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The Afterlife: Caitlyn: Sacred Calling (part 6)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
“Nate knew me well enough to have realised that was what I did without Aras saying anything.” Caitlyn thought of the spirit who had once been her husband and curled her arms around herself. “When I told him I was going to become a spirit guide he took it better than I thought he would and I think it’s because he already knew what was going to happen. Aras prepared him for it, so he was ready for the day when I visited him to tell him that I wouldn’t be incarnating with him again, which is something I am always going to be grateful for. I had this horrible vision of the two of us arguing about what I was going to do, even though he knew then that I wasn’t in love with him.
“When we met again that first time I could see he was still in love with me. Being here hadn’t changed that. Fortunately it had changed him and he knew, from that moment, that whatever relationship we were going to have here was going to be different to the one we had down there. Even though I didn’t think it was going to be possible we are friends now. He’s been talking to me about his plans for his next life and how he used the one we spent together to decide what sort of life he wants to live next. Instead of settling for stability he wants to try out being less steady, although I told him that whatever choice he makes is going to teach him something new.”
“You’ve seen the other lives you spent together.”
Caitlyn nodded, even though Uriel hadn’t been asking a question. “It was one of the first things I did when I found out about the Record Keepers, even though they weren’t certain it was a good idea. They wanted me to wait until I was ready. When I told them I was ready they consulted someone, I think it must have been someone here, and in the end they let me in to view my lives.”
“That was me,” Elizabeth said, making Caitlyn jump. “I’ve been watching you for a long time, Cait, and when I was told that you’d already asked to view your records I knew you were ready to take the next step, although I was a little worried that Richard would talk you out of it. Fortunately all he did was make you more certain that being a guide was what you wanted, even if it did change the path that you were on. Not having you here would have been a tragedy.”
“Uriel keeps telling me that I’m special, but I don’t feel special, Beth.” Caitlyn turned to look at Elizabeth and their eyes met. “I feel like I’m just another spirit guide.”
Elizabeth smiled. “You are special.” She reached out and took hold of Caitlyn’s hand. “There are spirit guides who met an angel once and nothing else happens, because they aren’t someone who is meant to work with them. I call them the guides in training, as they are meant to be guides but they aren’t ready for everything yet. Next time they become a guide they’ll be prepared differently, so they can take a another position within our ranks, and our job will have been to get them ready for that.”
“Have I already been a guide in training?”
“We all have, at one time. It’s something you’ll be able to see now, if you wish to, when you visit the records, but before you met Uriel you hadn’t learnt as much as you needed to about being a guide to be ready for that. Now you’re being prepared to be a guide who works alongside the angels and the deities, because that is the place you’re meant to have.” Elizabeth crouched down in front of Caitlyn. “Your proved that when you managed to break through the shields that Richard put up after Charis left, even though she had tried her hardest to get him close to some of us in order to stop that from happening, and that puts you in an even more interesting position, one I don’t think someone’s been in since Samael last worked with the Deaths.”
“You will be the guide who works with Death.” Uriel sounded as though he’d expected it, but was surprised by the news at the same time. “I think, if that’s going to be the case, I need to introduce you to some people.”
Elizabeth nodded. “There are a few other guides who do the same thing, like me, which was why I was chosen to be one of your mentors. I work closely with Uriel and some of the deities, in order to do my job to the best of my ability. You’ll find that a lot of your spirits will be like you – most likely pagan, someone who has an understanding of reincarnation and life after death, people who have found the records during their lives and know something of who they were before… the list is pretty much endless and it’s a rewarding job, but not one just any spirit guide could do.”
Biting on her lip Caitlyn studied Elizabeth. “Are you sure I’m the right person for the job?”
“Do you want the answer to be no?” Elizabeth asked, sounding as though she’d been asked the same question before. “Do you want a chance to be able to walk away now that you’ve met Uriel and realised that some of those things you didn’t believe in before actually exist?”
“No, I don’t.” Caitlyn sighed. “It’s just hard to accept that I’m…” She shook her head. “Why me?”
“That is a question I could spend hours answering and you’d still worry that you weren’t the right person for the job. We’ve all been through it, Cait, because becoming a spirit guide isn’t something anyone really expects to happen to them. I know I didn’t.” Elizabeth shook her head. “On the day I asked my mentor is she was sure that I was the right person for the job she looked at me, appearing to be fighting a smile, and asked me if I thought she’d be wasting her time on someone who wasn’t supposed to be a spirit guide. As I thought of all the work she had to do, because she was also a guide who worked with the deities and angels, I realised that she wouldn’t be. It didn’t stop me from wondering, but it did make me understand that she truly believed in me.”
“Can I walk away?”
“If that’s what you really want to do, yes, you can.”
“Has it happened before?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth bit her lip. “One of the other girls my mentor was working with chose to walk away, because she found being a guide harder than she thought it was going to be when the spirit who had been her husband revealed that he’d fallen in love with someone else and was going to live a life with them to see how things worked. She was still in love with him, so she made the decision that day to be reincarnated as someone else – it didn’t matter who as long as she didn’t have to see them together. Our mentor asked her to think about it for a little while. We have more time here and it does help with certain things, but she wouldn’t. Nothing any of us could say would convince her that she was being rash.”
