Chapel Orahamm

I couldn’t call it a voice. I couldn’t call it a sense or feeling. But it was there, here, everywhere and no where all at once. In, between, around, through that nothingness. And it commanded. It formed me; pulled and pushed and marked and marred until I was no longer. And in that moment of pure nothing, I drew on the name and gave it what it most desired: “Death.”

Shape and form became mine again and a chuckle that sounded like mine formed in that subspace. “You would dare name me?”

I trembled. That creeping, frigid chill flooded my senses. My nerves lit with ice fire.

It, me, Death laughed. “It’s been too long, little magician. Too long since one of your kind dared touch me. Dared step foot in my sacred spaces. Have you come to worship me? Come to barter, beg, and plead for yourself or a lover? Come to command and demand like some wayward ruler of mortals?”

“Are you the creature in the stone?” My bones had turned leaden, each individual sense of mine was being turned on and off, like an electrical wire in a preserved frog.

“Creature? Hmmm. Creature? Is that what I am? A singularity? An animal?” It made to roll the sounds around until I questioned if it was words I had heard or thunder, or a river, or the movement of wind through the trees.

Taste hit me next. The acrid flavor of meat-rot in the air. I suffocated on it while this nothingness, while Death toyed with me.

“You could see me. The sprits told me as much. They tell me you command them.” Death made it a statement, but there was a question to it.

“Sprits?” I got out as I tried to fight the next wave of senses that reminded me of how my skin fit to my muscle.

“My little gatherers.” Death gave me a sense of sight in that moment, a Mander, it’s massive yellow eyes staring up at me from a black, curled mound on a desiccating skull before the sense was yanked away again. I was powerless in the face of this thing. There was nothing I could barter with. Nothing I could promise. Groveling and begging would do no good. These understandings came to me. The only thing I could do was wait.

Maybe I was dead. This occurred to me as my concept of linear time unraveled. Could Wallace have been wrong about reincarnation? Or was this what was waiting for me in the end? I should have been panicked, but I couldn’t find it in me to be anything other than mildly curious. There was no mother’s warmth, like a welcoming home. There was no terror, like being ripped to shreds on a battlefield. There was no joy, no sorrow, no fear, or anger. Just a sinking acceptance of what was happening. My will to fight it? Why would I fight it?

That chuckle came again. At long last. I had waited centuries, millenia. A sense of profound relief and adore overwhelmed me. Then anger. It had taken my emotions and given them back to me one by one so that each felt more overwhelming than the last. But to ask it what it wanted of me, like I could provide it, an all encompassing nothingness, with anything? That would be presumptuous. Inane.

“No, little magician. No. I think I could use you.”

“You can do whatever you want. Why would you need me?” I protested.

“Because even I am not omnipotent, little magician. You’ve already lost a piece of you. Just enough for me to slip in and finally touch the world once more.”

“But you are Death! You are ever present in our lives. We fear you.”

“Am I? Am I Death? I am only experienced once by the living. At the point when you leave your plane and enter the next. You think you experience me. With every love lost, each fallen warrior, ever creature to eat or befriend. You think you’ve touched on me. But you only ever glance at those who have truly found me. You. You who gave up a section of your spirit? I can come over into your world and -”

“And what?” I felt no malice from it, no greed,no envy.

“I would give you powers. Those to bring you great wealth and status,” it weaseled.

“Why would I want powers, or wealth, or status? My soul was put into the son of a would-be emperor. I would lack for nothing if I had stayed in my tower,” I countered.

“You already use some of my powers. Why not others?”

“My sight?” I guessed.

It gave a pleased purr. “Even now you are watching me with eyes born to no man I have ever met. What will you do with that sight of yours? Maybe I will make it my own.”

“The firedrops, or my ability to pull cores out of funny trees?” I asked.

It snorted at that. “Removing the soul of one of the Earth Mother’s children, and you call it a funny tree? Yes. Yes. I think I’ll use you.”

“Do I get a say in this?” I protested, finally feeling panic set in.

“No.”

I dragged in a breath to the mud covered castle, Farrow holding onto my slumped form. I was resting my head against Rowan’s back as Ravur paced this way and that in the great courtyard.

“Oye, oye, Tanwyn? Tanwyn?” Farrow was shaking me.

“I-” my throat came out cracked and raw. Every fiber of my being seared with electric pulses. “I’m alive. How long have I been gone?” I looked up to the stone palace to find the great shadow settled in the middle, looming over us.

“Just a second. What happened to you?”

“I-” I wasn’t sure if I should say. Something deep inside me rebelled at telling them, and yet I wanted to. “Manders sit on the dead.”

Rowan flicked a glance over his shoulder.

