Page 64 of Where Light Cannot Follow

I take a step closer and really look at my father's face, study it one last time. The features I inherited. The coldness I learned. The fear beneath the cruelty that I can finally see for what it always was.

"I hope you find a way out of this someday," I say. "I genuinely do."

"Michael." Something flickers in his voice. Almost desperate. Almost human.

"Goodbye, Father."

“Michael!”

I turn and walk back down the path, into the corridor of screaming trees. Virgil falls into step beside me. The faces around us howl and snarl and plead—you'll regret this, you're just like us, you think you're so much better, don't you, come back, come back, COME BACK⁠—

But I keep my head down. My feet on the path. My shoulder nearly brushing the space where Virgil walks.

Because nothing they say can touch me now.

I've spent nearly forty years carrying my father's voice in my head, his judgments, his expectations, his endless catalogue of my failures. I let it shape every choice I made, every wall I built, every person I pushed away.

But his voice was never the truth. It was just noise.

And I'm done letting noise drown out everything that matters.

25

VIRGIL

Dante bursts from the Forest like a flock of birds startled from a branch, bright wings catching sunlight. He moves so quickly he nearly runs, and I bustle alongside him, matching his pace stride for stride.

I should remind him that we need to be discreet. That the ruler of this realm hunts us. That drawing attention to us will only hasten the confrontation I've been dreading.

But this moment—this grief-drenched, brutal, newborn thing—is too tender to shatter. It's still blood-covered from birth. I remain silent and stay at his side, as I vowed, as I will until he escapes this place.

He's so close now. So unburdened.

I don't know how to feel about that. Happy, certainly. When I first encountered him walking his endless loop through that cold Manhattan of his own making, I thought it impossible he might reach this point. He's proven my judgments too hastily rendered, my not-yet-extinguished hope worthy of its long endurance.

Yet I also know what his progress means. He leaves soon.

And some part of me, a part I've tried to smother since the moment I entered his mindscape, is realizing I'm not certain I can bear it. The losing of him.

He marches up a hill and stops at its crest. Before us, hell stretches toward the horizon, an endless expanse of shadow and ember, the distant glow of fires that never warm, rivers that run with something darker than water. The sky pulses with that sickly orange light, and far below, the path continues toward a river I know too well, and beyond it, the territory we must cross. The mountain rises in the impossible distance, its peak lost in clouds that shimmer with something almost like hope.

Dante doesn't look at any of it.

He sits, pulling his knees against his chest as a child might, and I lower myself beside him. He places his dark head against his knees and begins to sob.

The tears come unrestrained. Soul-deep. Wrenching. His shoulders shake, and his cries echo across the barren landscape until they almost reach some place within me, almost vibrate into bones I no longer possess.

I'd wanted to see this man happy. To see him smile truly. I realize only now that this was what he actually needed first.

Grief.

For him to grieve what he'd always avoided. Always repressed. The childhood stolen from him. The love he'd sacrificed. The decades spent building walls instead of bridges. The father who was never capable of being what he needed.

His tears continue, and I feel so desperate. Never in all my centuries have I felt so hopelessly incorporeal. So uselessly ghost-like.

But I remember how he'd held his hand out to mine. Asked me to place my palm against his, even knowing it would not truly connect.

I hesitate a beat, then move closer and wrap an arm around his shoulder.