“I remember her.” Uriel sounded sad. “That was her third chance, so she wouldn’t be able to become a spirit guide again, and when I asked her if she was certain she wanted to throw away something she had been working towards since the time she was a guide in training she said nothing else mattered. We might have been wrong about her, to be honest, but I’d so wanted her to be able to fulfil her potential. Now that isn’t possible, because of a choice she made out of pain and anger.”
“So you can walk away during your first and second chance, if you want to, and still become a spirit guide when you return to the afterlife?”
“Most of the time,” Elizabeth replied, “but there have been times when that spirit has made a really bad decision during their life that means they have to go back a couple more times. There have been three guides who chose to walk away that found themselves in that position and one of them was a girl I mentored. When she arrived here she did the same thing you did – she started exploring the afterlife. Her greeter met her in one of the forests, I think the autumn forest, and helped her to get settled in. About a month later the Council met with her, so she could be told that she was in the position to become a spirit guide if that was what she wanted.
“Like you she asked a lot of questions, which is always seen as a good thing, because curiosity is something we appreciate in a guide who’s going to be working with the angels and the deities. I was asked to talk to her, to make certain that she was going to make a good guide, and I was happy when I realised how well we got on. Before she started her training she seemed like the perfect spirit for the job.” Elizabeth ran her free hand through her hair. “Maybe she was just a very good actress because that all changed when she walked in here. I don’t know. It might have been the realisation of what she was going to be expected to do, as a guide, or it might have been something else. She didn’t tell me exactly what it was that made her decide she wasn’t ready, actually, although she had thought she was.
“So she asked to live another life. As she’d been my guide I helped her to create it, even though I had my misgivings. I asked her if she was certain that she wanted to incarnate again and she told me that it made more sense to her than becoming a guide at that time, although she wouldn’t explain why she felt that way. When she finally went to talk to Life we had everything ready and she checked again that my guide was absolutely sure of what she was doing. The answer, as it had been from the moment she made the decision, was that she didn’t have any worries about living another life but she did about becoming a guide.
“I tried to tell her that we all have worries. None of us think we’re ready to be a guide, but that hasn’t stopped any of us from doing it, because we’re trained to be the best we can be. She just shook her head and told Life she wanted to go. Everyone else she had lived with on Earth was still there, so we’d had to find a different greeter for her husband, which meant she was going down there with spirits she’d not spent any time with at all before. They’d accepted her as an addition to their group because they needed someone else with them. What we expected was that she would live an easy enough life before returning to the afterlife.
“She grew up, her parents loved her, and everything seemed to be running smoothly. I started thinking that she was right, my misgivings were just me being overly worried about the decision she’d made, but then…” Elizabeth shivered. “Even now I don’t know how it happened.” A tear trickled down her cheek. “As she reached the age of eighteen she started, like all young adults do, drinking. At first it wasn’t a problem. She went out with her friends from school, got a bit drunk, and stumbled home with them, knowing that she’d have an awful hangover in the morning. Then she met someone in one of the clubs. Her friends told her not to go with him, but she did. Occasionally the problem with having a safe life is that they want to have some excitement and then they do something stupid.
“The guy wasn’t too bad, really. He did some soft drugs, that he wouldn’t let her touch, but the problem was the people he happened to be friends with. Unlike him they didn’t have any qualms about letting her try things. First it was cannabis, which was not so bad, but then she tried other things, and that was where it all went downhill fast. It wasn’t the life we’d planned for her and it changed what her next steps would need to be, if she did want to become a guide. Sometimes, though, the issue is that the spirit gets addicted too, to whatever it was their body was addicted to. When she returned to the afterlife, after spending the majority of her life an addict, we found that was exactly what had happened to her.
“Even though she didn’t want any help we put her into a program to wean her off the drugs, which is something I wasn’t expecting to have to do, and I spent hours talking to her about the decisions she had made during her last life. I told her what it affected whether or not she could become a spirit guide, as she’d need to live some clean lives before that happened, but instead she did something unexpected. She asked for the waters. Nothing she’d done was something that couldn’t be fixed and I told her that. Three lives was all she needed. When Hades walked in the room, carrying the smallest vial of the waters, he reiterated what I’d told her. Making a mistake didn’t mean that she needed to drink the waters.
“When she’d listened to everything that Hades had to say she told us both that she wanted to. She’d never wanted to be a guide, but she’d gone along with it because she thought it was her only option, until she realised that it wasn’t something she could do. Her lives hadn’t prepared her for helping other spirits to live their lives, especially ones who knew they’d lived before and knew that their spirit guides existed. The last life she’d led just proved that to her, as she’d made such a huge mistake during it, and she’d decided, during her time going through the most horrendous withdrawal, that she wanted to start again. It took us a little while to coax out of her the real reason, because Hades hadn’t believed anything she said.
“Then she told us that she remembered her past lives from the time she was young, during her last life, and that was why she had turned to drugs. She wanted to stop remembering them, to live her life without the past affecting her, especially the day she walked into the office and made the stupid decision that she couldn’t be a guide, because of one person. I asked who that one person was. It turned out that the whole reason she had chosen to live another life was because a spirit who had once been her abusive husband was standing in the office at the same time as her and she was scared of him still. Him being there changed everything, even though it didn’t have to. If she’d bothered to talk to me about it we could have made certain they were never in the office at the same time, instead of her running away and making such awful decisions.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.
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