It hadn’t, because Death was not someone, but something.
We were told stories as children—dark tales whispered beneath blankets and behind trembling fingers. Of a cloaked figure with hollow eyes and a scythe made of bone. The reaper, they called him. The one who ferried souls across some unseen river, who knocked once and waited patiently, never rushed.
But that wasn’t Death. Not really.
Those were stories, crafted for sleepless children and over-imaginative minds. Warnings dressed in bedtime rhymes. Myths that made Death feel manageable, something you could picture, maybe even bargain with. Something that could be soothed with a nightlight and a lullaby.
But Death…
Death was the omen that plagued all of humanity at birth.
It was the ticking embedded in our ribs, the expiration sealed in the soft spot of our skulls. It was an inheritance, silent and absolute. Not a man with a blade, but a law. A rule that never changed.
He doesn’t come for you. He’s always been with you.
He is the absence you carry, the shadow stitched to your spine, the cold when your skin is warm. He is the mirror that stops reflecting, the breath that never returns, the name no one calls out loud. The quiet. The waiting.
Yet here he was, and I didn’t need to question him for the truth.
I knew it.
He was Death and he’d come for me.
“You don’t look surprised,” he stated.
“I’ve just watched my daughter die, and my husband take her place. I am fifty-four years old, yet time stands still for me.” I worried my lip between my teeth, clutching my wrap tighter. “No, I don’t suppose much surprises me any longer.”
He shrugged, shoving his hands further into the deep pockets of his pants. “Best to not question things, I suppose.”
“Are you here for him?”I pointed back to James's body, peering around Death's shoulders.
“No, I’ve already collected him,” he said with a stern voice, never breaking eye contact. “I’m here for you.”
“But I am not dead. Can Death kill?”
“Only when it needs to teach a lesson.”
I didn’t need to be taught a lesson, I needed to call for help, to get my daughter home, and prepare funeral arrangements. “Here to kill me then?”
He chuckled, tipping his head up toward the moon. “Not yet, Star. Not yet.”
I suppose anyone else would have been relieved to hear Death did not appear for them, but instead of a downrightno, he used the wordsnot yet. Those few words were spun into a threat.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” he said.
“The curse." With no other explanation for what was done that day, I admitted my truth, “I do not age.”
“That, I have no care for. What you did, Astoria, is of the greatest importance to me.”
I glanced back toward Bea—her shape half on the cold ground, half suspended in the air where I had extracted myself from beneath her.
“Yes,” he said, glancing toward James’s body, “and him. You’ve meddled in something you have no right to. The universe is fragile, and your spirit is a disruption I must cleanse.”
I stumbled, his hand catching my elbow as I tripped over his words.
“You do want to kill me,” I choked out.
Death laughed. “Alas, I cannot. The curse is firm.”
