I can no longer remember my name. I remember that I was not happier before the Atani bought my soul. I was not peaceful. My soul was battered, restless, and so was I. I could never satisfy its urgent bubbling. It— I — pulsed with a never-ending hunger that became a festering curse. Still, the Atani wanted my soul. It is pure, they had marveled, despite the darkness which snaked through it. Beautiful, they had said about the vining pattern cutting through the center of my existence. Even in the ephemeral world of the Atani, I could not stand to look at the stains my life had left on me.

Every soul I take to the Atani is pure. Perhaps it takes a kind of willpower to make the journey to the peak of the Atani mountain, so the most weightless souls are the only ones which make it to me. They are saccharine with the pain that comes from kindness and desire for good. These souls are revolted by the evil which surrounds them, twisting and writhing in their earthly forms in desperate attempts to escape. The Atani readily wish to obtain these souls once they come to me.

I can smell other souls, twisted ones, from where they lie at the base of the Atani mountain. They are sour with feckless satisfaction. These souls do not quake at injustice or refuse to bend in favor of cruelty. The Atani do not want these souls. They do not have elegant threads of darkness that spin through them. The darkness in these warped souls spreads through them in blotches and consumes them with age, so much so that the wretched people in possession of these souls desperately seek absolution from the heavens. Whether or not the heavens hear them does not concern me. Their performances of repent rarely make any difference in the ugly blotches which spread through an existence which could have remained unmarred. By the time these souls reach the base of the mountain, they are mangled, no longer valuable to me. Even if one of the poor wretches made it to where I sit at the mountain peak, I would need to avert my eyes to their pathetic and desperate crawl along the rocks and snow. There is no sacrifice in their ascent, no righteousness in their desire for absolution. The souls seeped in darkness only seek for my approval of the misdeeds they performed in their previous lives. They seek to be justified in bearing witness to the haplessness around them without so much as a word of dissent.

I only sell valorous souls to the Atani, the ones which have come to me in quaking desperation to be released from the plagues of world around them. The souls I accept on the Atani’s behalf do not seek absolution from the heavens but escape from earth. What the heavens would answer them is beyond my knowledge. The Atani are perhaps the closest to the heavens I have ever been.

To the earthly being, the Atani are simply a well-hidden myth. They remain invisible atop the snow-ridden peak of the Atani mountain. I can no longer remember how long I’ve been here, but I have stayed long enough to witness chang in the endless tides of rolling green hills visible from the gate to the Atani realm. Amid the sea of bright green grows a sprawl of magnificent golden trees. These trees are sacred to the Atani, for they live longer than even the Atani themselves. Each branch carries leaves that have seen centuries. The breeze in the Atani realm is everflowing and gentle. Its grassy scent reaches me even on the outside of the gate. The realm of the Atani lies in patient wait like clear water, eagerly anticipating the next clutch of souls which will carry the weight of a perpetual cycle of rebirth.

Each soul the Atani accept from me is reborn. Before I entered the realm of the Atani, I imagined the souls they took were merely kept in eternal peace and stillness. It was only after I began selling souls to them that I found each accepted soul was ceremoniously laid among the roots of the Atani’s great golden trees.

From each accepted soul, the Atani themselves are born. They are made from the wind, snow, and sky all the same. New Atani are supernovas, entering their realm in bright bursts of light and fire. It is fitting, I think. Their forms shine so brightly sometimes it becomes difficult for me to look at them. The Atani are solid beings. They lack the ghostly flickering quality of the souls they take in. Unlike a soul, the Atani have every ability to leave their mark on the earthly world. However, they rarely do.

For the decades I have resided at the gates of the Atani realm, I have only witnessed the Atani in a period of what seems like eternal peace. Nothing is eternal, they tell me, not even the serenity which presides over their realm.

Sometimes I look towards the pitiful souls scraping their way towards the mountaintop. Their numbers increase by the day, and I think the Atani may be right. No peaceful world produces so much death. Will the plagues these souls escape from eventually follow them to the top of the Atani mountain? Is there a cruelty in teasing the poor wretches with an unfulfillable promise of serenity? Then again, the Atani do not promise serenity. They promise nothing. Yet, souls continue to seek out the Atani realm, yearning for the relief of a home.

