Three ghosts dressed in tattered clothes escorted him to the Fields of Asphodel. It was a long walk. What the hell am I doing? Thomas thought to himself. He contemplated making a run for it. He’d rather die than this. But he was dead. Oh, good god, I’m dead. I’m dead for good now. It’s over, Thomas thought. He felt despair rise up in his throat. I can’t do this. He began to count the minutes that passed. It was of no comfort to him. Asphodel itself was not a place of punishment. It was suspension. He looked around. He was here, the entrance into the Fields of Asphodel. There would be no escaping this time. He wouldn’t lose himself this time. He wouldn’t. He took a step past the gate. He wouldn’t lose himself. I won’t lose–
     “Where am I?” He asked himself.  Looking around, Thomas saw dark gray grass covering an expanse as far as he could see A thick forest stood in the distance. There were no hills, no mountains. He thought he heard a river flowing. That aside, it was as quiet as a library, or a cabin of sleeping men. He looked around and saw no one. He looked in the sky. No sun. He’d say there was no light, if not for the fact that he could see. “Where is everyone?” He shook his head vigorously. He was missing something, something just beyond the reach of his memory. Thomas vaguely remembered that this happened to newcomers. Newcomers to where? He thought to himself. His memory would return with time. He took a second step.
     He was standing in a village. Houses stood scattered randomly throughout the space he’d been sure was empty. The forest was closer than before. A man was walking toward him. He looked… different. Thomas blinked hard and tried to focus on the man. His eyes didn’t seem to want to. He turned aside, an ache building in his head from the effort. Asphodel. That’s where I am.Â
     He became aware of a dull, muffled tone. A moment later he realized it was he himself who produced it. He was in pain and screaming, but the sound was muffled as if cried into a pillow. Silence seemed an unbreakable law of Asphodel: a sacred and ancient understanding.Â
     The creature Thomas had dismissed had wrapped its teeth firmly around his left shoulder. Not a man. His dull shout continued. Nobody came. From the shapes moving about within the houses, he knew they must hear him, but nobody came. He attempted to fight the monster off, but it was far larger and far stronger. His shoulder was now a bloody mess. Everything was gray, gray, gray. No blacks, or whites, or colors. His now soaked shirt grew dark with gray blood. He scrambled harder, trying to claw at the thing’s face. Nothing seemed to phase it. The pain grew exponentially as teeth sunk deeper and deeper into his skin, into his bone, drinking the marrow, severing the tendons. The muffled sounds of his screams became more acute. The creature joined in his howling, though his cries were muted by flesh.Â
     Thomas stepped into a house, rubbing his left shoulder. It was sore. He wondered how he’d hurt it. A dim memory floated to the surface of his consciousness. He flinched and shoved the painful memory deep down. The house was small: a single-story house, built from strange gray wood. It was his now. He wondered who built it, or where it came from. Who lived here before? The thought came unbidden. As if in answer, a sleeping man in a corner of the house became suddenly apparent to him. He was startled, but his body was lethargic in answering. The only physical indication that he’d even noticed the man was a slight widening of his eyes. He walked slowly toward the body. “Is he dead?” Thomas muttered to himself. That was funny for some reason. He didn’t feel like laughing.
     He couldn’t touch it. His arm resisted moving closer than three or four inches away from the man. “That’s… odd.” Thomas shook his head, putting the sleeper out of his mind. He walked around the rest of the house, which consisted of one other room. A room filled only with a bed and a small desk. He walked back into the other, slightly larger room. It was empty save for a single chair. “Why am I here,” he said to himself, sitting down in it. It wasn’t a question. Just something he felt he should say. It felt right on his tongue. “Why am I here. Why am I here. Why am I here. Why am I here.” He continued with the non-question. He knew he should be doing something. He just didn’t know what.
     A time and a time passed. He hadn’t grown bored of sitting there, but he felt like he should be by now, so he left his home and wandered the planes littered by houses made of the same, strange wood as his own. He wandered and wandered, inspecting the houses as he passed them. “That’s odd,” he said quietly. The door to one of the houses had an iron doorknob. He reached out and turned it, pulling toward himself. It didn’t budge. He pushed it away from himself. Still nothing. Locked. “Odder and odder,” he continued muttering.
     “What was that?” a man called to him, his voice unnaturally loud.
Thomas glanced at him. The man had a worn beard, streaked with white. Thomas was irritated by the volume of his voice. This was a quiet place. The quiet should not be disturbed.
     “The door,” Thomas replied, stubbornly keeping his voice to a whisper. “It’s odd.”
     The man stared at him. “Odd, you say? Odd how?”
