UTERO: Part IV
At the Gate of Return, a dark purple haze bled into the realm of the souls. Against the deepening hue, the midnight-tinted souls of the ancients swarmed like a flock of birds on Earth, ascending up and down, carrying urgent messages. Meanwhile, the dead of later ages cycled about in aimless patterns. In varying hues of rusty grey, they resembled the leaves of trees on Earth, blowing about on the wind.
Yahya was a copper-gold speck amidst their masses.
While the unborn were not prohibited from visiting the Gate of Return—a soul could not prohibit another soul from anything—there was a consensus among ancients, the dead of newer ages, and even tellers that it was inadvisable. Not so much for the sake of the unborn, but for the souls experiencing their return.
Desperate for salvation, they mistook the unborn for heavenly beings, capable of purifying them of Earth’s hatreds and humiliations.
As a precaution, Yahya darkened his glow so that returning souls would not drink heavily upon his countenance, thirsty as they were for innocence and generally accustomed to lapping it up at the diminishment of their own purity.
It was undignified, a behaviour unbecoming of souls, to steal upon innocence. The redemptive quality could never be achieved in this way, but souls were most susceptible to believing it could at that moment of their return when the exhilaration of being released from the body heightened their hopes for deliverance from suffering.
It was not Yahya’s first time visiting the Gate of Return, but it may just as well have been, given how changed, how altered it had become.
Plumes of smoke, bursts of ash and dust, concealed the golden stream of light that typically flowed from its mouth. If souls were present within that haze, Yahya could not make them out, nor sense their inclinations, but a loud persistent murmur of voices suggested there was an enormous number of them.
What word was amassing among them? What news? What knowledge did they share?
It was impossible to tell. Their murmurings did not materialize into any meaning or awareness. It was as if they did not speak the language of souls.
Unborn fool. Yahya’s soul murmured. Souls unable to speak the language of souls in the realm that nourishes them? Impossible. I must be a fool for not understanding them though I have always done very well at interpreting the utterances of others.
It had to be the fault of the smoke, dust, and ash. Never in his conscious existence as a soul had Yahya seen such a haze bleed into the realm of the souls from Earth. Once it lifted, his sense of inner confusion would likewise be cleared.
What was it made of? It could not truly be smoke or ash or dust. Those properties belonged to the living world. And it caused him no distress to move about in it.
Yahya flew toward the swarm of ancients, not fearing the unintelligibility of it all. Surely, they would have an answer. Surely, such an event had happened before.
As he flew, he thought nothing of the way the ash and dust, or whatever it was, seemed to paint his copper form a little grey. A harmful thing would sap his soul but he felt ordinary and unchanged by the deepening haze, even a little relieved by it, less sensitive, capable of bearing the brunt of the world.
The world, Yahya’s soul murmured, and all at once, it seemed as if he were in it.
