Chosen by Fate, Rejected by the Alpha

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Trinity

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Rudy was all ready to help me now. With his hand out toward me, he was waiting for me to follow him. I saw no reason not to follow him either. The sooner that I had someone guide me to the exit of purgatory, the better. I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to get home. And I wanted to hug my children.

Not to mention, I wanted to see if I was right in my guess that these three little boys were currently growing in my womb at the moment. If they were, then I would be truly happy to be having more babies to add to our family. If they weren't, then I would be sad to see them go.

I would miss them a lot and I would most likely try to get them to become a reality very soon. I know that sounds very bad of me, but I already loved these three little boys and I would do anything so I could bring them with me into the land of the living.

Zachary, Zander, Zayden and I followed Rudy over the line of the gate. The moment that we were fully into purgatory, completely in this level of hell, the sounds intensified exponentially. The amount of screaming, cries of agony, and sorrow-filled woes that met my ears was deafening.

I knew instantly that this had to be affecting the boys as well. What surprised me, though, was that I saw this was affecting Rudy. He had immediately clamped his hands down over his ears and doubled over as if he were in pain or sick, or possibly even both.

"This is horrible." I tried to tell Rudy, but I doubt that he heard me at all. He, like me and the boys, was covering his ears to block the screams. And my voice definitely was not louder than the screams.

I needed to do something about this. I needed to make this stop. I needed to make sure that none of us went deaf, or the underworld equivalent of it. But man, this sound was making it so hard to hear.

What was I going to do about it? How was I going to stop this noise? What was I going to do to make this easier on all five of us? Dammit. I could barely think with this noise.

That was when I saw the boys. All three of them, like Rudy, looked to be in pain. I could see their little faces scrunched up with everything that they were feeling at the moment. The looks they were making were enough to bring tears to my eyes, if there hadn't already been tears in them.

If for nothing else, I needed to end this sound. The problem was that the sound wasn't so easy to turn off. There were billions of people being tortured here, that wasn't about to stop on my account.

So, I needed to do the next best thing. I needed to turn it off just for us. I needed to block the sound from the screams for our ears alone. And while I thought about how to do this, I thought that the guards that were on this side either had something that worked like I wanted this spell to work, or they were born being immune to the sound of screams.

I cast the spell, imagining what it was that I wanted to happen. I thought of a thin, invisible barrier surrounding all of us. That barrier would block just the sounds of those being tortured. We would still be able to talk to each other and furthermore, if Rudy came across another guard that he needed to converse with, he would be able to hear them as well. I didn't want to cause any more problems here, only solve them. That meant that I needed to just do things that affected me and my group.

"Th..th..the screaming stopped." Rudy stood up and started to look around himself. It was like he thought someone had just turned off hell and all the tormenting had actually stopped.

"I cast a spell. I blocked the screams out." I explained it as best as I could.

"Mommy is the best." Zachary hugged me around the waist.

"Mommy can do anything." Zander hugged me around the left hip.

"Mommy is the smartest lady in the whole world." Zayden finished them out by hugging my right hip.

"The three of you are not stuttering anymore." I was amazed at the sound of their uninterrupted voices.

"We got used to talking because Mommy was here with us." Zayden was the first to speak up about it.

"We never talked until we talked to mommy. We needed to learn more. Now we know." Zachary smiled up at me, his arm still wrapped around me.

"Now Mommy can hear us better." Zander rounded them out.

"They really are your children, aren't they?" Rudy looked surprised. I guess he hadn't fully believed that part of my story.

"That they are."

Now that we could hear without almost dying for real, we set off for the other end of purgatory.

"Where is the door, Rudy?" I asked him with curiosity.

"There are only two openings into purgatory. The gate that we just left, and the door at the end of the hall. The gate is an entrance only. And the door at the back is an exit only."

"Hmm. So, what happens when a soul serves their time in purgatory and needs to leave? How do they get up to their paradise?"

"Well, to be honest, I don't truly know. I haven't worked here long enough. And it is not something that would happen every day, so it just hasn't had a chance to come up yet."

"How is that possible? How is it that with so many people here, there isn't a soul leaving every day? Multiple souls leaving every day at that. OK, I am going to take a crack at this math here, but I know that the daily death rate worldwide is around one hundred and seventy thousand people. That is per day. And if we were to break that down it would mean that there were more than seven thousand deaths per hour and that makes more than one hundred deaths per minute and almost two deaths per second. Now, let's just air on the side of optimism and say that only ten percent of those people end up in hell. That is still more than ten people every minute. That is just with the current death rates of course, I know that there were a lot less when the population was smaller. Still, with millions of souls entering purgatory each year for the last several centuries, how is it that there isn't at least one soul leaving a day? How long are the sentences that you usually hand out to people? How much time do they need to serve in purgatory?"

I could see that my question had made Rudy uncomfortable. That was fine, this was something that I needed to know, and I wanted him to answer.

"Well, to be honest, the terms are quite lengthy. The average person needs to serve at least a century in purgatory before they make it to paradise."

"A CENTURY?" I was floored by his answer.

"I don't think that it's right either, Queen Trinity. I would change it if I could, but I don't know how."

"OK Rudy. I know it's not your fault, so don't worry about that. Still, that just isn't right. And I hope that these are not just minor sins that these people committed. If they were in purgatory for that long for something minor, then I would have to seek out the others and have a word with them." I was starting to get very pissed off.

"W…well, like the sentences, the crimes vary as well. I would like to say that the sins are not major, but I have no idea of what a major sin is and what isn't."

What the hell had I been thinking? I knew that he had no experience in the real world. How was I supposed to get answers to questions like these from him? The answer was that I wasn't going to get the answers from him.. And that just made me feel like I had absolutely no power whatsoever.