Scythe

Death had started life, first and foremost, as a little sister.

She was the third, the youngest and the only girl. She had enjoyed it, in the way that most younger sisters do. There was never blame, there was never an expectation. She followed her big brothers around the universal wasteland with hopeless devotion and excitement; in that ‘yes, you can go and pillage the universe, but take your baby sister with you, will you?’ kind of way. She hadn’t been allowed to do much, she didn’t have the abilities that the others had, the strength. She was just…the baby. Where they had sweeping God-like powers, all she could do was peer through strange windows into other dimensions.

They gave her a horse, just like theirs, but smaller and pale. They gave her a sword, just like theirs, but it was golden and pretty. When they fought, huge epic games where they battled for dominance, they’d even let her win occasionally.

But then, Death had questions.

Who were they? Where were they? She had brothers, but no parents, so where had they come from? Who had they come from? Her brothers hadn’t much liked the questions, they had no answers and were much more preoccupied bickering amongst themselves.

She tried to fit in, she tried to ignore the gnawing feeling of loneliness, of misunderstanding. Alas over the millennia, the endless fighting got boring. Her brothers never got bored, but she did. She wanted, like a lot of girls, to play dolls. She wanted to play dress up. She wanted to let her imagination soar; much to the derision of her brother. So…like other girls her age, wanting a little hideaway, she found a tiny little corner of the universe. A place just her own, and she enjoyed it there. There were sweeping oceans, huge forests, it was lush and picturesque and everything she had been missing. The only drawback was that it was lonely. So, one day during a pique of imagination, whilst sitting under the newly birthed sun and watching through one of her own windows, she reached through and plucked something from there.

A soul.

Then she took another so that it might have company.

The new souls thrived, and lived, and explored. They wanted more souls, Death brought them. They would live and play and grow until they got bored, and they would ask her to send them to wherever they had come from before. Death, being kind, always obliged happily. Souls didn’t do well out of their world for too long, they grew stale and melancholy and started to flicker, they grew dark and all the magic evaporated. She had let that happen once accidentally when her brothers had summoned her back, never again.

Her little dollhouse remained a secret for a long time, but inevitably her brothers came searched and boy did they love the world she had created. They began playing with the souls, having a running competition on who could get the souls to want to leave first. Why would anybody leave paradise? War set about turning them against each other, he turned them all into bickering brothers. Pestilence plagued their bodies, making them so inhospitable the souls would flee. And famine set about on the landscape, killing anything edible, visiting droughts and floods as far as the eye could see. They set out against each other, War would incite an army, pestilence would smite them, famine would starve the victors – and at first Death saw no harm. She was elated that she was finally part of the game, her big brothers wanted to play with her again.

After a time though, the souls forgot her. She would dash around, bringing in new souls to counter the ones her brothers chased away, to stop them getting lonely. She would open the windows for the departing souls to go back to whence they came. The souls stopped wanting her though, she would appear as they departed, and they would flinch from her.

The souls learned her name and they hated it.

They hated her.

She who had made this world for them, who loved them. Her brothers had ruined everything. They grew older too, sometimes she thought they forgot they were brothers at all. It ceased to be a game and instead became a battle for Earth. Her world. Her souls. Her dollhouse.

Death grew older too. She grew tired of being hated, of being synonymous with evil, darkness, she got bored of people flinching for her and begging her not to show up. Once she had been loved, now she was not.

It was time for things to change.

It was not as simple as all that, as siblings they were not mortal, she could not shuffle them off to other worlds. She needed a conduit, a human, she needed to tie them to the mortal coil and lock them to a soul. A soul which would never be able to move on, who would embody all three facets of death and suffering and balance them out.

She needed somebody to wear a cowl and be the death that she did not want to be.

Finding such a soul was proving difficult. She would wait, waiting was easy.

She was a little sister first, long ago, but this was her world, and it was time for her brothers to go.