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antheap
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Character(s)/Relationship(s): Original Non-Human Character(s)
Words: 2093
Warnings: Deities, Shapeshifting, Violence, POV First Person, Present Tense
I always believed there’s a certain elegance in Death: it is the end of what’s ephemeral, the beginning of eternity. It’s supreme, ruthless and terrifying. That’s because, to the God of Death, death is everything that matters, and everything that exists only exists for the sake of, one day, meeting its end. And yet, it’s difficult to reconcile this image with that of Death herself, standing in front of me in the form of a boy in his early teens.
My eyes are following the lines of a book, but I’m not paying attention. I don’t like this alphabet: its shapes are inelegant and the symbols exiguous. There’s nothing artistic or creative about the way they are drawn, and it takes half of the fun away from reading. The thin paper they’re printed on rustles when a sudden blow of wind turns it, carrying the scent of old ink to my nose.
I hear a single, harsh caw coming from on high. I raise my eyes just enough to see a stain of dark ink on the page of the sky glide down towards me. I close the book and put it back on its metal stand, together with many more like it.
I feel the bird’s talons sink into my clothes and the flapping of its wings next to my ear as it alights on my shoulder.
“A crow? Isn’t that a bit cliché?” I chuckle, walking away from the sidewalk shop. The black bird lets out a high-pitched caw and its claws sink into my flesh, just enough to make me flinch.
It flies ahead of me into a side alley, feathers fluttering in the sultry city air. I bring a hand to my shoulder and massage it. My lips twitch in a slanted grimace as I focus my thoughts on the injury: the skin under my fingers takes only a couple of seconds to go back to its original smoothness, while the clothes take just a moment longer.
When I catch up with him, he’s wearing his human disguise again. I expect a theatrical pout on his childish face, but I’m met with his usual detached expression.
I always believed there’s a certain elegance in Death: it is the end of what’s ephemeral, the beginning of eternity. It’s supreme, ruthless and terrifying. That’s because, to the God of Death, death is everything that matters, and everything that exists only exists for the sake of, one day, meeting its end. And yet, it’s difficult to reconcile this image with that of Death herself, standing in front of me in the form of a boy in his early teens.
He side-eyes me from under his tuft of hair, making a step towards me. I catch a glimpse of him peering at the shoulder he injured, but it’s so brief I think I might have imagined it.
His hair is the colour of chocolate, and when I step closer to him I half expect him to smell like it, too. Instead, the scent carries me to an underground cave, and his big eyes are the stream flowing under my feet. Next to it, the lonely red flower of his lips blooms under my eyes.
“The crow is a stylish cliché,” he murmurs. “But a youngster like you would never understand.”
Death is old, so old that it’s said that the length of his life is the closest one gets to eternity. It’s difficult for me to grasp the concept of age, to measure time, so I can’t decide whether it’s true. I don’t even know how old I am: it’s like I was just born, but it’s also like I always existed.
“Do you like the new style?” I change the subject, gesturing at myself. My hands slide down the curves of my sides and I tap one of my heeled shoes on the ground. His eyebrows furrow and his hand reaches for my face. I think he’ll have to stand on his toes but he just grabs a lock of my hair that was brushing against my breast. He moves it out of the way and looks me in the eyes.
“You kept them green,” his voice says, straight into my mind. The way his thought dances inside me has something mismatched, distraught, slithering underneath it; but when it gets to the last word, it quivers pleasantly.
He grabs my wrist and his eyes become toneless mirrors; they melt and turn into mud that seeps into me. I can feel it smear itself over the volatile inside of my soul, and I wonder if he can see more of me than I thought he could. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if he can tell me how old I am. I almost ask him.
“Are you sure you want to come?” He closes his eyelids on the nothingness his eyes were staring at and he sighs. He lets go of my hand, but I feel the ghost of his grip like a slimy shadow around my wrist.
“Do I look scared?”
“No, you feel hesitant.” He doesn’t look at me, and starts walking away. I still feel a slick, pliable piece of clay wrapped around my hand and it pulls at me when the distance between us grows. I follow him into the main street.
“It’s something new for me,” I explain, focusing on that ghastly presence on my arm until I can almost see it, dripping, oozing out of him and reaching for me and, although it’s a part of him, it feels so different from the core he hides under his skin. “It’s natural that I’m excited.” I wonder if the woman who just walked through the space between us felt a chill, or maybe a wet drop sliding down her back.
“Nothing to be excited about,” he says. Maybe he’s right. But I have what one might call an academic interest in what he’s about to do.
“Maybe it’s just because it was so hard to convince you,” I tease.
His voice when he talks never trembles, never breaks, never rises even slightly in tone. Even the fluid of his soul is motionless as if frozen solid when I try to reach for it. But this time I feel a little wave running through his core, right after I speak. He clicks his tongue.
“It’s a pitiful show. It’s disgusting.” His thought reaches me with a powerful surge and my nose smells a decaying corpse that isn’t there. Around me there are only alive humans, bounced around by the events of their pathetic existence. I can see why they run, when death latches onto their backs from the moment they’re born.
