He ran toward me from the east, as I stood at the chasm’s edge. He threw his arms around me. Neither of us said anything; we just embraced. Quon reminded me of Brian, just a few years younger than my son. When had Brian last hugged me? I’d never been a touchy-feely guy. But Quon’s embrace felt good.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

Before he could answer, the smile on Quon’s face froze, then disappeared. He was looking over the edge, into the chasm, at bones and decaying flesh. His shoulders sagged, his eyes drooped. He stared at the abyss, pulling on his knuckles.

“Eeeeoooouuuu.”

Guttural screams erupted from the abyss, animal-like, as if from coyotes caught in bear traps. Instinctively, Quon and I both stepped back. He covered his ears. In the abyss I sensed nothing but raw need and horror, undying thirst without a drop of water.

“It’s so … There’s no hope,” Quon said, weak voiced. “Is there?”

I wanted to reassure him, but what could I say? He was right—there was no hope. The abyss was bottomless, fathomless, uncrossable. Charis, on the far side of the chasm, was but a dream, like Camelot or Atlantis or Mount Olympus. Or if more than a dream, every bit as inaccessible.

“I need to be alone,” Quon said, voice trembling. He turned and walked away.

Beside me, without footfalls preceding it, I felt a presence.

“Marcus!”

The dark-haired warrior looked like a man, but his face was expressionless, as if he wasn’t quite at home in his body.

“I hear no conversation in the chasm,” I said, my voice shaking like Quon’s.

“There is no one near enough to talk to, nothing to talk about,” Marcus said. “Erebus is an endless monologue. What else do you not hear?”

“Music.”

“There is none and never will be.”

“Not even songs of lamentation?”

“Those who have no hope cannot sing. Charis has a song for every star. It is a country of explosion, expanding with every song, becoming ever larger. Erebus is a closet of implosion, the infinitely small becoming smaller. Relationships, even small ones, are too big for Erebus. Music is too big for Erebus. There is no room for it.”

“Noooooo!” The hollow echo of the word erupted from those in eternal solitary confinement.

“Erebus is where the King is not,” Marcus said.

“So evil reigns there?”

“Evil cannot reign. In the abyss there is no power. It is merely the void left when all goodness has withdrawn, the shadow without the substance. The doors are forever shut, locked and barred. Not only from outside but inside.”

“After our hassles with that church,” I said, “my father told us he’d rather have fun with his friends in hell than be stuck with the self-righteous in heaven.”

“Fun in Erebus? You might as well talk about a cool breeze in a blast furnace. As for Charis, look for yourself.”