Zekt's immortal soul, separated from her body, drifts through the Astral Plane and is collected up, with all the rest of the souls of the dead, in the Halls of Judgment, the waiting area of the afterlives. 

It's a dreamlike, indistinct place. She is a ball of light, drifting among other balls of light. Most of them are other newly-dead souls; some of them are staff. 

The Halls of Judgment are the domain of Zarias, the True Neutral god of truth and balance. He is in charge of judging every soul that passes through His halls and sorting them into Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil. No fence-sitting allowed. 

To judge someone properly, of course, you have to know them. This is why Zarias watches every living, thinking being on the Material Plane, recording every action they take that affects their alignment.

In the Halls of Judgment, there is a library: rows upon silent rows of shelves lined with the black spines of books, each spine bearing a name. Every book in that library is a record of a single life. Some of them are quite long. Some of them are very short. A few, comparatively speaking, are still being written.

Hundreds of people die every single day, and Zarias is far too busy to adjudicate every single case Himself. So He delegates. His psychopomps are drawn from the ranks of the recently dead, offered the choice between going straight to their assigned afterlife or staying in the Halls of Judgment to serve Him for a while first. 

In life, Livie was a hobgoblin. She died five years ago, sorted Lawful Good at trial, and accepted an offer to work for the Judge. Now she's a caseworker. She pulls the next book off the New Arrivals shelf and starts reading.

Zekt of the Paletooth tribe, troglodyte, age 15. Birth dedication Chaotic Evil, never overridden by a dedication to a different god. Lots of murder and cannibalism. (Livie is fairly inured to reading about murder at this point, but cannibalism is rare enough that it still makes her shudder.) No sign that the deceased ever particularly cared for anyone other than herself. Looks pretty open-and-shut to Livie. 

She puts in for a default judgment of Chaotic Evil. Anyone who wants to file an objection has ten days to do so. 

Lawful Good is the alignment of believing everyone deserves protection. However, it's also the alignment of the good of the many outweighing the needs of the few. The City of Light only has so many advocates, and they only have so much time. If they tried to fight every case, they'd lose most of them, burn out all their advocates much faster, and end up saving fewer souls overall. They know this because they used to try doing that, and they did statistics about it. Numerically, it's better to only fight the cases they have a decent chance of winning. 

Vitalia, a low-level assistant for the Lawful Good legal team, reads Zekt's case file. Looks like a long shot, and honestly people from that sort of background tend to do better in the Chaotic afterlives anyway. She sends back Standard Form #2-2 to say that the City of Light does not wish to contest the judgment in this case. 

Then she sends two notes with a standard wording to the Neutral Good and Chaotic Good offices indicating that her team thinks their teams should take a look at this one. 

Someone on the Chaotic Good legal team checks their internal mail.

Chaotic Good is the alignment of believing everyone deserves to live free from oppression. They believe in giving people choices when they can. The Twilight Woods has an abundance of people willing to sacrifice a few hours for the sake of this principle, and somewhat fewer people willing to sacrifice a few months or years to learn the case law. They send someone to every case that goes to trial, although they're not always a trained advocate.

A few centuries back, a devil on the Lawful Evil legal team sued them in the appeals court, complaining that the Twilight Woods always contested every case where the default judgment wasn't Chaotic Good to begin with, even when they didn't actually have an argument for the deceased being Chaotic Good. The Twilight Woods got a stern warning against wasting the court's time with frivolous suits. 

So they stopped contesting every single case. Nowadays, they ask the deceased first and only file an objection if they say yes. That's totally different and not frivolous.

Meanwhile, Livie goes to find Zekt. They don't have any languages in common, but that's what Tongues is for.  

"Zekt? Hi, I'm Livie, your caseworker. Has anyone explained to you what's going on yet?" 

Livie is a naked soul in the form of a ball of light, just like Zekt. She doesn't mind going around without a body when nobody else around here has one either, and she finds that being in the same state as the people she's talking to can help with rapport. 

"You mean the part where I'm dead and this is the Halls of Judgment?" says Zekt, who still thinks of herself as a corporeally embarrassed troglodyte rather than a ball of light. "Yeah, I got that bit. Don't remember how I died, though, and the other guy didn't know." 

"Not remembering is pretty expected, since you were killed in your sleep. By—"

Livie checks her case notes. "Your cousin, uh, L’thetik?" 

"Huh. Well, good eating to him, I guess. So what now?" 

That's the calmest reaction Livie's ever seen anyone have to being told they were murdered by a family member, but she's not about to complain. Maybe it's normal for Zekt's culture? 

"Well, I'm here to make sure you know what your options are and help you put in a request for a specific afterlife if you'd like to do that. How much do you know about the afterlives?" 

