Young Writers Society

Eos looked up when he heard the name Quinn, and furrowed his eyebrows skeptically at the girl.
''Quinn? Your name is Quinn? Your Physic Radiance Person...'' he coughed. ''I mean I have a hard time believing that.''

"No," Margaret said, in regards to the song. "Was I supposed to?"

She was still conscious in her bloody nightgown, even though she noticed she wasn't the only one who was injured. Maybe this was all a terrible dream.

Quinn gave her a long hard stare, only pausing to unwrap another one of her chocolate bars and take a noticeably large bite out of it. Something about the look was familiar to Vil - it was the kind of look Axel had given him whenever he hadn't known what something was. An almost teasing, incredulous look.

There had been nothing wrong with that look on Axel's face (besides it being infuriating when he did it now) but the look just seemed wrong on Quinn's face.

"It's a classic," Quinn slowly repeated.

Giving Margaret one last incredulous look, she turned to Eos. "I think you have me mistaken for someone else," Quinn said, with a nonchalance that just didn't fit. Quinn felt like Lira, and Lira wasn't ever supposed to be so much like-

He shook the thought of his head.

"I don't know the song," he quietly said.

Quinn turned and stared at him.

"Well, you're a kid," she dismissively said. "I bet you listen to...Imagine Dragons? That's popular these days, right?"

He resisted the urge to tap into his irritation at being called a child. He knew he looked the part - there was no use getting angry about something that Quinn didn't even know was a point of contention. Shoving his hands into his pockets, his gaze dropped back down to his injury. It was like his body was trying to fade away like it had when he died, but was stuck right before it could - leaving him with the strange wound oozing with darkness and blood.

The others had injuries, too. Some were more obvious than others, but he was beginning to suspect that it was a mark of whatever place they were in. Why else would he have the bruise from nearly eight years ago, when Demyx accidentally whacked him in the eye with his sitar? Or the cut he got from messing around in one of Vexen's labs?

Zorothin closed his eyes, gritting his teeth. His body screamed in agony, and his mind was in a haze of pain. The last thing he could remember he had been trying to kill...the sound of voices reached his ears, and with a groan he slowly forced himself to walk, and slowly he emerged into a crowd of humans and...Eos?!
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Eos thought for a moment. He had no idea what this ''Imagine Dragons'' or ''Living On A Prayer'' was, and no one bothered to tell him. That was fine by him. He needed time to gather his thoughts. He and these humans, were stuck in an afterlife, their injuries were as good as new...what did it all mean?
A rustling noise sounded and he turned...then froze.
''WarLord Zorothin.'' He greeted the newcomer with obvious contempt. There was no mistaking those insolent starry eyes, or the extra toe.
In response Zorothin stared at Eos the way a spider might stare at a particularly juicy fly.
''Eos.'' he responded his voice cool, with an errie stillness.

Emily glanced around the group. There was a lot of tension here, and she didn't like it. Maybe her not liking it added to the tension? She chuckled and shook that thought out of her head. It might be true, but it was hilariously unhelpful.

"I really don't want to interrupt anything important, but don't you all think we should go somewhere? I don't know, explore a bit. I mean, I'm finally dead. I'm finally somewhere I've never been before, I'd like to check it out, ya know?"

Emily had a point.

He nodded in agreement. A short distance away, Quinn stopped leaning against the tree as she started on her last candy bar. "So where to?" she asked. "Exploring this place seems like a good idea to me."

He glanced around the forest.

"We should try finding some sign of civilization," he said. He knew the word must have sounded strange coming out of the mouth of someone so young in such a serious voice, but he really didn't care anymore. "Isn't there a saying about rivers leading to people?"

Eos nodded.
''That sounds like the best plan. I heard the sound or rushing water when I first arrived. Maybe there's a river around here.''
Zorothin just looked with twisted amusement on his face.

"Yeah, there is a saying. Or there was. It stopped being used commonly after a while, I don't really know why. The point is to follow the nearest river and eventually, you'll find a town or something. Towns are set up near rivers a lot. I mean, I lived in a few that were deliberately not, but those were special circumstances."

"I woke up by the river," Margaret offered, hoping she was being helpful. "We can follow it to somewhere that will help us." Her mind balked at the thought of the forest ground rubbing up against her bare feet for what could very well be miles, but knowing no one could do anything about it now, she said nothing.

