The Place After Death

[dealer_of_aus_666]

Monthly Short Piece for January 2024!

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Warnings: Choose Not To Use, Category: Gen, Rating: Teen and Up

Summary:
Colonel Salzen Pretzel hadn't expected to wake up.
Or: the afterlife really does exist, even if it's not what anyone expects, and Pretzel still has his daughter to worry about.

Relationships and Characters: Colonel Pretzel & Lt Col Flam Kish, Mentioned Shvein Hax, Mentioned Von Baum, Mentioned Von Stollen

Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death, Afterlife, introspective, Father-Daughter Relationship, Character Study, ish, Good Father Colonel Pretzel

Colonel Salzen Pretzel hadn’t expected to wake up.
He’d known immediately he was dying, as the shrapnel riddled his body and the fire ravaged his flesh. In his final moments he had held no anger towards the children in that tank. It was, perhaps, their right to attack him so, as he had attacked their town, even as the doubts he would never fully express—even in his private journal—were creeping up from the back of his mind, and so he could not be angry. He remembers his death clearly: a quiet understanding ache, an awe at the sheer power of the children’s tank, the tiniest sliver of misplaced fatherly pride, and then intense, agonizing pain that wiped out all other thought until it too winked out in the blackness of death.
(Not the best death possible, to be sure, but also not the worst—he remembers Mother’s months-long battle with cancer too well to claim that.)
He didn’t expect to wake up, but he counts it a pleasant surprise. Or an unpleasant one, if Hax’s wild stories of a fiery pit under the earth made to punish sinners are true, but even Shvein Hax, despite his obsession with old folklore and fairy-tales, had had little regard for the idea of a moral existence beyond life and death. And besides, the first impression Salzen gathers of his place isn’t fire, or red, or heat, but a softer color somewhere between light gray and off-white, like a cloudy day sky. He’s lying on his back, is the next thing he notices as his senses return to him. And then the pain hits again, and he hisses through his teeth as his skin feels like it’s lighting on fire again, trying desperately to hold back an undignified whimper or scream as it builds.
“Salzen Pretzel,” a musical, androgynous voice says over him, cutting through the noise of the pain. “Do not worry. The pain will fade soon.”
Slowly Salzen pries his eyes open again (when had he closed them?) to see a figure peering down at him. His vision is so blurred by tears that he can’t distinguish any details aside from a dark gray round-ish shape against the lighter gray of the sky. He thinks he opens his mouth to speak but all that comes out is a low groan and he immediately shuts it again.
“Hush now,” that same voice says. “Breathe deep and count the seconds to distract yourself.”
It’s all he can do to follow the instructions. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. After some undefinable amount of time—could have been seconds, could have been years—the pain ebbs away to a manageable level, to only patches of his skin rather than his entire body. His eyes pry open yet again to the face of that figure, and as his vision clears he realizes that it wasn’t that he couldn’t make out any details, but that the figure’s face doesn’t have any details to make out. It’s just a smooth, dark gray plane in the approximate shape of a face, no snout or mouth or eyes to be found.
“Ah,” he says. “Hello.”
“Hello,” it repeats at him.
The pain is almost entirely gone now, and he attempts to sit up. The faceless person(?) steps back to allow him room, but he doesn’t need it—the pain has left him too weak to sit up on his own. Another moment or two, he tells himself.
Instead he turns his head, with some effort, towards the faceless figure again. “If you don’t mind me asking, who are you?”
The figure’s head tilts, perhaps in amusement. “A better question would be what am I. I am what you might call an angel—I have no individual identity. My purpose is to meet and guide new souls. This place can be confusing to those who expected something else.”
“…this place?” Ignoring the question of “no individual identity” for a second.
“The place after death, of course,” the angel hums. “Where souls go after they have been severed from their bodies.”
That…does make sense, Salzen supposes. Where else would he have gone after that explosion? But he hadn’t expected death to be so painful. “What happens here?” he asks next.
“Several things may happen. It depends on the soul. There is no punishment or reward here, aside from the punishment or reward that souls put on themselves, or onto other souls. Some souls choose to wander and explore this place. Some choose to go back and be reborn. Others go out to meet other souls. Others lay down to sleep, sometimes for centuries. You may do as you wish.”
Salzen attempts to sit up again, and this time manages it—the pain is gone and his strength is returning. “ Other souls?” Even as he asks the question, he can see the outlines of the soldiers he commanded forming into bodies on the ground, still dressed in their uniforms just like Salzen himself. Something occurs to him. “Do people…” He struggles to word his question. “Does the place where someone dies correspond with the place where they, ah, enter this place after death?”
“It does. So does time.”
... time. Time was still passing in the living world, wasn’t it? Those children in that tank would continue to do…whatever it was they were trying to do—free their parents, wasn’t it? The Berman army would continue to spread through the last vestiges of Gasco territory. Hax would continue chasing his legendary Lost God. Stollen and Baum would continue to play their war games and waste lives. And Flam— impulsive, stubborn, brilliant Flam—would hear the news of his death and immediately resolve herself to vengeance, would lay an ingenious trap for the tank and its children, would bring to bear every single scrap of weaponry she could command or convince against it, and she would die anyways, because that tank was like something out of Hax’s old stories and Salzen doubted it could be defeated through any mundane means.
“My daughter,” he says aloud, to himself. “She’s going to get herself killed—I have to stop her—”
“You cannot stop her,” the angel interrupts. “You are Here, and dead. She is There, and alive. And should you go back There and be reborn you would lose your memories.”
Its words are gentle, but Salzen still feels the sting of failure. His daughter is about to throw herself into her own death and he’s unable to e ven attempt to stop her, because he’s gone now from that world, and soon she will be too…
…soon she’ll be here, in the place after death. Where Salzen is.
“If I cannot stop her,” he eventually declares, “then I will wait for her.”
“You may do as you wish,” the angel repeats.