Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

Seeing the souls moving about in the Park from high above had put him in mind of another one of those almost-memories. He was growingly certain that the world in which he had lived before he had died had been inhabited by creatures that moved about of their own volition. In this, they were unlike trees and grass and flowers, which lacked the power of movement except when stirred by the wind. But neither were they like souls. They belonged to an order that lay somewhere between. The notion had been in his mind for a long time, and he had sensed that the Land was not complete without such beings. But it was so ill formed that he had made no headway with it until he had stumbled upon the notion of clustering flowers together into beds—a project that Freewander had made her own once Egdod had seeded the general idea of it. Thanks to her, flowers were now growing all over the place—even in places where they did not belong, such as on the branches of trees. Longregard would spend hours gazing at them with a vaguely troubled air about her, difficult to put into words but easy enough to convey through a bridging of auras: the flowers, though beautiful, were somehow lonely, and could be bettered if they were aswarm with tiny souls-that-were-not-quite-souls. These would fly about on small wings and visit the flowers and fill the air with a faint hum.

She had flirted with twelve kinds of death and found satisfaction.