There's always a reason. "That," Skulduggery was strangely unafraid to say, "is what I'm afraid of. I didn't... pass on. I wasn't taken anywhere. I just was." He couldn't say that he wanted to move on, or that he was ready to, but he'd never even been given the option Gabe was implying. He'd been forced to sit and watch a war slowly being lost because of his own failure, the anger slowly growing and threatening to drive him insane until there was simply no way for Skulduggery to handle it anymore. And with moving on somehow blocked, his feelings had intensified until the sheer weight of them dragged Skulduggery back into his body, by then nothing but a skeleton.

That weight had never faded. It had driven Skulduggery into unspeakable evil not long after. Sheer stubbornness saved him, along with the thought of defying whatever had blocked his proper death and forced him into this. But a part of Skulduggery had always believed - no, more like hoped - that there was more to his resurrection than years of mass murder. And while the hope wasn't killed with Gabe's admittance of not knowing, it was certainly dimmed.

"Ah well," he said after a moment. "Thank you, nonetheless."

He kept being given second chances, and he kept ruining them. Being trapped here with the Faceless Ones should have been an end, a just punishment, but somehow he'd ruined even that; and now an Archangel, one of the best people Skulduggery had ever known, was putting everything on the line to help.

"Gabe," he began quietly. If traveling between multiple realities was easy and safe, his friend would have done it much earlier. "How did you manage to get here?"