. Never before have you seen such an easy target. His arm explodes forward. You leap. As his hand relaxes to release his spear, your claws gain purchase of his flesh. Your attack was perfect, your bite was precise. In a split second, you crush the human’s spine in your teeth; certain death for your latest victim. At least it should have been. Face down in the dirt; you on his back; your teeth planted deeply in his neck; he takes his last breath… then he rolls out of his body, and gets to his feet. Still, with the human’s lifeless carcass in your mouth, you look up at the unworldly version of your next meal. In his face, you can see the signs of confusion, as he finds himself looking down at you, chewing at his mortal remains. A few awkward seconds later, his instincts kick in and he turns and runs into the distance, leaving you in utter confusion and distress.

Such was the interaction between cats and humans for the first thousand years of Terra. Eventually, over time, as Terra got more and more overrun with humans, cats developed an understanding of them. For the most part cats and humans would just avoid one another. Humans wouldn’t talk to cats and cats wouldn’t condescend at humans. Cats carried a sense of entitlement as they believed they were the original inhabitants of Terra. This mutually beneficial social avoidance continued for the next few thousand years, when the living humans, no longer content with the status quo, gradually changed their views on the afterlife. Not content with existing on a second rate earth as disembodied specters; their souls evolved such that when they left their mortal coil behind, they moved on to a spiritual collective, where all souls would exist together in a state of bliss, disconnected from all earthly bonds. At least that was the theory. If you haven’t guessed yet, this new blissful place, was the Happy Place.

Meanwhile, those who originally came to Terra would get to a point where they felt content in the fact, that they had done more than enough living for one afterlife-time and allow themselves to fade into the ether. One by one they left. As they faded away, something unexpected started happening. As their essence parted for the ether, they left behind an immortal coil. Shadows of the once-living, these immortal shells, became creatures of Terra. Intelligent, but soulless, only capable of a limited range of emotions. Soon they became the dominant species on Terra. A world of unborn creatures existing only as echoes of those who once lived in this Domain. These were the Neverlived.

Now that you know a little about the first two Afterworld domains, I should probably tell you about the third one.

A few millennia after the Happy Place came into existence, a third Domain started appearing on the metaphysical radar; a dark place; a cold place; an angry place. You couldn’t see it but you knew it was there. You could feel it slowly creeping into Terra; always, just around, that dark corner; stalking our land. No one knew where it came from, or why it was there; we all just knew it was bad news. We called it the Darkness. By we I mean me. Literally, no one cares about naming anything in the afterlife. Except for maybe the cats. However, I stopped asking the cats what places were called after I realized that I was just opening myself up to a barrage of condescension. Cats are the worst.

Well, almost the worst…

There is another creature that is native to the metaphysical universe. Another form of Neverlived. They inhabit the Happy Place. Known as the Lightborn; they came into existence in much the same way as the Neverlived did. As souls of the Happy Place grew satisfied that they had lived long enough and faded into the ether, they left behind their own immortal coil. Tempered by a constant flood of positive energy, these new beings developed a full range of emotions and a literal glow. A unique trait of the Lightborns is; for whatever reason, they have the ability to move between the Happy Place and Terra, and should they choose, they possess the ability to open a doorway to the living world. There is also one attribute they possess that the Neverlived desire above all. If a Lightborn comes in contact with a Neverlived, their combined energy cancels each other out, and together they would dissolve into the ether.

After a few millennia, immortality tends to wear a bit thin, even for a being with limited emotions. The only hope for a Neverlived to escape an eternity of boredom is to get in the good grace of a Lightborn so that when they decide to move on, it might select them as their last-dance partner. It’s for this reason the Neverlived are, more or less, slaves to the Lightborns. The Neverlived would forever do their bidding.

That is what brought me to apartment 314. The short answer to why I would do something as vile as putting out someone’s spark; the Lightborns deemed it so. I honestly had no desire to carry out this assignment or any of my assignments. However, if that’s what it took for a chance to leave this disconnected world, so be it, that’s what I’ll do. Especially now that The Darkness was inching ever closer to Terra. Besides, it’s hard to have a moral compass, when feelings like guilt, regret, and compassion are drastically limited.