3 The river of souls - patting illusion

During the time we spent on investigating each other some portals opened relatively close. We tried to reach every single one of them, hoping that they were willing to accept an immense amount of soul flames. But our struggles were in vain. In most cases, only the bastards who were lucky enough to have a portal spawn in front of their non-existent noses managed to jump in before it closed. In the remaining situations, we were unable to break through a wall of souls who for one reason or another decided to stick together and make the afterlife difficult for others.

Some of those moving obstacles were hell-bent on dragging down the river as many soul flames as they could. What was the cause of their behavior? I had no idea, and this was neither the place nor the time to investigate it.

Nevertheless, if we wanted to maintain the proper state of mind, it was essential to fight against the odds every single time. Especially when the alternative - staying in one place and counting on luck - wasn't a viable option, it would make us too susceptible to losing focus.

'Next one is ours!' I tried to raise the morale after yet another failure, each of them hit my companion harder than me.

'...'

But it didn't work.

For the first time, she had completely lost her mind's focus and slipped back into the depressed state. It nearly caused me to panic as well, but there was still a way to bring her back and avert the worst-case scenario - an idea that was born when that stronger soul had 'grabbed' my shoulder.

Instead of reassuring her with words alone, I decided to give her an illusion of fulfilling one of her many small dreams. A taste of what she could obtain if we managed to escape from this place.

I focused on shaping my soul flame. The power of the mind was overwhelming in this place, it was possible to simulate the feeling of my hand gently caressing her silky hair. Albeit It took a few seconds to make it feel as real as possible, it finally worked.

The unexpected sensation snatched her from the confused state and helped reclaim the sense of self. I was also learning how to retake some of the memories that seemed to be already lost, yet were still around. It was a bit like collecting spilled groceries back into the bag.

'What's that warm feeling? It feels really good… please don't stop.' Underneath the request to keep patting her head was the request to help with clearing her mind from the negative thoughts. She actually wanted to harshly voice the latter and hide the former inside but messed it up.

'For once your words and feelings are harmonized. You should do it more often, it's rather cute.' Smoothing out her hair was fun, and I kept adding various little details like the texture of my hand or-

'Wait… what?! Forget about it!' The proud silver elf immediately shattered the illusion after regaining full clarity of mind, negating all the work I put into it. 'Give it to me!' She demanded as soon as she remembered the content of the message she had sent. Her goal in wanting to wrestle my side of this memory wasn't to feed it to the cleansing process. Although, me forgetting all about it would be a welcomed bonus.

'I refuse. It's also my new treasure, and it's only a fair price for bringing you back.' This message was filled with the conviction that the true importance of shared memories lied in actually sharing them with others and not collecting all of their pieces for yourself. Although, I wasn't sure if a transfer of an entire memory was even possible, but taking into the account the nature of this place it probably was.

In return, she sent me a really graphic presentation of flogging one of her slaves for a much smaller offense. Attached to it was a short label 'your fate will be worse'. In exchange, I sent her a compilation of gore scenes from various movies with a description 'you've got much to learn'.

To our surprise, the memories were more vivid and precise than ever before. Possibly due to the fact that we were both focusing on them, or maybe because we were getting better at using our soul bond. Whatever the reason, it improved their quality so much that even I was amazed. The images in those memories probably looked better than the source material.

While hectoliters of blood and tens of kilograms of spilled guts wouldn't do much against a desensitized modern person, it was more than enough to shock her into silence. Especially when she found it hard to tell the difference between reality and fiction.

True, it didn't take her long to discover that all of those brutal scenes were fake, but she couldn't even begin to imagine how they were created since I as well lacked this particular information. Instead, she tried to substitute the missing elements with the knowledge from her world. Which often resulted in such thoughts as 'just how many slaves were killed during the production of that movie thing?', or '... suffocating someone with his own intestines?! Disgusting… yet innovative', or 'which part of that is fake?! That headless slave for sure ain't a wooden doll!'.

'Hmm… you've made a foolish choice by teaching me all those various techniques. I will make sure to test them out on you. By the way, what's a tv? How is it connected with that zombie girl who came out from the well?'

Her death threats weren't effective, not in this situation, and not when I could easily tell that she was sending them only to uphold the spirit of our mental wrestling match, while in reality, she wanted to watch more scenes from the movies. I would love to take her to a cinema and show the real thing. Simply watching her reactions would be worth the trouble of developing a dimensional travel technology. And I would finally have someone to watch the horror movies with, she proved to be strangely resistant against that genre.