I seldom recognize a soul once I have given it to the Atani. The Atani healer, Nafi, is responsible for delivering each soul the Atani accept from me to the roots of the correct tree. Nafi understands the contours of each soul in a way I, or the rest of the Atani, never would. Nafi remembers my name from before I entered the Atani realm. I never ask her to repeat it.

“How is today’s crop?” Nafi asks me. She visits the gate frequently to compensate me smartly for each soul. At first, I demanded comforts; to live among the Atani, to have a title, to dine with their warriors. Now, I seek mirrors to the world I only vaguely remember. I ask Nafi for old memories, or time meditating atop the roots of the Atani’s great golden trees.

“Hm,” I can only answer in a downward hum. Nafi’s smile does not leave her face. I have rarely seen it do so. The serenity of her gaze is infectious. For a moment, I can almost look towards the base of the mountain, at the souls who will never make it to me. Maybe one day I can gaze upon them without revulsion, but I would never feel right about selling them anyway. Only the finest for the Atani.

“You seem displeased,” Nafi states. Her voice is a gentle and understanding ripple through whatever being I am. She is Atani, so she stands before me as solid as someone who is alive, glowing brightly in the reflection of the sun and snow. I look down at my hands. They are not as solid as Nafi’s, but they are clearly formed, unlike the fickle outlines of new souls.

“Not enough of them are making it upward,” I answer. My irritation betrays itself in the sharpness of my voice. Nafi peers over the side of the mountain, towards the bottom where I am pointing. Her hair cascades over her shoulders, like it too can touch everything that lies at the mountain’s jagged base. Even though the Atani mountain rises from the earth, only rocks jut out ominously from its base.

“What’s to say more won’t today?” Nafi asks, and her question is laced with a hope opposite to my exasperation.

“Look at them,” I say it as though no further explanation is needed. Nafi only turns her head to me with a puzzled gaze.

“I am.”

“No, look at them.” This time, I can feel a rather earthly expression of disgust stretch across my face. I peer over the side of the mountain once again with Nafi, forcing myself to not recoil at the flickering, desperate expressions swarming below. What they have done before climbing the Atani mountain does not concern me, but what their misdeeds have done to their souls is cause to recoil. “They are twisted, confused, filled with baseless and insidious hatred they cannot justify. Yet, they have tried so hard to spread their selfish misfortune that now the absolution they so foolishly thought they were entitled to does not even exist. And they will never reach far enough to find out.”

Nafi waits patiently for me to finish. Her everlasting smile hides careful and cautious thought within its silence. Then, she points downward to a soul that has clawed its way nearly to the midpoint of the mountainside. It is mangled, perhaps more so than some below it. Still, I don’t expect it to get very far.

“Do you see this one? You may not know its name and its life may not concern you now, but it concerns me. As clear as you claim the conscience of the souls you sell us are, their lives have still wounded them. Those wounds concern me.”

As she speaks, Nafi’s voice begins to grow from a gentle ripple to a single, clear note, “this one was named Naradmi.”

Naradmi. I try to speak it, but not with too much fervor. There is power in names. Whatever this soul had been in its, his, previous life still lives in the name kept alive by Nafi’s recognition.

“His darkness lies in his complacency. He bore witness to the darkness of his world but could not bring himself to dissent. Fighting the sadness encroaching on his soul was more difficult for him than allowing it to twist him.”

