For Whom the Belle Tolls

by Jaysea Lynn

A hot tear burned down her cheek.

She beamed. “If you can think of it, it’s here, as long as it wasn’t based in cruelty.”

She’d wondered if all religions had been a little right and a little wrong. “Okay,

You can get away with a lot of things if you do them with confidence.

If I’d known demons looked like that, I wouldn’t have had such an irrational fear of letting my foot hang over the edge of the bed. Hell, I might’ve done it on purpose.

Kind. The demons were kind, in their own way. Even after seeing the worst of humanity, they cared.

“Being yourself—really, authentically yourself—that’s a heroic feat, yeah?”

Seeing herself as unimportant was safe. Unimportance was safe, being a disappointment was safe. There were no expectations, no standards, no more pedestals to fall from.

How many times had she told her friends that no one’s opinion of them mattered more than their own? She’d cheered for them as they learned to care for themselves, to see themselves as wonderful and flawed and complicated and unique, convincing herself that while others deserved to take up space in the world, she was inherently too much, required too much space and effort. She

“All battles have the capacity to be noble,” Odin said, casting his gaze over the crowded hall.

“There are many battles worthy of Valhalla, no matter what the stories may say.

“Grief isn’t linear. There’s no formula to it, and sometimes you feel guilty for feeling or not feeling a certain way. That’s okay.”

“In the equation of grief, as one of the people who has been left behind and had to mourn, I promise you that your brothers know.

“We all have terrible thoughts, yes? Sometimes they leap into our minds out of nowhere, other times they creep out of crevices in ourselves we were unaware of or tried to forget. This is normal. It is a condition of life, of being, that our minds shock us sometimes. But this is where we define ourselves: we are either horrified or confused or disgusted by these thoughts and work to change them, or we let them rule us. Our first thoughts about a situation are seldom what we actually believe. They are what we have been conditioned to think, or sometimes they truly are

random spits of consciousness. But our second thoughts, ah, that is where we are. It has helped me, working in this position, to forgive myself for my terrible first thoughts, and to pay more attention to my second thoughts.”

Kindness. That was what helped keep the shadows at bay and kept the shitty souls from being so overwhelming. Kindness and humor and simple understanding.