Reaper's Breath

I never believed in Death. Not the regular death death, you know, the kind that happens at the end of one’s life – that much is a fact and hard to ignore. But actual Death, in the flesh. A Reaper. And maybe you do, maybe you always have. I know a lot of people talk about the Reapers like they were angels, or monsters, or some sort of force of nature. Good or evil, fact or myth, I guess I always just thought of them like a bedtime story we invent to put a name to the shadows that we’re afraid of. Well, I used to think that. But that was before I met her.

I grew up in Oldtown, back when it was called “Oldtown-Against-the-Wall,” but when most of us just called it Oldtown. I was here when the Wall still towered above us, back before the Machines had come back. I was here back when we had to stay off the streets at night because of the monsters, and I remember when we heard the first rumors that the Reapers had come back. It’s only been ten or so years, but to see the town now you’d think we never even had a wall in the first place, that we hadn’t been split between everything we believed in for so many years.

Marna and I, we’d been friends since we were old enough to walk. Our parents had been professors at one of the Ethereal colleges together, and we kind of grew up thinking of ourselves like brother and sister. So much so, in fact, that by the time we realized we weren’t, I guess the damage was done. We even tried kissing once when we were still apprentice age, but it was no use. We were just too much like siblings for it to not feel…well, kind of gross.

Oldtown wasn’t such a great place, not like it is these days. Back then, it felt like the whole town was falling apart faster than we could keep it together. One of every four children didn’t survive to see apprenticeship, and on average one more wouldn’t make it to adulthood. Death plays a large role in our lives, from the time we’re young. The energy of the town may come primarily from the steam pressure that connects us all, but we don’t really think about our relationship with it until our first Skyward prayer.

I lost both my own siblings pretty early on, and, as is the custom, we said goodbye to them in a ceremony held deep within the foundations of Oldtown. The bodies of the dead are carried down a long circular staircase into an elegantly and reverently decorated chamber. There are, I understand, a few of these chapels, but they’re all designed to look the same. I remember thinking that it could have been the same room for both my brother and my sister, even though they passed away a year apart. But what struck me most was the moment they opened the furnace doors, and the wave of heat that rolled out over us. As the flames consumed the last evidence of our family, sending what remained up into the sky, I remember staring into that powerful fire which was always burning, always giving life to our town, always ready to take our loved ones away and send them up into the sky. Both times, we would come home and Marna would be there waiting for me, ready to hold my hand and say the same thing: “It’s okay.”

It was a simple phrase, that, but she was always right about that. It always was okay when she was around. Whatever would happen to either one of us or to the people around us, she just knew it would be all right, and seeing her faith in that was enough to keep me hoping in that, too. My father once told me, “some people believe, and the rest of us believe them – for most folks, that’s enough.”

She’d had a gift for the arts, one that I never picked up. I did have a bit of a knack at mechanics, though, so after a few years of working in the smithies, I got a job working with the steamers. Pretty standard stuff at first, working in the boiler pits, later working the lines. I even did a season in the suit – back when I was younger and feeling immortal – and helped out once when the city was almost attacked by a stampede of beasts from the Wild. A lot of the things had gotten into the city, and a few key steam stations got taken out. I lost the rest of my team that day, and after it was all over, they promoted me up and out of the division. I drank a lot during the year after that.

Strangely enough, it was Marna who brought me out of it. She’d been studying music, up in the college of Kinesthesia – it’s a school where they study how music and the magical arts work together or something – and she’d gotten really good at playing a metal flute. Marna had this gift for making things sound just perfect. She’d always been like that, long as I remembered. From telling me stories to cheer me up when my mother had passed away to the funny rhythms she’d knock out on stuff she’d pick up in her family’s kitchen, everything just sounded better when she had a hand at it.

I remember waking up a little over a year after my team had been killed to the sound of music. I thought I’d died, and something perfect had cut through the worlds to call my spirit home. It was a strange thought, and as I lay there thinking about how strange it felt, I could feel the pain and guilt from having not died with the rest of my team rise up and crash down around me. I lay there, stinking of cheap booze and resignation, and when the music stopped, Marna was holding me as I cried it all out.

It’s strange to think of it now, looking back, but sometimes I wonder why she and I never just got married. I remember the looks on our friends’ faces as we both found other people to share our lives with. She met Tomas just a year after the Wall came down, and they introduced me to one of his friends from inside the city, a beautiful woman named Zuan. We married not two months apart, and our three kids still play together today. I think we looked at our kids as the extension of our own friendship, and I wouldn’t be shocked if at least a couple of them are just like Marna and I were all our lives.

I don’t think the thought had ever really crossed my mind that she wouldn’t be a part of my life. One way or another, I just assumed we’d be two old wrinkled bags of personhood, doddering about the town and reflecting together about the good old days.

