Time

Prologue 3

It was night. The winter air was crisp, almost biting, and cold. When Willow looked up, she could see the silver moon perched high in the starlit sky, with the blue moon right next to it. Willow looked at the baby in her eyes and fought to hold back tears. She had blown her chance of having her child become great and living a happy life. She walked with a shuffle in her step that showed the sadness within her soul.

She stepped within the clearing in the forest where a fire was burning in the middle. It was glowing blue, and a tall man in a cloak stood next to it, waiting. Oh, how she hated him! He had taken her son away from her and had smiled like it was the best day in the world. She now stepped like her closest friend had betrayed her. In this case, that friend was Fate. She walked up to the man in the cloak and held out her hands. In them was a boy with dark brown hair and dark green eyes the shade of a treetop. The long, thin fingers of Death lifted from his body and to the baby. Death took the baby with ease from Willow's arms and pulled it to his body. He took one finger and touched it to the boy's forehead. The boy's hair turned as black as a starless night and his eyes became such a bright shade of blue that they seemed to glow. Willow gasped as she felt the great waves of energy that emanated from the small boy. It stopped as instantaneously as it had started and the child's hair and eyes turned back to their original colors.

'Wha-what did you do?" Willow asked the cloaked horseman in an estranged voice.

"I put my mark on him. He now is my child. He still retains your appearance, but his soul has been marked for life. It now marks him as Son of Death." Death answered in an ethereal voice within Willow's frail mind.

Willow became frightened at the prospect that her son's soul had been altered to be completely different.

"How could you do such a thing to someone else's child!?!" Willow screamed at Death, her motherly care suddenly taking over.

"But don't you remember?" Death said, "It is my child. I won him in a card game."

Willow, when subjected with the memory of losing her child to an emotionless pile of bone and duty snapped. She screamed and screamed until her throat became bloody with anguish, then she opted to scratch at her face until her hands were as bloody as her throat. She coughed, spitting a globule of blood to the ground and continued screaming in her hoarse voice. Death tried to access Willow's mind, finding it blockaded by pain, anguish, and loss. He touched his finger to her forehead and forced her to see what she was doing to her child. The boy was frightened, shocked mentally by the sudden display of emotion.

"Now go, Willow."

And with that, Willow was gone. The only evidence of her presence a child in Death's arms, and a puddle of blood on the floor.