A New Night

A Different Kind of Spirit Realm

For a moment, I believed that everything had just been a dream. I’d contracted some sickness and hallucinated a nightmare about demons, the Spirit Realm, and finding out that everything I’d ever known was a lie. Now, I opened my eyes and found myself hanging from a boulder. I was on the Island … I was home. A cool breeze gently caught my wings. The moon was full, bathing the entire beach with her silver light. It glowed in streaks upon particularly shiny plants and bugs. The sky was a cosmic mix of stars, swirls, and lights that fell across the sky.

Had it really all been a dream? That the Sleeping God had woken and fought a Golem. That we had gone over the Gods’ Wall. That over the Gods’ Wall had been a sort of Hell, filled with demons of every shape and size. That there had been the journey up a frozen vine to reach the Spirit Realm, and then...

“How are your dreams?” asked Krogallo, who fluttered his wings and landed on the rock alongside me. There was something blatantly off about him, something I couldn’t yet come to terms with. It felt like it had been many days since I’d last seen him … and I felt so unexpectedly happy to see him.

“They have been bizarre,” I replied with a smile and sense of calm that I had to force. “You died.”

Krogallo gave a somber nod.

“What … what is it?” I asked, seeing his gaze fall to the silver-lit sand.

“I think you know,” Krogallo replied.

I felt less shocked by his response than I thought I should have. There was no imagining all that I had learned and seen since setting out with Bassello. The stories, medicine, gods ... and everything that I would have rather not discovered. I looked at the visage of my teacher and said, “Can I still call you Krogallo, even if I know you are a dream-spirit?”

“Of course,” Krogallo, who was not really himself, replied. He smiled very gently, only barely showing me his fangs. For an imitation, he seemed to know how to be Krogallo very authentically. He studied me as I thought these things and eventually said, “You have countless questions, I’m sure. Or maybe you’ve seen so much, you don’t even know where to begin.”

“Everything is different,” I said with a slight nod. “The gods are not what I thought they would be. They can be damaged, scared, destroyed. They don’t have the answers to the things I needed to know most. Where you are … where my father is. What the point of any of this is.”

Krogallo again gave a gentle nod. “Do you really feel there should be someone with all the answers you seek?”

Once again, I found myself without an answer. It was an unusual feeling for me. I always knew what to say and had the conviction to say it, whether to Bassello, Camolla, Scraa, or any of the Night People. The moment I’d realized that the flying green apparition I’d first chased in the city of the gods had not been my father, the words had left me. Just like my faith and everything I’d believed in. All I had left was a tired shrug.

Krogallo extended a wing. “Perhaps I am wrong, but I sense that the limited nature of the gods is not the discovery that has disturbed you most.”

I shook my head, knowing that my eyes were surely giving me away. I felt ashamed about all that this dream-spirit shaped as Krogallo could probably see in me. I whispered, “There’s no place for my kind in the Spirit Realm … which means that our life below is the end. I always thought that one day I would find my father and the real you. But the gods have determined that our souls are meaningless. Or else … we are just a smarter kind of fruit bat with no soul, and the gods never had anything to do with our kind whatsoever. So maybe there are no souls … which means that it is our destiny to spend our lives saying goodbye until we ourselves leave into eternal loneliness too.” My chest became heavy as the dull pain that I had forced into my belly seemed to release into it. It felt like mild acid that burned my chest and made my throat muscles tight.

Krogallo listened silently, his eyes misting as I spoke. Then, when I was finished, he shuffled closer and put a wing around me. He said, “You feel so much.”

I winced as I looked at him, not knowing if I should feel chastised.

However, Krogallo did not seem upset at all. He continued, “I wish I could express what your life means, how beautiful and terrible your anguish is. Life is filled with tragedy and horrible pain without excuse or justification. And you’re right—it is a destiny of saying goodbye again and again until we face the unknowable. The only meaning is in the beauty and purpose we create in the midst of the horror. For me, this has been all the many times I also get to say ‘hello’ before the goodbye. But that doesn’t always relieve the pain.”

It all felt so worthless. I asked him, “Why do you keep going?”