"...I didn't think I got to pick. Isn't there a whole thing where the Judge weighs my heart and decides where I'm supposed to go?" 

"It's a little more complicated than that. You don't get to pick, exactly, but we take your preferences into account. For example, if you want to go somewhere other than where you're headed, that's a reason for a judge to look at your case more thoroughly and see if they can justify letting you go there instead."

Something occurs to her. "—and, uh, just to be clear, the heart-weighing is a metaphor. There are no bodily organs involved in this process." 

Zekt snorts. "Well, that's good, because I don't think mine exist anymore. Where am I headed, anyway, do you know yet?" 

"The Maelstrom. If you have questions about what it's like there, or about any of the other afterlives, I can fill you in. Some of them will probably send representatives to talk to you soon, as well." 

"Most people go to the Maelstrom, right? Or most of the people I know, anyway." She hesitates. "Do you know where my parents are? Or Sortoosk?" 

"It's actually pretty even, on a population level—um, if you give me their names, and their birth and death dates as precisely as you know them, I can look it up for you?" 

Zekt can give Livie her parents' names. She knows what year they were each born and what season they each died in; she doesn't have a way to track more precise dates than that. Sortoosk is Zekt's twin brother; he was born the same day as Zekt and died in winter two years ago.

"...can you look up Haldet as well?" she asks before she can chicken out of it. "She was...no, it doesn't matter." 

"If it's important to you, of course it matters," Livie says briskly. "Four names won't take me much longer than three. Was she...a friend of yours? Another relative?" 

"...friend. Yeah."

(Zekt had a hopeless crush on Haldet for two years before getting up the courage to say anything about it, at which point Haldet quite reasonably pointed out that they were both girls and couldn't mate and have babies, so there wasn't much point. Haldet was killed by an adventurer later that season. Zekt couldn't have said with any certainty which event she was more upset about.) 

Haldet was a member of the Paletooth tribe like Zekt, and she was born in this season and died in this other season. 

"I can look all of those up for you today and tell you where they were sent," Livie promises. "Do you want me to do that next, or do you have more questions for me first?"

"If you go do that I might have thought of some questions by the time you get back," Zekt suggests. 

"Sounds good to me. I'll come back when I've found the records you want; it might take me a few hours." 

Livie heads back to the library.

Requests like Zekt's are common, as is the level of precision she gave for the births and deaths, so the system is set up to make finding the people she's looking for relatively easy. The life records are arranged on the shelves chronologically by their time of death, but there's a whole second library of reference books that sort by various other methods depending on what information you have, so Livie doesn't have to look through four entire years' worth of shelves. 

Livie finds the reference section that sorts by death year, birth year, and name. All of the people she's looking for died in the last decade, so she only needs the most recent meta-reference book. Using a couple of pages per year, it lists all the birth years of people who died in that year and tells her which reference book to check next for each of them. Following its instructions, she looks through another four reference books for the names—sorted by writing system and then alphabetically, with names in writing systems that don't have their own internal ordering of symbols (like Zekt's) sorted alphabetically according to their Celestial transliteration.  

Some time later, but not nearly as long as it might have taken her in a less thoughtfully arranged library, Livie is looking for Haldets with the right birth and death years to be Zekt's Haldet. There are six in this book. Luckily, they have tribe names listed as well, and there's only one Paletooth. She writes down the shelf listing next to the three she's already found, puts the reference book back where she found it, and heads into the record stacks. 

Meanwhile, a blue blur zooms towards Zekt and becomes a 2-foot-tall blue-skinned person. 

"Hi I'm Kaolin from the Twilight Woods legal team can we talk?" he says, very fast. 

"Uh." Is it an emergency or is this person just like this?

"Sure?" 

Kaolin is constantly in motion, fidgeting from one foot to the other like standing still is physically painful to him. 

"I talk fast so tell me if I need to slow down or repeat something!" he says, equally quickly. "Chaotic Good is the alignment of thinking everyone should have options so we want to give you the option to come to the Twilight Woods! Would you like that?"

"Do I have to decide right now?"

"No of course not! So how it works is right now you're going to the Maelstrom but any time in the next ten days well a bit under ten days now we can petition for you to go to the Woods and if we do that you get a trial to decide where you should go!" 

"And at the trial, I could still end up going to the Maelstrom? Or somewhere else entirely?" 

"Yes that's right! In theory you could go anywhere but we'd be trying to convince the judge you should go to the Woods!" 

Kaolin has been standing still too long; he takes a quick break to nyoom around in a circle and is back before Zekt resonds. 

"If I have ten days to decide," Zekt says slowly, "can I think about it and tell you later?"

"Of course!" Kaolin responds, almost before she's finished the sentence. "You can ask your caseworker to pass on a message or I can come back another day!" 

