a guide to the shinigami realm | relevant excerpts for the melancholic traveler :

- the air is denser than what you are used to. at times, it grows purple and heavy, and you think it might be possible to scoop a handful into your palms. when you do, its weight feels like warm pennies on skin.

- great chunks of ruby and opal jut from the ground, untouched. you imagine this world would be spectacular in daylight, but there is never any daylight. you drop uncut diamonds into your pocket, but abandon them an hour later. the currency here is blood, not rock.

- you try not to breathe with your mouth open. the air tastes like the moonshine you'd brewed in a copper vat at the orphanage.

- the shinigami regard you as a curiosity and little more. you wake to find them browsing your travel journal, claws shredding the cover. one steals hair from your pocket comb. another, whose teeth reflect yellow light, asks if you've ever heard of kira, in the reverent tone of a father.

- there was a war, you are quite certain of that. the landscape is pockmarked with battlescars and ruts. you stumble upon fields still reverberating with the snap of breaking bone.

- in places, you hear the whistle of traffic police and streetlights gulping electricity. you wonder if you can dig your way out, and if it's better to start now, because you certainly can't go back the way you came.

- the clouds here look like burnt patches in the sky.

- your matches no longer work. this is troublesome, because even on earth, you felt bombarded by transmissions from the secret room in your brain. without fire, you instead spend the evening peeling your fingernails away with your teeth.

- there is a king, the shinigami tell you, but he demands more payment than you can give. your eyes are not so special here, they laugh, and you haven't got much else.