“He’s a ghost,” said Merlin, kicking at a jewel-encrusted diadem before bending down to pick it up.
“I can see that,” said Leonard, grumpily. “Why are you here, Sir Ronald?”
“Ah, that’s my Leonard . . . sharp as a tack and always asking pertinent questions.” The affable knight chuckled, then proceeded to look for a place to sit. Leonard watched patiently as the dead knight looked around the cavern before deciding to give the burial object pile a shot. He cautiously lowered himself into a seated position and was pleased when he didn’t sink through it to the ground. “There we go. It’s been a challenge to figure out which solid objects will hold me up and which ones will let me pass through in the same way mist parts before a breeze.” Sir Ronald settled, pausing for a moment before realizing that both Merlin and Leonard were staring at him. “What?”
Leonard smiled. His old master hadn’t changed a bit. “Why are you here, Sir Ronald?”
“Oh yes. Sorry. I got lost.”
“Lost?”
“Yes, Leonard, lost. It turns out when I shed this mortal coil—”
“What does that mean?” asked Eater.
“It means he died,” said Merlin, pocketing the diadem before picking up a small but sturdy-looking sword. “Here, Leonard, take this short sword.”
“Why?”
“Not sure, seems like it might come in handy.”
Leonard frowned. “It’s not very big.”
“Mayhap you could throw it.”
“Throw a sword like a dagger? That’s silly.”
“Warriors have been known to throw swords on the field of battle. Lancelot is famous for it.”
“I don’t care if Lancelot is famous for it. It makes no sense to throw a sword. The balance is all wrong.”
“Just take it.”
Leonard sighed, then took the sword and examined it closely. It was a decently made weapon, well-balanced for ordinary use in battle and surprisingly sharp. Leonard was about to comment on the blade’s condition, but when he looked up he saw Sir Ronald staring at him with his arms crossed.
“My apologies, master,” said Leonard. “Please go on.”
“Thank you. Yes, it means I died, Eater,” continued Sir Ronald. “Anyway, and this is going to sound crazy to your young ears, Leonard, but when you die you are assigned to the afterlife that best suits your own life experiences. For example, we have our notions of a Christian heaven—”
“What’s a heaven?” asked Eater.
“An eternal afterlife, usually of a positive nature,” said Merlin as he examined a wizard’s staff with an ivory-toned wood of flawless grain.
“Oh, I see,” said Eater. “In that case, even though I’m not dead, I’m already in my heaven. What is your heaven, Merlin?”
“It’s called Avalon, a mystic realm of eternal youth, abundance, and happiness,” said the old wizard, rather quickly. “Eater, I’ve found several magical items that I rather fancy. Do you mind if I keep them? I already pocketed a diadem, but thought I should ask before taking anything else.”
“Of course not. Take and keep whatever you’d like.”
Merlin leaned his old staff against a nearby stack of mummified corpses and pointed the new one at the opposite cavern wall before calling out, “Sha dur!” At once, a stream of what appeared to be large hornets shot out of the tip of the staff and began to attack the corpses on the far wall. When Merlin jerked the staff back, the hornet stream disappeared and the residual insects vanished. “Very nice! I was never able to pull that spell off with my old staff. This one’s made from celyn, also known as holly. Quite powerful.”
Leonard cleared his throat to get Merlin’s attention, then jerked his head in Sir Ronald’s direction.
Merlin grinned and gestured for the knight to continue. “My apologies, Sir Ronald, please continue.”
“Well, apparently there is a place, a central location if you will, where all of the afterlives keep their records and conduct their business, and somehow a mistake was made and I was sent to the wrong place.”
“How terrible,” said Leonard.
“You don’t know the half of it, my boy,” said Sir Ronald, attempting to pat Leonard on the shoulder and failing miserably when his hand passed through the boy, causing him to shudder.
“C-cold!” gasped Leonard with sudden sharpness.
“Sorry. So, instead of arriving at the pearly gates and being welcomed into the presence of our God, Most High, I was unceremoniously deposited before the dreary gates of Queen Hel’s fortress, the Northmen’s goddess of the dead, and ruler of the dark and bitterly cold realm of Helheim!”
Leonard blinked. “Seriously?”
Sir Ronald nodded. “Seriously. When I attempted to explain my plight to Her Majesty’s gate guard, they snickered rudely and sent me to her palace’s lowest dungeon where my sole duty was to torment the dishonorable dead by howling in their ears and mocking their moans.”
“Oh my,” said Eater. “What a cruel fate.”
“Cruel indeed. Well, after several weeks of howling and mocking . . .” Sir Ronald paused, a perplexed look crossing his face. “. . . or was it years? Time behaves strangely in both Helheim and the surrounding realm of Niflheim; it stops and goes, speeds up and slows down. An extremely peculiar place for sure.” He shook his head to clear it. “I had been tormenting an oath breaker named Dagfinn who could tell my heart wasn’t really in it and told me so to my face. We got to talking, and I explained what had happened to me, and then he came up with the best idea I’d heard in a long time. He said, ‘You’re a ghost, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course I am.’"
Merlin sighed impatiently and drummed his fingers on his newly acquired staff.
Leonard shot the old man a stern glance, so Merlin shook his head and went back to picking through Eater’s hoard.
“And then,” Sir Ronald continued, “he said, ‘You should just leave. You can travel through walls, float past guards undetected, pretend to be sleeping. What’s stopping you?’ Of course he was right, so I thanked him and left. And guess what? No one noticed!”
“How surprising,” said Merlin, pinching some odd-shaped coins and a heavy gold ring with a large black stone.
Leonard shot Merlin another death glance, then turned back to the knight. “That is a truly amazing tale, Sir Ronald. How did you end up here in Eater’s cavern?”
“I wandered through the most bleak and despair-inducing landscape, full of fearsome beasts and the walking dead, draugar, the Northmen call them, for days or minutes or years, I really don’t know for how long, and then I came upon a cavern. I went in and was immediately confronted by a monstrously large spider covered with white fur.”
“I like spiders,” said Eater. “They tickle when they crawl on my arms, and their webs taste sweet to my tongues.”
“I’m not sure you’d like this spider, Eater, as she was monstrously large and had a hungry look in her eyes that seemed like it would never go away. Believe me when I say that living Ronald would have been frozen with fear at that moment, but since I was already dead, and, as far as I know, impossible to damage further, I simply asked her if she could please direct me to the closest exit. She stood, unmoving for a long moment, thinking, I suppose, then pointed at the back of her cave and said, ‘There.’ I thanked her and made a bee-line for what turned out to be a narrow tunnel, which I traveled in for some amount of time until I emerged into this most, uh, unusual place with its most exceptional inhabitant.”