It was exactly the way she’d imagined mortal life would end, though she’d accepted, with her lifeblood flowing from her and onto Romeo’s unmoving form, that the loving embrace of paradise would not be hers. This was what it should have been like, she reasoned. No fear. No agony or doubt. The welcoming arms of eternal peace, instead of the blank, emotionless void she’d woken to. “What is this place?” Romeo asked behind her. His suspicion was an affront; how could he not see what a perfect place they had entered? The sun shone down from a blue sky, and though cheerful white clouds drifted above, they never cast a cold shadow upon the ground. The grass beneath Juliet’s feet was the greenest she’d ever laid eyes upon, and it lay in a long, rectangular field surrounded on all sides by a stately colonnade. Souls draped in softly colored fabrics moved from the shade of the columns to a large central fountain.
