Afterlife District One

The place the saga's narrators keep talking from, and it is a workplace.

Its actual name

Ch. 75. Matta arrives and guesses.

MTA: Let me guess. Heaven? AQL: Afterlife District One, actually. But most people call it Heaven, yes. Terrible branding, if you ask me. Makes it sound all harps and halos when it's mostly paperwork and committee meetings for us virtues. At least the ones who pass have peace.

That single answer establishes the structure: the ordinary dead rest, and the Virtues of the Fourteen have jobs.

What it looks like

Rolling white hills "of what might have been cotton but moved with too much purpose". Structures "carved from pearl and starlight". Bridges arcing through empty air and buildings that "seemed to exist in more dimensions than should be mathematically possible". Gardens with flowers in colours that have no names.

The ground is cloud that holds weight perfectly.

Do not step on anything that glows. Aquila's warning, and her explanation: they are the foundation stones for the place.

From a viewing platform of compressed starlight you can see "the world spinning like a soap bubble, dimensions folding and unfolding like origami made of space-time, the fundamental forces of existence flowing between realities like cosmic rivers."

Its districts

The saga shows three parts of it.

• An engineering district (ch. 76), crystalline structures humming with energy, "beings of pure mathematics" at workstations, and a smith, Pomni, whose bench is made of crystallised time.
• A cafe (ch. 80), tables like carved pearl, windows opening onto vistas of folded starlight, and a barista with golden feathers under her apron.
• A viewing platform (ch. 75), from which everything below is visible.

Who is there

Aquila, who calls herself a maintenance specialist and goes by L'Equilibra. Sienna Blackwood, who runs her errands. Remi, sitting with Blook in ch. 55 and answering the narrator of ch. 53. Illia, dead by ch. 134 and drinking coffee here in ch. 80.

Gabriel and Lucifer are both reachable from it. The ch. 53 narrator complains that asking Gabriel anything gets only a warm smile and that "Lucifer is always busy".

Getting in

Not gently. Sienna knocks Matta unconscious with a finger-flick to the forehead, which Aquila describes as "a gentle nudge into the right state of consciousness", on the grounds that "interdimensional travel can be rough on first-timers".

Aquila's appearance changes on arrival. Her forgettable grey dress becomes robes cut from the same material as the clouds, and her unremarkable features "seemed to fit better, like she'd finally put on clothes that actually belonged to her."

Open questions

• Whether there is an Afterlife District Two.
• What the foundation stones are.
• What the beings of pure mathematics are, and whether they were ever people.
• Who runs it. Aquila reports to nobody the chapters name.