Four months ago, Tomas came by, pulled Zuan aside and they took the kids across the street, leaving Marna and I alone. It wasn’t an unusual thing, really. Marna and I have so many private jokes that make the others roll their eyes in a way that just says, “oh, there they go again,” and I suppose they figure it’s just better to let us talk amongst ourselves from time to time.

But I could tell Marna had been crying – something had been too rough for her to bear with her typical stoicism, and was still so fresh that she hadn’t gotten her Wall face up yet. We talked briefly about nothing important, but as soon as she mentioned the healing guild, we both broke down. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. I knew how it would end.

The diagnosis had been pretty grim. The illness they’d found was too far gone, too spread throughout her body, and the only treatments they had would slow down the eventual progress it was destined to have. It was aggressive and degenerative, and though most of the symptoms could be covered by the healers, her health itself would doom her to a wretched quality of life where her loved ones would be helpless to watch her unavoidable and rapid descent into incoherence. They promised that they could make it less painful, but one way or another it would come to death.

It was impossible. I wanted to refuse it, deny it, reject it outright. But Marna…she was already coming to terms with it. I realized in that moment that if she was willing to embrace it, then what she needed from me was my support.

The next couple of months were a blur. Our two families spent much of our time together, sharing an unspoken agreement to step up to every possible opportunity for experience we could find, so that we’d have it to look back on. We took one of the airships out to the Machine city of Dynamis, spent a week at the young colony of New Bankton and marveled at the grand technologies the colonists had brought with them from over the sea. It was a fantastic vacation, where we all crossed all those things off our mental lists that we’d always wanted to do but had never seemed to find the time.

Marna fell asleep on the airship coming home, and when she wouldn’t wake up, Tomas rushed her to the healers while Zuan and I took all the kids and returned home, waiting for word.

Three days later, we heard back over the aethernet, asking us to come as quickly as we could.

They let the children in first, Tomas and Marna’s toddlers. When Tomas came out for me and Zuan, his face was pale, his eyes red. I tried to put on the strongest face I could, even though I know I wasn’t fooling anyone.

She lay there in the center of the bed, a faint tang of incense wafting out of a brass lamp on the far side of the room. I remember that smell. It’s strange, the things you think of at moments like that; the things you don’t think you’d recall so vividly later.

Marna got that funny sparkle in her eyes when she saw us come into the room. She always had that, and I used to find myself trying to manage somehow to see her first whenever we spent any time together, just so I’d get the chance to see that change come over her when she saw me. It was something I never told her about. It seemed just…silly, really. I wish now I’d told her. Just as, I don’t know, some special last gift I could have shared with her, to let her know how much she’d always meant to me.

We all sat together there for a while – how long, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware when Zuan and Tomas took the kids back out and left Marna and I alone in the room. I just knew that it was like how it had begun for us, just us two being there for one another for as long a moment as we needed.

I tried to speak a couple of times – to say what, I don’t know – and each time she’d shake her head no, even though even that small effort seemed close to overwhelming. So we didn’t speak, not once, even as I could see the lights vanishing from her eyes.

Even to that last moment, I didn’t – I couldn’t – belief it was happening. She couldn’t go, it wasn’t possible.

But then I realized we were no longer alone in the room. It’s strange, I hadn’t even noticed when the healers and our families had left, but I noticed when she appeared.

I don’t think I ever even considered what a Reaper might look like. The myths talk about them flying, so I suppose I expected wings; the old songs and prayers suggest that their eyes are fashioned from rare gems, and that they come bearing ancient weapons to cleave aside the souls of the unjust. There’s even a cast metal statue in the center of Oldtown of a young girl with a large scythe and a small feranzanthum on her shoulder. The plaque beneath the statue says “Life,” and there’s a flowerbed around it with a couple of tiny machines that tend to them, day after day. I always thought that was an odd thing for it to have, really. After all, the Reapers are essentially the opposite of life. They kill everything, don’t they?

So when the young woman appeared there in the room out of nowhere, even though she didn’t have wings or a small animal draped over her shoulders, and was only holding a black parasol, I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. She looked a lot like the statue, but older, with hair the color of the clouds and eyes the color of the sky. But my eyes went straight to her forehead – right there, just above her eyebrows were a pair of purple gems, glowing faintly. I thought for a moment that they were ornamentations, like some of the Matrons wear in their ceremonies, but the gems were a part of her. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t believe it, but I couldn’t deny it: it was real. She was a Reaper.

