Styx part 5

  I wander through my world lost in the thoughts of the day as souls mourn and swirl around me.  I cannot help them, I cannot save them.  They have damned themselves to this fate and I am but a ferryman moving their souls from one end of a bank to another.  

                Today I had an odd encounter with a recently deceased man.  In his life he had been a priest of a high ranking order.  He was not headed to paradise as he would have liked to believe and the boat made of bone and sinew scared he so much my wraith had to come and move him into the seat to be taken to the ninth circle.

                On our voyage he kept asking me why he was not going to paradise and the only answer I could give him was.  One cannot expect to exist in a place of purity if they became who they are because of treachery and deceit.  He was not amused by this and then proceeded to quote bible verses… to me!  I can’t say a soul has ever made me laugh with the irony of their predicament but this man had me echo a great bellow of laughter that resounded throughout the high ceiling of the immense cave we were pushing down.  To be quoted bible verses by a man who was so sure of his right to heaven that he actually tried to threaten me with the word of God.

                I told him that here God did not hear him just as he did not hear God while he was alive.  I have never heard a man spew so many justifications for his behavior.  He truly believed he had done nothing wrong in his life and he had just done what any good Christian would have done to help as many as he could by getting to a position above everyone where he felt he could do the most good.  My response to him was.  “Deceit only begets deceit.”

                When at last it was his time to depart again my wraith had to move him forward, in all the millennia I have been ferrying souls I have never had a man with such ignorance is his heart that even in death he cannot admit the error of his ways.

                When he was finally removed and I was again moving down the river I could hear the blood curdling screams as he was torn apart by other betrayers.  Witnessing this man made me think of what the world above had become.  The machine of propaganda had so spoiled the morals of man and woman that ignorance has begun to cross over even in death.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR WAYS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!  The creator has consumed the world in water once, the next time will be fire, a fire none can escape.