“Tell me about work”.
They were resting together in peace and quiet, having created a private cocoon just for themselves. The Gods and angels he met were all wonderful and he was thrilled, meeting so many new friends and establishing connections that could only be described as those of closest family. He even joked with Lady Lakshmi that he was legitimately her son, having spent two centuries in her womb, and she nodded appreciatively and for all intents and purposes adopted him for real. It felt amazing, having a major Primordial Goddess for a mother, and it didn’t feel at all like a joke. Lord Shiva, on the other hand, felt like a fatherly figure, someone he could go talk to if he had a problem, and it didn’t feel at all awkward that they were parts of two different couples. The vibe he got from them was that of a brother and sister who fiercely adored and respected each other. Everybody was so deeply connected with bonds of love, that felt more like steel cables than mere emotion. They all knew each other in and out, and the feeling of mutual respect and worship was overwhelming.
What was even more overwhelming was the fact that each person in Heaven wanted to see and hold Grace, as if feeling her existence in their arms will make her more real. He knew that her death was a shock to everybody, but information is one thing, and seeing it first hand was another. It wasn’t a shock; it was a stab to their collective heart with a poisoned blade. He thought it was even possible that all of Creation might have been fatally wounded and never have recovered, had she not been successfully resurrected.
It was an incredible thing. She was just one person. They’ve seen angels die before. There were lots of ‘batteries’ in that system Satan plugged him into. Each was an angelic soul, just like himself and his wife used to be before they became Gods. He heard about souls that willingly accepted Satan and became evil, and souls that were broken by him and turned into monsters. Those were all tragedies, and people remembered each one, for thousands of years, with sadness, regret and fear. He would have been one of them – a cautionary tale, someone who made a fatal mistake. They would have cried over him, they would have remembered him, but that would have been the extent of it.
Not Grace. She was something else, something different. Every other soul that died made a mistake, or committed treason, or a terrible sin. They betrayed God, betrayed Heaven, betrayed their friends, made terrible choices and ugly mistakes, and it was their fault. Grace was not just innocent: she was Perfection. For all everyone knew, she never did anything wrong in her entire life; kept doing kind and wonderful things, was an incredibly good person, a beloved family member to Gods, a stellar team member at work, reliable, kind, reasonable, smart and loving. She was an angel of such magnitude, that she was almost a Goddess in her own right, dark violet and indigo in colour, and enormous in size. All she needed was a husband to belong to, so that she could make that final step that would make God choose to be her – and she prayed to God to lead her to her true love, which he did. And then she found out what he did, how he doomed himself, and her heart exploded.
And, apparently, it took out most of Heaven with it. They looked like a disaster zone; half the Gods almost dead from trauma themselves. Nothing that ever happened, in the history of Creation, had nowhere near the impact. People on Earth talked a lot about how Christ was innocent but crucified, but that was nothing. He of course survived, as it was a merely physical thing, a death of the body. And it felt planed, pre-arranged with God. Unpleasant, but merely one bad day, with blissful eternity afterwards. It wasn’t a tragedy.
This was.
She was truly dead; her soul exploded from the extent of her agony. A true death, of someone who was the embodiment of perfection, and also connected with deep personal bonds to others; bonds of love, trust, family, personal debt. Her death wasn’t a shock; it was an asteroid strike that wiped out Heaven and turned it into a disaster zone worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah. He joked with her about it earlier, in Lakshmi’s womb, but it was quite different once he saw the aftermath with his own eyes, and all the traumatised people wanted to touch his wife to make sure she’s really here… thousands, millions of them. It was emotionally overwhelming and exhausting.
So, they made a private place for themselves, hidden from sight, just like that amniotic sac in which they spent their honeymoon, breathing each other and exchanging intimate thoughts. Just themselves again. No emotionally traumatised people to comfort.
“Work? What do you want to know?”, she smiled and nibbled his earlobe.
“What can I expect? What typical expectations people have, that you need to set straight? How do you approach them? Where do you draw the line between traumatised and misguided good souls, and truly wicked and corrupted ones?”
“Most expect some kind of an afterlife described by their religion. Also, they usually think in a very slow, linear way, in sentences, and it takes a while for them to thaw, to learn normal communication. They have an idea about what is sin and what is righteous, and they usually fear punishment for all sorts of silly things they think I will throw them to hell for. And I mean, the list is long”.
“Some think eating beef is punishable by hell. Some think eating pork is. Some think drinking alcohol occasionally is a dark secret I must never find out because if I do, they are doomed. Some think it’s a mortal sin if droplets of urine sprayed on them as they relieved themselves before prayer, because it would render them ritually impure. Some think they are ritually impure because they accidentally touched a person from a lower caste, or leaned on a grave by mistake. And sex, don’t even get me started. Every combination and permutation of sexual experience in existence is something someone somewhere thinks is a mortal sin worthy of hell. When they see that I don’t seem to care, they start checking if I heard them right, or whether I’m right in the head, because that’s how seriously they take things like masturbation – which is of course a part of one’s personal sovereignty – and someone somewhere taught them it’s a sin. I’m trying to explain that sin is when they actually hurt someone with their actions, or made a decision to reject God’s will, but deprogramming them from their nonsense takes a while, and it’s a normal part of the thawing process, as they lose spiritual rigidity a physical incarnation imposed on them. As they do, they start exchanging mental objects with me, with increasing speed, and they very quickly understand how I see things, and they relax and start to listen and trust. That part is normal for most good souls. There are, of course, exceptions, such as when some extremely advanced souls returned from Earth. Those are the good ones; they thaw very quickly, I go through their memories with them and explain things from a higher vantage point, I recover their suppressed memories from their prior existence, and so on”, she smiled.
“The bad ones… for the most part, I have what you would call a gut feeling about them. There’s nastiness, cruelty, arrogance, a spiritual scent of evil about them. In every case I knew instantly, but I still check very carefully, to be completely sure, and in some cases I call the Boss for a second opinion”.
“And then you flick them to hell?”, he kissed the tip of her nose.
“Yes, but hell isn’t a singular thing. There are multiple places that fit the description. There’s a place for godless souls, those who renounce the authority of Heaven. Then there’s a place for cruel, evil souls – murderers, torturers, rapists, but those are usually male. There are lots of women there – spreaders of gossip, of evil thoughts, evil traditions and customs such as female circumcision, of things that ruined lives, things that caused others serious harm while they used hardly more than words as weapons. They are terrible and toxic, and as bad as any murderer. There are women who are the reason behind some tropes from the fairy tales – an evil stepmother that sends the children from the first marriage to the forest to die. An evil bride that makes the old mother go to the forest and freeze. People think women are better than men because the most obvious criminals are men, but in hell both sexes are pretty equally represented. It’s just that female minions of Satan use different weapons to do his bidding”, she shivered.
“I always knew you were wise and brilliant, but you always manage to shock me by revealing exactly how much”, he whispered in awe. “I’m the luckiest man alive to have you”.
“Never forget it”, she snickered and gently kissed his neck.
“And all that I am is all yours, forever”.