Krogallo nodded as if he understood my question completely. “The meaningless beauty that we fight to see, even in the depths of despair—the flowers that hide in the heart of the darkest jungle, the little Hunter of nobility among demons, the scared god willing to seek out aid against evil Golems, the monster who chooses to evolve into a father, the priest who heroically gives up a comforting lie in exchange for the terrifying truth.

“Even when it seems we have no reason to be good, or to try, or to be happy, we can never let this universe of darkness win. It will try its hardest to make us like it … and eventually, it will win—even if that means dragging out our final breath. But we can choose to be the stars that twinkle back against the darkness for a little while. We can find that beauty within ourselves, within others, and even within this world of suffering. At least, that is what gives me the strength to go on.”

I hesitated and then asked, “So … you will die too?”

Krogallo nodded. “The end, no matter how prolonged, is as inevitable as the beginning. I have no reason to think that a part of us goes on past death, whether we be Night People or the gods themselves. However, I intend to one day embrace my end with open wings. I will one day go into the darkness with my heart holding tightly to the memories of those I have loved and all the beauty I’ve seen. The last thing I will know is that everything meant something to me.”

I thought about the few people I’d let close to my heart. My father, Camolla, Krogallo, Scraa, and Bassello. The thought of each of them caused a sharp pain in my chest. However, the pain was real … significant. It wasn’t the dull nothingness I’d felt in all the years of pushing people away from me so that I would not feel their loss like I had felt in losing my father. Was that what meaning felt like? This sharp feeling that made my eyes water, that made me feel like crying, but that also made me feel like smiling.

“I think you understand,” Krogallo said and smiled. “It’s not easy … and even the so-called gods have extended their lives to give themselves more time to understand this. But for those like you and me, it’s worthwhile.”

I swayed silently for a moment and then felt stinging tears roll down my forehead. I let out a sob and shuddered as Krogallo held me. But unlike the hollow sadness that had overtaken me after I’d left Bassello, these tears had weight. My crying became harder, and I could truly feel all the anguish I’d fought off for so long. There were no more stories to tell myself, no more false hope, no more shielding me from the heft of my grief.

“That’s it,” Krogallo said as we swayed. “That’s all the meaning flooding in—all the truth you can accept for what it truly is. It hurts … but it also heals. So let yourself feel it; you have all the time you need.”

My breath became ragged as I cried harder. Then, finally, I let out a scream of rage for all that had been taken away from me—my father, the real Krogallo, my childhood, my hopes of a perfectly happy world where I didn’t have to say goodbye. It felt like saying goodbye to them all one last time. But as I said goodbye, I truly allowed myself to feel their absence. So it was like they were with me, for the first time since I’d cut myself off from feeling their loss. And now … now I wanted to be with the friends and family I had left so I could cry, laugh, and hug them for every moment I could. I wanted …”

“Bassello!” I shouted, suddenly remembering the urgency of what I had been doing. I wiped my forehead and said, “I need Bassello. The Queen of the demons is free in the city. We need him to help us fight her. But he’s missing! And he’s sad … and if he finds her and tries to fight her while weakened and without me, he’ll die. And I don’t want that to happen—at least not while he’s alone. Not when I can be with him.”

Krogallo nodded. He then spread his wings and fluttered down to the ground. He began to hop toward the beach and pointed with a wing directly out over the ocean. “We will find Bassello and stop this situation from escalating. However, to do that, we must reach into another’s dream so you can see some truths that the waking world has kept so hidden.”

I nodded, ready for whatever it was I had to see. I leaped from the rock and took off into the air. I went much further over the ocean than I’d ever gone while in the waking world. I flew straight forward into the suddenly rising sun. Then, something like sleep struck me for just the slightest moment.

Just as suddenly as sleep came over me, I was awake again, flying back to the same Island I had just left. Only now, it was day, and the sun burned oppressively from overhead.

I spotted Krogallo again, standing on the beach just out of the surf. However, there was now someone with him. This Night Person was about my age, maybe a year younger. Her fur was a dark brown, and she looked small for her age. She stared up at the Gods’ Wall with a big-eyed expression that seemed lost and afraid in a way that seemed distinctly familiar to me.

I landed in the sand and hopped toward her. Somehow, as I watched her face, I found that I knew exactly who she was. She was not a god, not an invincible machine, not a warrior. She was a person. With just that, whatever frustrations I had felt at her from how I had seen her before melted away as I finally—truly—saw her.