Part III~ The Goddess

He slowly meanders into consciousness, at once only aware of absence. Something is not quite right. It dawns on him like an April rainstorm, swift, unforgiving, knocking the air out of his lungs. Lungs. Søren tries to open his mouth, or what was his mouth. Suddenly all sense of material and immaterial seem to vanish. Ownership flees, leaving but the faintest wisp of memory. Mouths are simply ideas, made for communication. Communication? What need has an angel for speech. He is everything: eternal, pure, divine. The feeling rings through him, resonating, he harmonizes with the universe…

All of a sudden the feeling leaves him. Hollow, a shell, mortal. "Silly humans" a melodious voice rings out. "So selfish once you have fed of ambrosia." Søren starts. He notices that he has hands. His feeling of self swiftly jolts back. He remembers. Smoke. Boar. Fire. Pyre. But then how is he here and where is here?

Again the disembodied voice rings out, answering his unspoken questions. Coldly feminine, "You are dead in Purgatory, Hell, The Otherworld, Heaven, or whatever you desire to call it." His mind briefly registers a thought before that too is answered; "My name is Medeina". "The earth goddess?" he vaguely thinks to ask, before that too stimulates an affirmative.

Through the fog of his existence, a figure twirls together, she combines thoughts, memories, preconceived notions, biases he didn't realize he had into a radiant being. She shapes a world for him, a world in which he agrees to be her champion. He will be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of his pyre. He killed her boar, so he must be strong, but for that he will do penance as her champion. Two tasks are all she requires of him, one as payment for the boar, the second for a new life. He says yes. How can he think to do otherwise? She is a Goddess.

Beckoning a second figure out of the mist, the goddess bestows him with a companion; a guardian angel that she says will appear to him when he is back in his mortal body. 'A spy?' he wonders, before that thought is lost to the swirling fog of the afterworld. He is falling, flying, abruptly he jolts into consciousness to see an ethereal figure looming over him. "Are you my guardian angel" is all he has time to query before he yet again succumbs to darkness and the frustrated thought, 'not again' rings in his ears.