He nodded.

Before anyone else could offer to the take the lead, Vil moved in the direction that Margaret had come from. It only took a moment before he heard the sound of moving water - a small but steady river cut through the forest, leading out beyond the woods.

He didn't wait for the others to follow.

He started heading down alongside the river, eyes continuing to study the wound in his abdomen. He narrowed his eyes. It was growing smaller. Not by too much, but it was just enough for him to notice a difference.

"Your cut's smaller," Quinn suddenly commented from beside him, head tilted in a vaguely unnatural way. He immediately stiffened at the comment. His hand went up to touch the cut on his cheek, but she cut him off before he could feel if it had changed as well. "Not that cut. The big, gaping one in your stomach."

He looked over at her. "You noticed?"

"You have a giant, gaping hole in your stomach with darkness surrounding it," Quinn drily said. "Of course I noticed it. Your other injuries are getting smaller, too, but that's the biggest. And presumably how you died."

Vil studied the ground in front of him.

Quinn didn't say anything for another minute.

She just finished off her last chocolate bar and shoved the wrapper into the pocket of her leather jacket. "Well, my insides don't feel like they're burning up as much, so maybe that's just a thing that happens here - you get stuck with your injuries for a little bit, and then they heal up."

He glanced over at her again. "How did you die?"

Quinn shrugged. "Work. You?"

His gaze fell back down to his feet.

"...Work," he said.

It didn't even register that Quinn wasn't questioning why a ten year old would be working, or why that work involved something like a cut that almost tore him in two.

For the first time Eos noticed that Vil had a cut large cut across his stomach.
He narrowed his eyes.
''How is possible that you both died of work?'' he asked, thankful that no one had asked about the circumstances of his own death. ''What kind of work did you two do?''

Quinn was silent for a moment.

"...I was a hunter," she said. "I hunt things-hunted things that go bump in the night. I also helped them out, too. But people are stubborn, and they thought I needed an exorcism when I didn't. And exorcisms in real life don't work half as well as they do in the movies - I'm surprised the people who did it to me aren't here, too. The strain on the souls create a burst of energy, and then..."

Quinn paused - Vil suspected it was for dramatic effect.

"Death," she said. "It's why my insides feel like they're burning up right now. My soul didn't exactly explode, but it feels like it did - and my body is trying to cope with it."

He hadn't heard of that before.

He wasn't entirely sure what a soul was, either, but he had heard the word when visiting other worlds. A soul was the equivalent of a heart - the thing he no longer had.

"It doesn't matter what I did for work," Vil coldly said. "I'm dead now, and I'm not going to be finishing it."

Emily was bored. She hopped up onto a tree trunk and jumped from tree to tree as entertainment. Like a sideway-gravity version of something they might make you do at a summer camp. It was then that Emily realized that she'd never been to a summer camp. How was that the thing she missed out on?

The mention of the word 'hunter' cut through her pondering, and she listened to the rest of the conversation.

"You were a hunter?" she said to the girl. She didn't think she had a reason to be scared now that she was already dead, but she did take some caution. Hunters were unpredictable.

A hunter? Eos glanced from Vil to Quinn, his eyes narrowed then he shrugged.
He suspected there was more to their story but if they didn't want to talk he wouldn't push them. He did know one thing however-Hunters didn't scare him.
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Zorothin studied Vil and Quinn for a moment then glanced at Eos.
''Why don't you tell them how you died?'' he asked menacingly.
Eos's eyes narrowed dangerously.
''They don't need to know that. They wouldn't understand.'' he responded a warning in his voice. Zorothin had touched a nerve.
''But they need to know that your a tra-'' he tried to say only to be cut off by Eos.
''I said no.'' he snarled. ''They do not need to know how I died, and I am not telling them.''

"A hunter," Margaret remarked. "That's interesting."

She wasn't sure she'd heard of people that were hunters for a career. Still, she wondered, if they were all dead, maybe everyone being from different time periods wasn't completely out of the question.

"If we're talking about music," she said. "The Carpenters are the best. I was supposed to dance to We've Only Just Begun at my wedding."

She noticed then that she still had her engagement ring on. It was caked in blood sure, but it had survived.

Thank you.