White with no sense of depth or contour – no horizon, no floor, no sky. The bodies, their size, portrayed distance as being whatever size that body was in proportion to your own. Crowds, there were crowds of the dead healed; the children of London who had been slaughtered by the Nazis and by Maxwell.
Maxwell. He was here as well. Green eyes, bright and shining with the immortal light of this space, found the archbishop in his mended garb, small - small meant he was far from Father Anderson, the man standing in this realm of purgatory that was not really the halfway place. He felt it was temporary; all of these souls were moving elsewhere. This was a stage of coming to terms with death, gathering up the soul in the form of the individual identity without the containing body to help it retain its shape. The priest was nearly in his living form, dead as he was, as a soul in a dimension of white.
He heard the laughter of children - the little ones, he saw them run past. They played. Dead young souls, they played, so bright - bright and innocent. Their parents were present, souls shaping themselves besides familiar forming faces of neighbors, friends, those they had died with. Some bodies were so small, only the size of the tip of a small finger, so far away, and cut off by the bodies of the rest of the reaching mass of crowded souls that seemed to have their own space and separation from others, and yet, with only size and no distinct depth, they seemed so close to one another.
There were even the Nazi monsters, but they were darker - shadows, and they were distorted, unable to reach a crisp form. Perhaps they lacked individuality, part of a unified, mindless, conscious-less mass as they had been for all the years they had been undead.
The priest turned his head and found another child he had raised. Yumie, standing and only slightly smaller than the priest, the nun with her sword in her hands - she must have died too, then. He hadn't wanted her to die, but the grief was only a misting sadness that settled over his form, his heart the essence of his whole soul so that the feeling was not isolated in his chest. Somehow, this diluted the emotion and made it easier to manage, less sharp. No wound could be made by such feelings now. And this place was not a place to dread. It was calming, neutral, white. And the girl bore no shadows. She shone like the innocent London civilians who had lost their lives.
They shouldn't have had to die either.
Only the darkened monsters should have died, those collected blackening ghosts. They continued to appear, along with a few Iscariot souls – yes, he recognized them all, all of the individual lives – but the citizens had ceased to materialize. No new victims arrived - only soldiers who had had a real part in this pointless, wasteful, destructive war that had thrown souls from their bodies and into this place when they should have lived on for many more years.
Another shadow formed, but it was much larger than any of the Nazis. It was larger than Yumie or Maxwell. It was the largest Father Anderson had yet to see. It was close and it was sitting, its back was leaning against some indistinct surface that could not have been separate from the white realm. Green eyes watched the black, smoking and clouded substance wander. It floated about his feet, building and flowing as a stream would have if he were to stand in one – but slowly, like something aged, an aged miasma. It filtered over his boots which had formed as part of the paladin's identity. It swirled around him, a weary shadow, dark, the soul of a creature that could not shine. Some of this shadow remained around his feet but it was seeping away and thinning, creeping towards a darkening lump, a pit, which took the shape of a man with darkness waving like flames from his head, reaching but seeking to burn nothing. The blackness moved as if there was wind in this realm, but Father Anderson could feel that the space was still. There was no air, only a faint warmth, the brightness of the white light.
The form became more detailed, but it was clear now that it was forming much more slowly than any of the other souls had, as if it could not find its identity, similar to the Nazis, but also so very different from the behavior of their dark shadows. The man knew what the soul was, who the soul was, what body it had once belonged to. And as he knew this, Father Anderson saw that there were many small bodies within it, distant souls within the dark one that made it heavy and slow, their movements preventing the black soul from finding a shape. And where the black miasma was thin the small bodies made it writhe. There seemed to be agony within the mass of blackness, drifting and moving towards a core while it also moved away, like clouds circling about the eye of a hurricane, but here the clouds were repelled as well as collected and drawn in. White souls glittered within the black pit of infinite distance - or no distance at all - the darkness within it was like the whiteness of the realm the priest was in. The white souls, tiny specks of light, caught within the dark body.
It had taken time, but a face formed, and it was the face of the vampire the paladin knew. Grey. The skin was not pale as it had been on Earth, and dark crimson did not possess the light that made the green eyes glow. And it had no expression. The face stared forward, into the whiteness, into nothingness. Then, slowly, the white lights within the nosferatu's soul began to escape, trickling out slowly, like the sands of time escaping from its prison, the hourglass. The souls never grew in size, so they remained distant from the priest, but they developed their identity, their soul found the shape of their body, no longer just a flame.
But a grey haze remained over Alucard as Father Anderson watched him. At this point, he realized…
No. The creature wasn't dead. His blank eyes could not see this place - they were within the darkness inside him, swirling in his soul, casting out the specks of light.
The vampire stayed by the priest's side, until the man grew in brightness, glowing, whitening, until he melded into the white realm.
All of the others soon left.
Then, Alucard was alone, though the souls continued to leave him, so small and distant. But they quickly faded into the light, and he always remained as the blot of darkness.