'You still want my part of that memory?' I asked, suspecting that she already forgot why we started doing this.

'What memory?'

'The patting illusion.'

'Oh... fine. You may keep it, but- You felt that?!' The elven girl tried to send me something inside her message, but I was unable to comprehend the attachment. It seemed to be a voice, or an emotion, or a warning, or a set of orders… whatever it was, my mind lacked something essential, something that was required to fully decipher that thing. I only knew that it got my companion really excited and full of hope. 'We need to move! It's our only chance!'

It was hard to probe inside her mind for a further explanation, maybe because her entire focus was converted into the movements of her soul flame. For her, it was all or nothing, and since I had no other ideas, I decided to follow her lead.

'Faster! Put every ounce of your reserves into moving!' She urged, unhappy that I still had a part of my focus directed to keeping my core self intact, and to a certain extend hers as well. 'I can't miss this chance! Don't make me regret taking you with me!'

'No. We will break into pieces if this turns out to be a false alarm.' My old habit kicked in and I refused her request, unwilling to trust her to such a degree. I felt that it was petty and stupid, but without knowing what exactly caused this sudden change in her behavior - even if she was convinced that it was our only hope - I was unable to break through this particular mental barrier.

Yet, I had no other alternatives to offer and knew that we were slowly reaching our limits.

'Idiot! Why do you keep such a glaring flaw in your character?! This is one of the 'do or die' situations, can't you see it?! Being careful is fine, required even, but don't take it to the extreme! Take my previous self for example, you want to become like that?!'

She easily sensed my immediate rejection of her words.

'Coward.' Her genuine wave of disappointment was incredibly painful.

The thing she was most unhappy with wasn't my reluctance to trust her but my hypocrisy. Previously, when I was trying to influence her core values, she listened to my advice, took it into consideration, and accepted it. But when it was my turn to change... I failed spectacularly, not even willing to check if there was any merit to her words.

And to think that I had been irritated with her double standards.

This realization hurt, but also finally pushed me toward the decision to correct myself further.

'... sorry about that.'

'You're lucky it's an emergency. Hurry up.' She wasn't satisfied with a single 'sorry' but ultimately accepted my apologies. The fact that I was about to risk tinkering with my core due to her words won me a lot of points.

My goal was to become a person who could accept a 'do or die' situation without trying to run away. The first step was the hardest one, that was why I first threw away a lot of my hesitation.

The following corrections… turned out to be very easy.

However, due to my newly found eagerness, I overdid it. Once I started removing various flawed memories and unnecessary values from my soul's shelter, it was nearly impossible to stop. After all, the memory that I had to correct myself ruled above all others, and I couldn't tell how many times I threw something away only to forget about it a second later and threw something else, convinced that I had yet to improve.

But she could.

'STOP!' Her sharp inner voice together with a painful sensation, as if she slapped my cheek with a metal glove, put a stop to my errant behavior. Then she immediately helped to collect the memories that were yet to be devoured by the river of souls and gave back some that survived under her protection. But I could tell that something vital was forever gone.

The sudden and unexplained feeling of loss pushed me into a confused and depressed state. I was about to start looking through everything that was left, hoping to find any hints that would help to pinpoint the nature of the missing element.

'There's no time for it!' Her angry reaction didn't help to stop me from gradually losing the clarity of mind - her inner voice was becoming more and more distant. She quickly realized that and made a desperate attempt to help me collect myself:

'B-brother… do you really want to leave your c-cute t-twin s-sister alone?' I could only imagine how much pride she had to swallow to send this one sentence. On top of that, attached to this message was a genuine longing for its content to become a reality, and a tiny question if she was the only one who felt this way.

Actually, she truly believed that this wish could come true.

Just having her call me 'brother' was more than enough to bring me back from the verge of oblivion. It convinced my sense of self that a strong connection to the person I used to be was still present, which in turn allowed to calm down.

Although, I would prefer a younger sister instead of a twin.

'Alright! All or nothing!'

'Good… you're going to pay me for this later. Now shut up and follow my lead, we're getting out of here.' Interwoven within her thoughts was a lot of joy. She was delighted that the crisis was averted, that we had some means of escaping, and that I removed my irrational fear of death thanks to her advice…

… I couldn't recall too many details about the last part, and it got me a bit worried, but she was right. Getting out of here as fast as possible should be our priority.

'Your wish is my command, little sister!'

'Shut up!'

A new point was added to my list of things to do - make her repeat that line three times in quick succession. But I couldn't tell why exactly this strange idea seemed so amusing.