Somehow, the outlines of Naradmi’s soul tightly grip their way like human nails into the side of the mountain. I am almost surprised they don’t leave marks. They couldn’t, of course, not on the earthly world. A gaping maw opens and closes at the center of his soul’s outline, moving like a mouth in some sort of prayer. For a moment, I consider leaning down to whisper that whatever he thinks could come of his fervent chant is futile. It will not change the misfortune of his passivity, the dark shadow of his ignorance which has already putrefied his soul. I might have done so had I not found myself recoiling from the oozing, inky blotches that spread rapidly across the patches of Naradmi’s otherwise silken aura. Each dark growth envelops what could have been a viable, perhaps even a valorous soul. They change Naradmi’s shape from one that could have been gentle, flowing, even kind, to something gnarled and tortured. Naradmi scratches against stones during his ascent, looking to lose his impurities by peeling them off. Still, stains of darkness are left, regrowing into what they were before with a renewed fervor each time a previous one falls off. I can almost spot a grotesque gasp of relief make itself across Naradmi’s face each time an impurity falls off.

“Poor wretch,” I find myself saying. The momentary relief which radiates from Naradmi is deftly cut short by a new growth on his soul. Nafi sighs, then points to a particularly dark patch that protrudes across Naradmi’s back.

“They are heavy,” Nafi states. “This is why the souls do not make it to the peak. The burden of guilt is too heavy for any of them to carry it successfully. They are weighed down by the transgressions of their own past lives and yet, they still reach towards you for the absolution they both feared and desired when they lived.”

Reaching to me? The thought of the vague formations of claws stretched towards me leaves a prickling sensation in whatever form I took now. If I reach downward to take Naradmi’s mangled soul in my hands, could I bring it to the gate of the Atani? “Would you take an unvalorous soul such as this?” I ask Nafi. The festering stench of desperation that clings to Naradmi is coupled with a stale, stagnant quality which follows his soul in a cloud of gas. I recoil once again. “I cannot help them.”

“Unvalorous?” Nafi asks in return. Her voice takes on a humorous tinkle, “who made you the judge of a soul’s valor?”

I have never thought to ask myself such a question. The Atani only take a certain number of souls from me. I pick the best I could find, the lightest, who could make it to the top of the mountain by themselves. Still, Nafi does not want them all. The ones she does not take stay with me, but I do not see them anymore and they cannot keep me company. They dissipate, too light to wait at the peak of the Atani mountain, but not heavy enough to return to the earth. I ponder this, then Nafi’s question. The truth is I cannot remember when I began selling souls to the Atani. I remember what I asked for quite well, for I still walk through the gates of the Atani to enjoy every fruit of my labor. I cannot, however, recall the moment my soul had left my earthly life. I assume it drifted upward along the side of the Atani mountain like every other soul I allow through the gates. Or had I crawled like the souls which pined beneath me now? A strange sinking feeling spreads through my chest at the thought of my own form laboriously hoisting itself upward along the craggy mountainside rocks, weighted down by self-inflicted misery.

“Was it not you?” I finally ask Nafi in return. I try to remember the first time I saw her. Had it been at these gates? I picture myself, a new soul, floating to the top of the Atani mountain, stopping at the gates when I meet Nafi’s eternal smile. Had she looked the same? No matter how hard I try, each piece of the memory felt as though I had placed it there.

Now, Nafi laughs like she is about to explain the simplest thing to a child. Suddenly, I am aware I have no body to be conscious of under Nafi’s searching gaze. The question of whether I truly believed she has charged me with the duty of bringing souls to the Atani radiates from her. Am I, a soul just like the others, truly so important? Do the contours created on my conscience by my past life set me so far apart from every other soul the Atani have seen? I try to look at my hands. Unlike the souls below, both my own hands and Nafi’s have a solid quality to them, made more visible by a light which radiates from our skin.

“I do not assign the Gatekeeper to the Atani,” Nafi finally answers. I know her response will cause the ground beneath me to disappear. I can tell from the way she laughs. She studies me like she has existed for centuries before my soul was even formed. She likely has. “The Gatekeeper finds us,” she continues, cutting through the spiral of my own thoughts. “No one had to assign you to become Gatekeeper, you were made to join the Atani in the same way each soul I take inside was made to join the life force of the Atani.”

“But you don’t take all of the souls I bring you.”

“Because as valorous as a soul may be, its purpose may be better served in rejoining the Earth. What do you think the breathes life into the world around the Atani mountain?”