     “The doorknob. It’s metal. Also the door seems to be locked. Do you know who lives inside?”
     “There’s nobody in there,” the bearded man answered, an indecipherable tone in his voice.
     “People don’t leave their houses,” Thomas said with certainty.
     “How do you know?”
     “I–,” Thomas began to reply. “I guess I don’t.” He didn’t like this man. He was loud. He asked questions. And certainty was a difficult concept to grasp.Â
     “You’re right, though, child. That you are. Would you like to come in? I can tell you’re a curious boy. Curiosity is hard to come by these days. If you have questions, I may well have quite a bit of answers for you.”
     “Why do you lock your door? Do you have something to hide? People don’t hide things, here.” Thomas asked, suspicion coloring his face. The man let out a long sigh and, inserting a heavy key into the iron lock, turned back to Thomas, saying, “I’ve seen things to boil blood and curl hair, child. Do not presume to pass judgment when you know so very little. Come in, or go home. I have little patience left, these days.” The man turned the key and swung the door inward. As Thomas followed him in, he wondered how it was a man could lack patience when time was such an expendable resource. It was a large home, easily four times larger than Thomas’s own. It was littered with things. A lit fireplace burned below a mantle. The mantle itself was covered with lumps of metal. A table stood low to the ground beside a long wooden bench. The bench was the only surface in the room, other than the floor itself, without things on top. The table was home to hundreds of pages, neatly stacked in a dozen separate piles. Some were covered with writing, others with drawings, and yet others were blank.
     “What do you think?” the man said, his eyes twinkling with amusement.
     “It’s… incredible. Where did you get all these things?” Thomas cried out, not a care in the world that his voice was raised.
     “Most of it comes from the forest. I like to go there to think, and to study. How long have you been here, child? What’s your name?”
     “I don’t know. How does one keep track of time here? My name…” Thomas thought hard. He hadn’t used it in so long. “Tom. Thomas. That’s my name.”
     “For the longest time, I couldn’t. Now I keep a clock. It makes a racket like all God’s armies once a day, so I know to make a mark on my calendar. I realized a while back, that, if you go deep, deep into the forest, you could see the stars at night. I used that to judge the length of a day and spent the next month or so building a clock. It’s harder than you’d think. It’d have been impossible, but I found pre-prepared gears half-buried in the mud one day. To this day I have little idea where they came from. Or who built them. In any case, there are tests we can take to see how long you’ve been here, if you’re up for it.”
     “Are they… painful?” Thomas asked, shoulder twitching.
     “Not at all, child. No need to fear. I’m just going to need a piece of your clothing.” At this, Thomas took off his shirt without a word and handed it to the strange man. He took it gingerly and laid it across his arm, walking down stairs Thomas hadn’t even noticed. They appeared to lead to a basement. Thomas started to follow him, left shoulder twitching once again, but the old man shook his head, asking him to stay upstairs. He sat on the bench and waited. It was nothing new, but the restlessness he felt was. He quickly grew tired of sitting and doing nothing and longed to see what the man hid downstairs. He fought the feelings, though, and sat waiting silently. And then the clock went off. Thomas jumped straight off the couch, and into the air, his eyes wide, shoulder spasming violently. The sound was that of metal scraping against metal, but louder than anything he could remember.Â
     It was a sound loud enough to wash away all his lethargy, to sharpen his mind, loud enough to wake the dead.Â
     Finally, blessedly, the sound abated. The old man returned up the stairs, Thomas’s shirt in hand.
     “So?” Thomas asked, curious, still shaken from the violent noise.
     “You’re… young. Very, very, very young. I’ve never met anyone become self aware before his fiftieth year. No one except a boy I met a few years ago. In fact, he was just a little bit older than you yourself are. But he was a special case, to say the least. Special indeed. You’ve been here for less than three years, child. Tell me everything you remember. No, better yet, write me everything you remember!” The elderly man was surprisingly spry, and went sprinting around the room excitedly, searching through the clutter. He found what he was looking for and tossed it to Thomas. “That’s my old journal, Thomas. Treat it with respect and with love. That journal is the single most valuable piece of writing I own. Just start where my writing ended. Write down whatever comes to mind. Feel free to read through it. I can lend you some ink and a quill. Your new life has just begun, Thomas, boy. Nothing will ever be the same again.” Thomas smiled and stepped toward the man, words of thanks on his lips.
     He sat on his bed. A journal was lying on the desk beside him. The journal was important, somehow. His shoulder twitched, he opened the book, and his eyes began to trace the lines of words scrawled on the page.Â
     And, after a few moments, he began to remember how to read.Â
