#agatb edit

“What if evil doesn’t really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except our own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?”

“Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story?” The voice, a faint echo in the great cave, belongs to Felicity. She turns around on the rock, faces us, wraps her arms across bent knees, hugging them close. “Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one …” She glances at me. “One was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls.”

The choice is before me in her palm. The cries of my friends grow faint in the fog. I take one plump berry and place it on my tongue, tasting it. It is not tart. Rather, there is only a pleasant sweetness and then nothing. It is the taste of forgetting. Of sleep and dreams with no waking. Never to long or yearn, to struggle or hurt or love or desire ever again. And I understand that this is what it truly means to lose your soul.