With a groan, she rubbed at her face. "No. All we are in the Abyss are our thoughts. The good, the bad, and everything in between." Slowly, she removed her hands and looked at him. "I can remember everything there. Here, I can't recall the face of the priest I killed outside that coffee shop. There, I can count every drop of blood and all the hairs on his arms. With no senses to distract us, the memories are sharper. Many eidolon relive their lives over and over, pretending they're in the moment. Others try to repent. No matter how we deal with the complete solitude, when a path to reality opens, we always take it. It's just too compelling, and when we do try to resist, it will suck us back to here."
"This?" He pointed to the ground. "You call this reality?"
"Don't you?" A smirk took over her lips.
He chuckled. "Yeah, but I'm human."
Dahlia held up a finger. "And that's the second lie. Technically, in the scheme of things, you're a part of the human genus, but your species isn't the same as the guy sleeping next door."
"How do you know there's a guy next door?"
Again, she laughed. "I don't, Thane. It was an example. I'm saying you're as different from humanity as Neanderthal man. Long, long ago, a single gene mutated. We don't know how or why. Soon enough, it started showing up in others. From what you're saying, the children inherit it and then pass it to theirs. All we know is that your kind look just like the rest of their society, but these "humans" can do things - miraculous things. Before the world could accuse them of being witches, they began accusing everyone else. It worked. Hello, Spanish Inquisition, and the start of your holy church bullshit."
For a long moment, he said nothing, just stared at the ground. His head bobbed once, then he took a deep breath. She knew he was thinking. It was more than she'd ever gotten before. The few priests she'd tried to convince had all reacted by screaming that they would not be swayed by the Devil's words, usually before trying to shove a silver spike into her. Thane was listening. He was honestly considering that what she said was true.
"How do you know all this?" he asked.
"The eidolon talk."
He tossed an exasperated look at her. "I mean how can you be sure? What you're telling me is just a scientific version of Genesis, or something."
Dahlia sighed. Of course he couldn't just believe her. Then again, she wouldn't, either, if the situation was reversed. "In the fourteen hundreds, all of this blew up. Before that, people used to bribe the 'spirits' to keep us happy. Thane, that was a very long time ago."
"And?"
Another sigh dropped out. "And a lot of people die every day. Some of us come back, but we don't forget. Doctors, hunters, sword makers, chemists... doesn't matter, we remember it."
A devious smile lifted the corner of his mouth. "And?"
"And we're curious. We wanted to know why we're not dead and our families are. We wanted to know how the people hunting us can do things that are inexplicable. We want to protect ourselves, and knowledge has always been what gave humanity the advantage."
"But you're not human."
She cocked her head and lifted one shoulder. "We were."
"Ok." Without warning, he stood and began pacing. "And now you're eidolon?"
Dahlia waved that away. "In the 1800s, someone coined that word. It fit, so we took it over. Before that we'd been ghosts, vampires, demons, and just about anything you can imagine. We called ourselves the undead, and we honestly believed we were those things. Back when it happened to me, we didn't even have that much."
He stopped in his tracks. "When?"
"I don't know."
Thane's brow furrowed and he looked at her. "You've said that before. Dahlia, how do you not know?"
"I died in the fifth year of Chieftain Gier Ivanson's reign. Does that help you any?"
This time, when he sat, it was beside her. "How long ago?"
"I don't know!" she insisted. "I have nothing to compare it to. The calendar we use now didn't exist. The place I lived wasn't important enough to matter, so no one translated the dates. I'm not even sure if it was before or after Jesus and the whole cross thing! Although I'm pretty sure it was before. We thought bronze was a marvelous new thing."
His eyes grew larger with each word. "You've been in this world for more than two thousand years?"
"Not exactly." Checking the stakes to make sure he couldn't reach them, she shifted to face Thane. "It's probably closer to three thousand, but I died. Immediately after death, we have this partial form as our own demise pulls in enough to make us, I dunno, almost tangible. A phantom, I suppose. We look real, we can be touched, but it's not stable. That construct doesn't usually last that long before something destroys it. Then we wait until we get the chance to follow the light. Often, it's a family member who first calls us back by accident."
He latched onto that phrase. "Follow the light?"
"Where do you think that came from? In the lack of sensation that is the Abyss, the opening of a path is like a bright pink light filled with flower petals. We can't see, but there's no other way to describe the sensation. A trickle of brightness that we can feel like falling petals, so we follow it. There's no God or angels involved. No trumpets from on high. Usually it's just some boy jacking off."