“Humans have dignity in death,” he adds, almost as if he read my thoughts. “But Gods, they are at their worst when they die.”
The last sentence is barely clear when it gets to me, carrying a shoal of muddled images that flash before my eyes, violently. They follow one another in a jumble of wrecked bodies and dissolving cores, of powerful fires extinguishing themselves, of solid ice melting into nothingness. For a moment, I imagine how I would look if he managed to destroy me.
“All Gods are like that?” I think aloud.
He doesn’t answer. His boundaries shrink; they’re sucked as if he’s breathing himself in. He suddenly stops, in the middle of the crowded street. His disguise shifts and blurs and a gooey energy starts oozing from his body until he is nothing but a liquid, pulsating shadow of the form I’m used to seeing.
“They never want to surrender. Gods hate being powerless.” I expect his words to be hazy, confused, as my own thoughts are when I let myself fluctuate freely out of one of these pathetic disguises; but instead, they hit my consciousness as if he etched them into me, as if he stabbed me with each of them.
Wind hits the both of us with a blow that makes me lose my balance for a moment, but he stands perfectly still through it. With the corner of my eye I see a woman stumbling to find shelter from the sudden whirlwind forming in the sky. In front of me, Death’s form twitches and crackles, and it takes me a moment to understand he’s chuckling.
The Goddess is a cloud of gleaming energy in the eye of the storm. She twists her anthropomorphic appearance to escape the blow of oozing matter aimed at her. Neither of them even attempts communication.
I wonder if any other God can even follow the swiftness of her movements as she leaps from the ground to the wall of a building, to a terrace, to a roof. Her body shifts, adjusts, mutates, and sparkles with green electricity. All around her, the wind throws around every object in its path. Death looks unaffected by all of this. He swings lumps of black liquid in slow, big arcs, and every blow strikes a moment too late.
I abandon my human form in favour of a more comfortable one, but still contain myself into a wavering body, my long form slithering on the ground to watch them from the side. Only then does she notices me, and the cloud that forms her body rustles and glimmers. She’s distracted and I expect him to hit her, but he doesn’t. He turns to look at me, just for a moment.
Death is still standing in the same place, his feet firm on the ground. His face still has human attributes, eyes now back on his objective, lips curved in a smile and hair fluttering in the strong wind, but it’s like every part of him is covered by a layer of pitch. She has tried to hit him repeatedly and she tries again, but everything she does can barely make his form fluctuate. I expect her to try to run, and when she does I almost find myself rooting for her desperate will to fight.
In a flash she puts an incredible distance between herself and Death, she flies so high in the sky I’m sure he can’t get to her anymore — but it’s then that he catches her. I can barely make out the black spear piercing her core — it’s as if it was always there — but I clearly see it pulling her down to the ground at the speed of a diving hawk and dragging her until she’s right in front of him.
“Pathetic.” His voice pierces just as well as that spear. “You wouldn’t have suffered if you just gave up.”
The spear melts all over her unstable body, it smears its gooey liquid on those lumps of sparkling energy that shudder and tremble, it drips inside her core until its light starts flickering.
An unblockable, scathing, agonising pressure surrounds me, and I contain my core back into the human form, smaller and more manageable. The pressure is a scratch at my soul, not dangerous but painful.
He laughs. I look at him, and the liquid surrounding him crinkles and quivers. It's like he's drunk on the echo of her pain.
Slowly, her core dies out and the pressure eases until it disappears.
Death turns toward me, his human form unstable, liquid energy still bleeding out of him and surrounding him in lumps and limbs. His body is still covered by it, but his eyes are completely white and as sharp as ice. I find myself paralysed, mesmerised, and my only thought is that I have never seen and I will never see anything more beautiful.
One of his leaking limbs closes around my throat, lifts me and slams into the wall. I realise what he’s about to do well before he does it, but I don’t react, and I let him push my pathetic vessel around like a doll.
“What were you doing?” His voice, far and otherworldly, slashes my thoughts as if he’s trying to pierce through me with the power of his words alone.
“I was just watching,” I wheeze, and his slimy tentacle squeezes me tighter as if trying to suffocate my answer. He walks closer and the black liquid travels up my face, enters my nose, my mouth, my throat. He’s so beautiful I wish I didn’t have to stop him.
I repel his oozing limbs, push him back with a gusty blow of my power and he staggers back. His form pulsates and his black lips curve upwards. He moves backwards one, two steps, then regains his composure.
In the blink of an eye, he’s back to his human appearance, pale skin almost glistening in the setting sun. I think it’s incredible how well he can contain all his power in that tiny disguise.
“You were interfering,” he says, clearing his throat.
“I thought I’d help.”
His aura never felt as intimidating as it does now. It alerts me, and I prepare for another attack. But it never comes. Instead, he turns his back to me with a sigh.
“I don’t need help,” he whispers.
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