Death and the Emperor

Bonus Chapter: The Undiscovered Country

Author's Note: Originally this bonus chapter was to describe how Death became so involved with Kilan's family. But when I wrote it, Death had other ideas, and it basically became a "day-in-the-life" story. Only not really a day, since it takes place over thousands of years, or a life, since it's all about Death with all the associated dying. It's still got some references to Kilan's family, but it went off in unexpected directions.

...the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns...
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The old man's breaths grew slower and more laboured. Death stepped through the veil between her world and the mortal world, scythe and hourglass in hand. She took no notice of the man's family gathered around his bed. All her attention was on his hourglass. There were only two grains left in the top half. They fell. The man's breath stopped. Death swung her scythe, and his soul slipped from this world into hers. His hourglass vanished as if it had never existed.

She turned to leave, and found herself confronted with a small child sitting at her feet.

The little girl looked up at her with the fearless curiosity of a mortal too young to understand what – or who – they were looking at. There was nothing unusual about that. Other than the dying, children were the only mortals who could see her. But Death stopped and looked at this child more closely than she usually looked at children.

At this time, the planet Niorla was a mass of warring tribes. The last great empire to spread across the planet had crumbled five hundred years ago, and the next had not yet risen. But Death knew it would, and she knew who would build it.

The girl at her feet was only a two-year-old brought to her grandfather's death-bed. But she would become a priestess, and then a conqueror, and then an empress. She would take the world and reshape it in her image.

Death looked at the girl who would found the Carann Empire and the Caranilnav dynasty. The girl smiled at her. Death smiled back, and gave her a bow before leaving.

~~~~

All through the vast universe, Death and her Reapers gathered souls tirelessly. One day Death was collecting the souls of sacrificial victims on the planet Jik-Diothuz. The next she was walking among the wounded on a battlefield in Renchis. The day after that she went to Totukvam to collect the last living member of a once-great civilisation.

Sometimes her travels took her to Niorla, and the descendants of the little girl she had once bowed to.

And sometimes they took her to Earth.

~~~~

One sunny Saturday in August, a town was ripped apart by a bomb planted outside a café. Death walked through the burning wreckage, unseen by the firemen, the police and the survivors. She raised her scythe, and a man ceased to cry in agony. Again she raised her scythe, and three souls left the mortal world at once. A mother and two children, who would never return from their shopping trip. Death moved on.

Some of her Reapers, who had once been mortal and still saw the world from a mortal perspective, begged to hunt down and kill the people responsible for such atrocities.

"No," Death said every time they raised the subject. "Everyone dies. You may torment them to your heart's content once they are dead, but do not touch them while they live."

As she left the smoke-filled ruins and returned to her own realm, she thought of how much longer the criminals had to live. Some of their hourglasses had almost run out. Their arrival would give the Reapers some amusement, at any rate.