Morwen’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

😂😂💯👌🏻✨
“We’ve had a very bad time, and we didn’t get what we came for, and I feel we ought to get a refund.”
King Yama fell silent for a moment. She could not read his face. Slowly he said, “You feel you ought to get a refund from Hell.”

Clutch she did indeed, very tightly, for if she pressed hard enough, then she could make herself his shield and protect him from everything in the universe. What a miracle a person was, she thought. They took up so little space. The difference between presence and absence was not even a square meter of matter. Yet now that Peter was here, the whole world shone brighter.

FUCK YES!!!

Professor Grimes was not good at being dead, did not have the fortitude of mind, hadn’t come close to conquering Hell, and Alice found this deeply disappointing. It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants, and they devastated you by being so human.

Ok this is turning out better than I expected from the beginning BY FAR. Ijusr need Peter back and I'll be happy. Please please please.

Alice watched his grayness undulating around the fire and wondered what it was like to exist so long that your practical identity was no longer hinged to a time or a place, but a question.

“Marks.” Gradus chuckled. “No, they don’t tell you anything unless you’ve passed. We don’t get revisions. We receive no feedback whatsoever. We just wait in anticipation forever and ever, until hope turns to panic to disappointment. If you hear nothing, then you must assume you’ve failed. Only there’s never confirmation, and timelines here mean nothing, and so it’s up to you when to extinguish your own hope.”

She sensed its inner sin—a biting, evil thing; that force that poisoned bonds, turned friend against friend and kin against kin. She could only describe that feeling as a violation; the sharpest, severest pain, that which pierced in her inner depths where she felt most safe.

This is the source of our unease. A paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

And Alice—who stood stock-still with his brains and skull fragments and blood splattered across her face—could not stop laughing. For a way out had opened up after all. And it seemed the most hilarious thing in the world, in that instant, that it nevertheless led straight to Hell.