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I sigh. What does my pride matter anymore? And doesn’t she at least deserve the truth about who she travels with?
“We did not tell you all that we ought to have,” I say, my breath puffing in the cold air. “My brothers and I, we are not just monstrous looking. We have been around for a long time. Long enough that stories have been told about us. We are named among your kind.”
She frowns, and her rocking slows some. At least I can distract her from the cold and discomfort with my tale. “What did they call you in the stories?”
I take a deep breath. “I do not want to scare you.”
She sits up straighter. “I’m not easily scared.”
Considering she tangled with a wolf today and came out the victor, I can attest to that.
“They called us the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
She is quiet for a moment, her eyes blinking repeatedly, the only sign of her surprise. “Which one are you?”
I suck in a quick breath. “Death.”
“What does that mean?” she asks. “Being death?”
She is taking this far more calmly than I expected. Her question sounds only curious, not fearful.
Still, I try to be careful as I answer. “My father created my brothers and I for a purpose. To be his army. For thousands of years, we were an unstoppable machine of devastation wherever we went. Alongside every great army, we were there.”
“So, if you were there during the battles, what did you do?”
I suck in a breath. “During the bloodiest of battles, humanity’s lusts to destroy one another were inflamed by my conjoined twin brothers War. My other brothers Famine and Pestilence attacked their physical bodies. I was the one who finished them off, carrying men by the thousands to the otherworld.”
“What does that mean, carrying them to the otherworld?” she asks.
I do not want to continue answering her questions, but in her curiosity, I notice her clenching hands have relaxed.
So I expel a great exhale, the vapor puffing out in a cloud. “I am a plane-crosser. It was my job to take their souls to the realm where they rest for eternity in death.”
Her eyes widen slightly. “So there is an afterlife?”
I shrug. “A resting place, yes.”
“What’s it like? Like heaven?”
Again, I shrug. “It is the shadow realm. Peace and warmth for some. Darkness and endless wandering for others.”
“Like hell?” she asks, sounding alarmed.
Another shrug. “Not like some of your religions paint. There is no creature with little horns poking souls or great fire pits. Souls wander for eternity if they did not find peace during life in this plane. They carry that restlessness to the next realm.”
“What about people who do? People who were happy here?” she asks.
I pause, thinking. “It is not a place of happy or sad. There is peace and not peace, I think. Rest, and not rest. Some souls live in a spacious place in that realm but are not frantic or searching. They are content forever. Others. . . wander endlessly, searching for a peace they will never find.”
“And you’re like, what? The Grim Reaper who takes everybody on Earth there?”
I laugh at that. “No, no. I’m just a plane-crosser. I took swaths of souls from battlefields on the brink of death there because it seemed like my function among my brothers. Else, what good was I?” My frown deepens. “My father certainly found my powers lacking. He thought me the least of his sons.”
Her eyebrows lift as she stares at the fire, warming her hands. “You can cross over into the realm of the dead, and he wasn’t impressed?”
I shrug. “Eventually, I realized he would have preferred they stayed here until the last moment, suffering from their wounds until natural death took them.”
She gasps. “But you had pity on them.”
“I don’t know. I felt I had been given a purpose, so I did what I thought I had been born for. I thought it would please my father, even though it never seemed to. But once someone was on the brink from which there was no return, I took them.”
“Well, fuck your dad. I think it’s noble.”
“No,” I bark, shaking my head. “That is not what I am. Not what we were. My brothers and I were mad with fury and the need to spread death. We did not show pity or discriminate. The other plane is full of all who our father set us upon.”
And some he didn’t. Once the madness had fully taken hold. . . That is a shame I cannot speak of. After thousands of years, and one last unspeakable death, this time one of our own brothers. . .
“So what does this have to do with where you were today?”
I breathe out again, another puff of vapor in the darkness. “After so much of my life spent in that other realm, sometimes I find it. . . easier to be among the dead.”
