Death's Apprentice

There are only three times in my profession when I am to take an apprentice, someone to inherit my power and the responsibility of being who I am and doing what I do.

Although an apprentice will never truly use their power, only parts of it, until their master and mentor dies, they still play the most important role in ones life.

The first one is the most simple one, when someone wishes to retire they must take as many years out of their life to teach their apprentice their way.

The second is when the mentor is dying, or his or her power is waning, there is little choice in this situation. Take an apprentice, or go to the most high ranked Gods for power.

The third is the rarest, which only happens every million of so years, it has happened only once in my time and even then I didn't need one.

The time when the whole balance, where everything inside of our domain, is at threat. One has no choice here, there is a complex system where an apprentice is chosen as soon as the threat starts to arise. As soon as this threat begins to bubble, the apprentice starts to feel drawn to the location of the mentor and master. For the master there my be a sign, even the High Gods coming to point out the apprentice, but most of the time the Master finds the Apprentice.

This time it was the other way around.

The apprentice, a young boy who was half way into a normal teenage life, who works a normal paper round, suddenly felt drawn to the old house, a white paint-chipped house with a brown roof that appeared to missing many parts. The house had a somehow nicely trimmed path, bushes crowding each side and trees blocking the view to the back of the house, that led up to the door with a large skull knocker resting silently against its holder.

Even though many people had rumors about this house, that no one really lived in it, that it was haunted and the person who lived there is old and cranky and ate children for breakfast, it was an entirely different story, and the boy felt compelled to walk up to it.

The story with my life is I never liked it, every day since I had been created I had lived in a gloomy swamp, watching each full moon as the Gods gathered in a meadow with flattened patches of grass where everyone sat. It was only one day when I made the choice to stop living in the Other Realm and come to Earth, where I had seen so many times people thriving until I drew them up and cast them on their path.

For two million, five thousand and forty one, six hundred and eighty eight years I had lived on this dirt rock. Nobody had disturbed me in my work, I had lived a normal human life over and over again while watching the humans come out of their caves, crawling with fear in their eyes, to standing on two legs. All the way to the beginning of electricity, something that fascinated me the first time I saw it.

I had never expected to be interrupted so suddenly, going through my files and double checking the daily area, some odd deaths had started. People blamed it on a new sickness, but going over the symptoms didn't make any sense, they were all different, not relating to one another.

During this time a loud knocking erupted on the other end of the house, I hadn't heard it at first until the second knocking, scaring the death out of me.

I never knew that the High Gods would call upon me, Death, for help.