I finally stopped running, sat down by the road, and spoke to the King about two things—two people—who weighed so heavily on my shoulders. I’d never told him about them. He knew, of course. I remembered what he had said, that he’d bring more things to my mind—and that he’d paid the price for everything.

Everything? Even this?

Yes, even this. Still, nothing I could do now would change what I had done to those who most needed my protection and care. Like a barbarian, I had sacrificed them on the altar of my convenience, sanitizing my barbarism with white coats and white forms and sugarcoated words in a futile attempt to cover the blackness of my heart.

I poured out my insides to the King and wept. I wept for the evil I had done, for those I had betrayed, for the opportunities I had lost, and finally for the grace he’d shown me—that one such as I could be headed for Charis after all.

As we walked, Marcus suddenly appeared alongside me. I shuddered—some things I never got used to. Without a word, the warrior pointed, and a portal opened in the air. I peered across far reaches of nothingness and saw a spattering of shriveled souls, husks of humanity. On one of these desert islands of misery, I saw a pathetic being with contorted face and body. He was familiar. I cringed when I saw his chestnut curls and realized it was Mason, buried to his neck in boiling sludge. The stench was awful.

Had Mason died already? Or was I seeing into the future? I couldn’t tell.

I heard a shrinking man mutter on and on about theology and what the King had really said and what he hadn’t. “I had degrees. I wrote books. I taught classes,” he said.

“I fed the poor,” a nameless woman cried, then muttered about medicine and rehab and going to church and bazaars and soup kitchens and saying her prayers. She stopped, as if waiting for applause. Hearing none, she recited her virtues again and again, but her words were only words, met with eternal silence.

“I recognize some of them,” I said, pointing to famous people here and there.

“Erebus is full of the once well-known,” Marcus said. “Physicians and scientists in white coats, businessmen and educators and politicians and celebrities and clergymen with white collars, smooth-shaven faces and manicured fingers.”

Reading my dismay, he said, “When your stories say ‘they lived happily ever after,’ it all depends on where they end up living, doesn’t it? For in Charis all live happily ever after, and in Erebus none do.”

As I scanned the wretched faces of Erebus, I noticed two philanthropists I’d seen on television. One had given away a billion dollars.

“They donated so much money,” I said.