I am simply a mass of atoms floating in the space between the world that used to accept me and the one I serve now. Each day I look down upon souls, deciding their value based on how much they look like my own. “What purpose does a marred existence serve?” I ask. Where could a soul encumbered by its own malefactions possibly belong?

“How will I understand where each soul belongs if it is not given a chance to present itself to me?”

Even the outlines of my own soul, the deeds and misdeeds I must have done in my previous life, had been weighed by the Atani. I can no longer remember what they were. By Nafi’s curiously smug tone, it seems to me that she remembers the desirable, or undesirable, marks of my soul well.

My soul, one which must have been pockmarked with the earthly decisions I had no choice but to make, looks more solid by the day. It feels weightless. The choice of which souls to bring to the Atani and which to leave crawling laboriously up the steep, rocky slope of the mountain does not leave its mark on me. I know, even with the curious intensity Nafi’s line of questioning, that whatever I answer will not jeopardize my position as the Gatekeeper of the Atani mountain. It is as Nafi says, I was meant to exist here, between the world that I was once a part of and the one I serve now. My gaze falls upon the wretched souls that crawl towards me. If I leave them where they are, dragged towards the base of the mountain by the scars of their misdeeds, they will never sully the peace of the Atani. But they will never return to Earth. How many have I sentenced to crawl towards a destiny which remains unfulfilled without them?

“The Atani,” Nafi speaks and cuts through my thoughts again. We are watching the souls below us, equally pensive. She continues quietly, “we are not judges, jury, or executioners. We are none of those things, simply part of a cycle which does not begin or end with us.”

Nafi’s voice is a calming ripple in the stitches of the universe which tenuously root the Atani mountain to the earth. She extends her own arm towards the mangled imaginations of outstretched ones belonging to the souls below. The blinding light from her own creates an uncanny comingling with the coarseness of Naradmi’s imperfect outline. Nafi lifts Naradmi with an unspoken promise that the others, too, will have their turn. I look away, half expecting Naradmi’s grotesque form to darken Nafi’s own. Instead, her skin shone brighter, extending the light from her aura towards Naradmi with a welcoming warmth. The light envelops each blotch of darkness until Naradmi’s soul can rise to the peak of the mountain on its own.

The soul which now faces me is brand new. It is not yet solid like me or Nafi. It cannot communicate with me or Nafi in the steady vibrations of the Atani. It buzzes with energy, restless and disoriented, shocked by its newfound weightlessness. Many of the souls that reach me are like this, quivering with the leftover effort of climbing the mountain, no longer weighed down by the choices that brought them to me. The light emanating from Nafi brightens what was once Naradmi’s soul until it is unrecognizable, and its excited buzz quiets. Nafi leads it towards the enormous trees which stands behind us, into the land of the Atani.

This new soul approaches the gate of the Atani, no longer one of the mangled, grotesque things gaping at my feet. It dances in elegant shapes along the sunlight which illuminate it. Just before Nafi disappears with her newest soul, she addresses me, warmer than before, “you must give them all a chance to find their place. Then, perhaps, each one may understand what true goodness looks like for their next lifetime.”

For their next lifetime, to exist in their next state. Or even to simply breathe more life into the strings which hold the Atani mountain to the Earth. I am not to judge the value of each soul, but to help determine its place.

Nafi and the soul that was once Naradmi disappear into the grove of great golden trees in the Atani realm. I spin myself towards the edge of the mountain once more. A thin layer of snow fades into the craggy mess of rock and slate below. I must look at each soul which crawls upward on the rocks now, not turn away from their twisted outlines. Some of the more mangled ones have come to rest just below where I stand. Had they always been there? I do not beckon one soul to me over any other. The first one to crawl toward my silent offer of help twirls its own outstretched aura into my own. I stifle an automatic shudder and grasp the soul tightly, forcing myself to watch the mass of gnarled growths along its outline erode. Through the quaking bonds which tie me to this new soul, it emits a plaintive quiver:

“Thank you.”

And in the frailty of the soul’s gratitude, I remember my own name.