"How about you come back in, uh...two days?" If she hasn't decided by then, she can always send him away again. Right now, Zekt doesn't feel like she has anywhere near enough information to figure out whether she wants her case to go to trial.

"Ok see you in two days bye!" 

"Before you go—"

Oh, too late, he's gone. She was going to ask him to tell her what the Twilight Woods are like. She guesses she can ask him next time, if he comes back like he said he would. 

An intern on the Lawful Evil legal team skims Zekt's case file. 

Lawful Evil is the alignment of believing that everyone has a correct place and purpose. Those best suited to ruling should rule, and all others should serve them. To go to the Eternal Battlefield is to dedicate yourself to serving a cause greater than yourself, and to go anywhere else is to selfishly abandon your true purpose. However, Lawful Evil believes in efficiency just as much as Lawful Good, if not more. Like the Lawful Good team, they don't bother fighting every case, only the ones they think they can win. And, crucially, the ones who'll fight on the right side.

Winning a soul for the Battlefield is a double-edged sword. As the name suggests, it's a realm at war with itself, the sun goddess Sovaris fighting to keep the war god Istus from conquering the cosmos. Sovaris is Lawful Neutral, but she makes her home on the Battlefield, and almost half the souls who go there choose to fight under her banner. If Lawful Evil wins the wrong trial, they could end up strengthening the enemy. 

The typical member of a Chaotic Evil culture, like Zekt, is likelier to fight for Evil than for Law. But, relatedly, the case for Lawful Evil looks fairly weak. Low-risk, low-reward. If it's going to trial anyway, they'll send a lawyer, but they won't call for a trial if nobody else does. They'll take no further action on this one for now. 

Livie returns after a few hours, as she said she would. 

"Zekt, hi! I found the information you asked me for, about your family and your friend. Would you like to hear it straight away?" 

If Zekt still had shoulders, she'd shrug them. She bobs up and down a little instead. "Not much point in waiting." 

"Alright. Starting with your family, your father is in the Maelstrom, but your mother is in the Twilight Woods. Your brother Sortoosk is in the Maelstrom as well." 

"Huh, alright." As she thought, most troglodytes end up in the Maelstrom, although it's a little surprising that her mother is in the Woods instead. She wonders why, but that part Livie probably isn't allowed to tell her. 

"What about Haldet?" 

"Your friend Haldet went to the City of Light." 

"...huh." 

Alright, that one she wasn't expecting. 

"I, um, also took the time to look up the population statistics for troglodytes, since I thought you might be interested. Apparently, about eighty-five in a hundred troglodyte children go to the Maelstrom, and fifty-five in a hundred adults."

"I'd have expected it to be more adults than that. It's higher for children?" 

"Children are almost always sorted based on their birth dedication, and I suppose troglodytes mostly dedicate their children to Ota, like your parents did? Adults are more likely to have done enough Good or Lawful acts to override a childhood dedication," Livie explains.

"Fifty-five percent is still a lot, even if it might not feel like it: that's more than every other afterlife put together, and more than double the world average." 

"Alright, I guess that makes sense...how many troglodytes go to the City?" 

"Five percent of children, and about the same for adults, actually. One in twenty. In the whole world, it's one in four, the same as the Maelstrom." 

Zekt is realising that much of what she knows about the afterlives is...not necessarily wrong, but incomplete. 

"What's it like there? In the City, I mean. I've never seen a city in real life, and I've never been able to picture it." 

"Never? Well, I'm not sure where I'd start in explaining it; I grew up in a city—although Avralac is nothing next to the City—and I can't imagine not knowing what one looked like! Want to go to the viewing gallery?" 

"That's a place where we can see what the different afterlives look like? Sure, sounds interesting." 

In that case, Livie can lead her through the dreamlike, indistinct Halls of Judgment to a large, square room. They enter through a hole in the centre of the floor; each of the four walls is taken up by a massive window divided into many panes, showing views of each of the four afterlives. 

This window is divided into sixteen identical rectangles. When Livie and Zekt enter the room, all of them are working together to display a single view, looking out from a high tower across a shining city that stretches to the horizon. Tree-lined avenues stretch between tall buildings of white stone, which give way to aqueducts, canals, and parks. Light streams from every window and street corner, and each arch, column, and dome is placed with care, working in harmony with the elements around it. Winged shapes, tiny against this magnificent backdrop, swoop through the sky. 

As they approach, the windows shimmer and change. The four in the centre now display a smaller version of a similar skyline—although an attentive viewer can easily notice that none of the same landmarks appear.

Around the edges, the remaining twelve panes each display an individual scene from closer to ground level, sometimes inside buildings. A winged person speaks to a crowd gathered in a square. Blue-skinned traders hawk their wares from market stalls. A group of people who seem to be on fire (and not at all bothered about this) are hard at work making a steel girder. This pane shows a courtroom; this one shows an auction house; this one is pointed at a construction site from across a busy street. 