I stared at the massive shadow. “There’s death here.” The Mander sitting on the skull came to mind at my bidding. The sprit. But the cascade of bodies etched into the back of my eyelids after were not my doing. “Manders in the walls.” Bones and blood and intestine perched in the folds of my brain, and I couldn’t shake that glare of the shadow above us.

“You alright there, Matchstick? You’re not making sense.”

No. I was making perfect sense. The shreds of blue magic wavering over the mud. “Manders in the walls. Slaves that died making the castles.”

Rowan and Farrow tensed.

“That shadow…” I let on, nodding at what they couldn’t see. “I don’t think that was just a person or two falling from the scaffolding.” My skin pebbled in a wash of goosebumps. “I know what Quamire found.”

I slid off of Ravur, Farrow and Rowan protesting as I landed ankle deep in cold mud. The stench of it engulfed me. I pushed through, slipping and sliding in the grime as I made it to the slick stairs and in under the arches of the grand entrance, into the shadow. There, light and blue shreds of magic shone in spots through the broken roof. I swallowed. The shadow lingered, made up the whole of every wall, watching me from every direction. It wasn’t Death that lingered there, but the dead. The mass of ragged cloth and browned bone poked out from under the mud in every direction

“Let them find peace.” I muttered. Something in the back of my brain understood what it was I was demanding “I see your sprits. I see where the dead lay. Take them! Take them back. They don’t belong here.” I didn’t realize I was getting louder with each comment. Directing the comment to the nothingness in my soul. To the shadow in the walls. The shadow. It splintered. The room darkened.

And the dead moved.

“Matchstick!” A sword came down between me and the first rotting skeletal hand, pointed fingertips almost in my eyeballs. A large, warm, fleshy hand grabbed my shoulder and dragged me out of the room to push me into the hands of another. “Farrow, get him out of here!”

“On it, boss.” Farrow wrestled with me to get us unstuck from the mud as I scrambled to join him.

“What did you touch?” Farrow hissed at me as we made it into the great courtyard.

What had I touched? “You said I had powers. You wanted a slot in my soul. Take your damned dead over to the other side already.” I spat at the nothingness tearing a hole through my being.

“They have not come to my door yet. The sprits wait for them to accept their fate. They have not come. Little magician, will them. Command them like you commanded Earth Mother’s children to give you their souls,” Death demanded behind my ear.

“Will them?” I spat.”

Farrow had put distance between us, his form tensed, ready to spring away. “Walking skeletons in there, and you’re arguing with yourself? What by the Dark God and his consorts is Rowan thinking?”

I couldn’t give Farrow the time. Death was outlining a sense in my soul. No form. No space. No spell to shape. It was another chunk of nothingness. Of drawing forth. Rowan’s sword clanged and crunched from within the dark palace. I dragged in a steadying breath, only just realizing that I was half kneeling in the mud, watching for the tidal wave of skeletons I had felt come together in that grand hall.

I latched onto Death’s command. Channeling the sense of it, I drew in the deads’ moment of despair, when they drowned in the flood brought on by the destruction of a dam during a royal’s coronation. Betrayal. Regret. Rage. The tearing desperation that comes with choking on water. Raw fingers. Pulled out hair. Ripping at others to try to squeeze out the last breath between the cracks in the ceiling. It flooded my senses. I dripped with it. I harnessed it and carried the load. Water gushed from my mouth. I became the drowned and drowning. Panic took over.

“Alright, Tan. Whatever is going on with you,” Farrow grabbed the back of my neck, snapping me out of my panic, “get these bastards off of Rowan.”

I pulled every flicker of blue magic from the castle, imagining it like pulling the moor lines of many floating boats. No time to deal with the sense of drowning. “Heed me.” I grabbed the senses of these souls who had never walked through Death’s door. The lines tugged in every direction. “Heed me!” I yelled again, this time putting every fiber of my being, every sense I had just had toyed with, into that command until the lines went taught.

The crunch of steel on bone stopped. I was going to be pulled apart at this rate. Rowan emerged, covered in mud and bleeding scratches to look for Farrow and me. “They’ve stopped!” He scrambled down out of the palace and down the stairs. Then he really looked at me. He dropped his sword, a wash of horror coating his features.

“Death. You wanna take your charges yet?” I didn’t realize I’d bit into my lip until copper coated my tongue. The nothingness bubbled from the cut, tasted that copper on my lips, and took to the mooring lines of the dead. The whisper of bones falling apart into the squish of the mud echoed out from the room in an unenthusiastic wave. All of my energy seeped out following the nothingness. I crumpled. The last I saw was Rowan fighting with the sticky muck to retrieve his sword.

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