She was staring at Marna when I noticed her, and looked slowly over to me. I’ve never seen that kind of expression on someone’s face before, nor have I since. It wasn’t sadness – not completely – but wrapped up in that sadness was a kind of strength and compassion that I suppose I should have expected on a Reaper, if I’d really believed in them or even thought about it. There was a part of me that kept trying to insist that I was so distraught that my mind was fashioning her appearance out of a hope for the immortality of the soul or somesuch – it continues even now, weeks later, struggling to convince the rest of me that I didn’t really see her.

But she spoke to me, and that was something else I hadn’t expected.

“She holds on to you,” she said to me. Her voice wasn’t this terrible, ground shaking noise; it was just the voice of a woman, touched by sorrow, filled by a tranquil sense that she was here to do what had to be done. “Her soul stays here because you won’t allow her to leave.”

“Me?” I stammered. “What do I have to do with this?”

The woman – the Reaper – closed the parasol and tucked it under her arm. She stepped closer to Marna’s side of the bed. “She has said her goodbyes to her family, but you… are something more to her, in your way. She is afraid to leave you. Afraid to hurt you.”

I looked back at Marna, whose eyes were filled with tears. She nearly didn’t look like herself – so wan and weakened, pale from the effort to hold on.

“You have to do it,” the Reaper whispered. “You have to allow her to go on.”

I didn’t know how, and I said as much. I couldn’t even see Marna now myself, for all the water that filled my vision.

Again the Reaper spoke to me. “It is not an easy thing,” she said. “It’s a moment you thought yourself prepared for, but now it’s here and you don’t think you can do it. You want to hold on to it forever. I understand that.”

I don’t know how long we stayed there, the Marna and the Reaper staring at me, with me unable or unwilling to let Marna go. It was probably only a few moments, but they felt like hours. I could only think of all the years we’d been friends, how she’d brought me back from the edge of my own destruction, and yet here I stood at the edge of hers, stubbornly refusing to let go. At what point do memories become just memories? When we live our life, the moments of the present always feel real, only to turn into illusions, dreams, thoughts. I felt like so long as I held her hand, Marna and our friendship would always be real, and I was afraid of it becoming something… less; becoming merely a memory.

I probably might have stayed like that forever, but then Marna spoke. It was soft, almost inaudible, just two words.

“It’s…okay,” she said. And just like that, I knew it would be.

While I lowered my head and let myself cry through it, the Reaper closed the last footstep between her and Marna, and a moment later I felt Marna’s grip release my hand. She was gone.

I glanced back up to the Reaper, who was looking compassionately at me. “She still lives,” she said softly. “I promise you, all spirits remain.”

Just like with Marna’s words, I found truth in them. Just like my father promised, I believed their words. And as I blinked my eyes, the Reaper disappeared, leaving me alone in the room with the body of my friend.

It has been a few weeks now, since then. We stood beside Tomas and their children as we watched the Matrons give Marna’s body to the sky in a ceremony I had once come to fear, but now felt a strange quiet calmness pass through me as I listened to their song.

Deeply from the shadow of the night we faithful cry,

Earnest to the Lords of Aerthos, Air and Sky:

Hear the constancy of hope which we do in silence shine

Surrendering to the sunrise in which governance is thine.

Slave away in night and day

Do we beneath the watchful sun;

While out of sight in the slumbering night

Lay the fallen, forgotten ones.

Give heed, oh skies above we pray all injuries be healed,

Protect us from the deep behind your armor and your shield.

Cast our weaknesses away, unto the wild and untamed lands

Until our souls atoned are claimed within the Shepherd’s hands.

Breathe and dream over iron and steam

Do we beneath the watchful sun;

While far past night and dreams and sight

Fly the risen, remembered ones.

Yesterday, as I was walking back from the market, I stopped in the old square beside the Reaper statue. It had been torn up on that day the Wall had come down, but it had been later replaced and was now framed by a ring of flowers that I had once found strangely ironic. I watched as one of the small Machines moved around the monument, carefully probing for weeds or insects. My eyes saw the face of the Reaper, mirrored painstakingly by the artists who had built it, and then lowered to the plaque at her feet.

Life, it read. Life is the most important thing.

I cried again, reading it. Not because it all clicked into place or because I was suddenly healed of my sense of mourning my friend. I cried because I believe. Because I know that her soul lives still, in that place where only the Reapers can go, into that world beyond our own. I believe it partly because I must, and partly because I choose to; but I also believe it because I believe Marna.

I still see her face wherever I go, I hear her laughter on the streets and turn without thinking, expecting her to be there, prepared to be cross with her for that most cruel of jokes. Zuan and our son mourn with me, for she was their friend as well, and each evening we find ourselves sitting together, talking, laughing, and when Marna’s laughter does not join in, we feel her absence, and we cry again.

And each time, I reach out, draw them into my arms, and whisper softly, “It’s okay.”

And, each time, it is, even if it’s just a little bit.