Zekt stares. 

"That's so many people." More people than she's seen in her whole life, not just 'at once' but at all. 

She can't help but notice that none of them are troglodytes—although, on closer inspection, none of them look like any other species she's familiar with either. And, to be fair, she doesn't look like a troglodyte herself right now, what with being an insubstantial ball of light. 

"Can it show specific people?" she asks. 

"No, sorry. The views are from specifically enchanted windows on the other end; we can't just look at anything we want. You probably wouldn't recognise your friend if you saw her, anyway," she adds gently, guessing why Zekt asked. "She'll have a new body, like everyone else, and won't look anything like how you remember her." 

"So that's why I don't recognise any of those species? Makes sense. What's with the ones who're on fire?" 

"Those are azers. They're not so much on fire as...made of fire, almost? Their bodies are generating the flames."

Being familiar with what people tend to worry about, Livie adds, "It doesn't hurt them or anything, and if they decide they don't like being on fire they can put it out—although that would hurt them—or leave that body and get a new one that isn't an azer." 

"Can't imagine why anyone would want to be on fire on purpose, even if it didn't hurt. Is it useful for something?" 

"My understanding—I've never tried it myself—is that it's useful for working with heated metal and other molten materials, because you don't get burned by those either." 

Zekt looks at the window again. The azers are shaping red-hot metal with their bare hands, and Zekt isn't an expert—has never seen metal forged, in fact—but that looks like it would be a bad idea for anyone who wasn't immune to burns. 

"What are they making?" 

Livie squints at the window. 

"I'm not sure. I don't know much about metalwork. It looks big, so it's probably going to be a part of something big, like a bridge or a ship. Something that helps lots of people, rather than being for one person to use." 

...one of those words didn't translate. "What's a ship?"

"Oh, right, you lived in the mountains, didn't you?" 

Livie can...find a window that's showing a river with boats sailing up and down it, and point them out while explaining that a ship is a big boat, bigger than any of the ones they can see through that window at the moment. 

...honestly, that sounds fake. Not that Zekt thinks Livie is lying; the setup feels wrong for that and there'd be no point anyway. It's just so far outside Zekt's experience of the world that it feels made up. 

"Boats and ships. Okay." 

She goes back to watching the windows. 

The windows cycle through different views of city life at regular intervals. All of them are public spaces, full of people going about their daily business. Most people don't acknowledge the windows, but occasionally someone waves at one. 

This window looks out over a bridge across a river, with carts and pedestrians streaming in both directions while boats pass underneath. This one shows a park where a group of people—some short and hairy, some tall and blue, some with lion's heads—are playing a ball game. This one shows a busy street, where some enterprising street performers have set up directly across from the window and are putting on a play told entirely in mime. This one shows people queuing up to drop tokens through a slot into a large box. 

"Do they know the windows are there?" Zekt asks, squinting at the street performers. 

"Oh, yes, they're required by City ordinances to be clearly marked so people know they might be being watched. Obstructing their view is illegal but deliberately arranging yourself to give them a better view isn't, as far as I know." 

Alright, so everything that can be seen through these windows is what the City wants people to see of it. That makes sense, but is also somehow disappointing. Zekt is abruptly much less interested in the view than she was a moment ago. 

She looks around at the rest of the room. "Can we see the other afterlives here, too?" 

"Yes, the other three windows are the other afterlives! Which one would you like to see next?" 

Zekt bobs up and down in the ball-of-light equivalent of a shrug. 

"Might as well see what the Maelstrom is like, I suppose." 

"Alright, this way!" She leads Zekt over to the opposite wall. 

In contrast to the neat, identical panes of the City's window, this one looks like someone took a hammer and shattered it, then stuck all the pieces back together in their original places like a jigsaw puzzle. The panes are jagged, irregular shapes, tiny in the middle and larger around the edges. They jump between views erratically, with no discernible pattern. 

Here's a brief glimpse of a handful of winged rock people gathered around a large, writhing red snake that seems to be on fire. Here's a broad vista of a stormy sea, with merfolk dancing in the waves. Here's a thin sliver of the inside of an erupting volcano. Here's a lizard-like humanoid riding a giant crystalline snail through a cave studded with gemstones bigger than their head. 

One of the larger panes is currently devoted to a massive thunderstorm. Tiny winged shapes are tossed around like dolls in the high winds, and the scale is impressive enough when one imagines them to be the size of a troglodyte. Then the winds throw one closer to the window, revealing it to be a dragon easily fifty feet long and prompting a sudden recalculation of the size of the storm. The dragon's maw gapes wide, filling up the pane, and the scene goes dark before switching to a different window.