The corridors of the Land of Death's Administrative Division were dim as always, buzzing faintly with whispers of lost souls and the soft rustle of parchment being endlessly filed. Vanessa walked with a familiar heaviness in her steps, her boots echoing faintly against the black marble floor. She swiped her entry pass at the checkpoint crystal, the flickering glyphs pulsing with pale blue light.
"Another day, another backlog," she muttered, pushing past the entrance.
Like clockwork, Nix appeared beside her, emerging from thin air with a mischievous grin. "Still haven't learned to duck when I pop up?" she teased.
Vanessa groaned. "It's too early for death humor."
"Too bad you're in the Land of Death then."
The pair walked through the endless rows of file shelves, passing skeletal clerks hunched over typewriters and ink-splattered scrolls. Souls floated in limbo nearby, awaiting judgment or reassignment. It was easy to forget that this was a place of power—buried under the exhaustion of system errors and immortal bureaucracy.
They reached the Haunting Reconciliation counter, where the receptionist skeleton, Grimelda, sat behind a wall of stacked paperwork. Her bony fingers clacked as she filed the same form over and over.
"Hi there! Back again so soon?" Grimelda chirped, her jaw clacking open and closed as if permanently stuck in a customer service smile. Her name tag sparkled with a faint layer of spectral glitter.
"Yeah, can't stay away from your charming voice," Vanessa replied with a smirk.
Grimelda winked. "You're lucky we haven't lost your file… again."
Nix snorted beside her.
---
After some exasperated waiting and several reassignments, Vanessa was directed toward the HR filing sector, or as some nicknamed it, 'The Pit of Pity.' Stacks of soul reports towered over desks, and skeletal staff moved like clockwork—slow, creaking, and burdened. Ink-stained scrolls covered every surface.
"Is that someone buried under the paperwork?" Vanessa pointed at a desk.
From behind a mountain of forms, a translucent girl peeked out. "Oh! Hello! I'm Ellaria. I'm… um… supposed to file these. I've been here 58 years."
Vanessa blinked. "Why haven't you… moved on?"
Ellaria clutched a crumbling form. "I had a dispute over how my soul was processed. A decimal error. Now I'm an unpaid intern until it's resolved."
"Seriously?"
Ellaria's smile was brittle. "This is Death. It takes a while to die properly here."
Vanessa winced and wandered deeper into the archive stacks. The deeper she walked, the worse it got. Reports were stamped, shredded, duplicated, and sometimes eaten by paper golems who seemed as tired as the clerks.
Eventually, she stumbled into what should've been the corrections department—a room covered in signs reading: "Processing Delay," "On Hold," "Pending Divine Appeal," and most tragically, "Do Not Touch – Time Freeze Error."
A lone skeleton named Bonny, wearing cracked spectacles, looked up. "You new to processing?"
"Just trying to fix a mistake," Vanessa replied.
Bonny laughed hollowly. "So are we all."
Vanessa stared at the soul records, each detailing inconsistencies—some souls misfiled into the wrong afterlife, others stuck in limbo due to a single wrong rune stroke.
"So, wait… you're telling me no one actually fixes the inconsistencies?" she asked.
Bonny shrugged. "Only the Wardens can override, and they haven't shown up in centuries. They say they're still in their 'meeting.'"
Vanessa slumped into a dusty chair, files spilling off the sides. "Why is this place worse than my old office job?"
Nix perched on a stack nearby. "Because here, the errors are eternal."
Vanessa didn't laugh.
She looked around again. The air smelled like musty parchment and lost time. Her gaze fell onto a slightly glowing scroll peeking from under a loose pile labeled "Inquiries to Reassign: Rejected." The label read: K.Z.N.
"…That's not a coincidence," she whispered.
Nix raised an eyebrow. "What did you find?"
But Vanessa didn't answer immediately. As she sat among dusty scrolls and voices long forgotten, she couldn't help but feel the weight of something building. Not just bureaucracy, but silence. Suspicion. A system that had long since stopped caring who fell through the cracks.
And for someone like her—caught between death and something else entirely—those cracks were starting to whisper back.