Chapter Text
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it. - Haruki Murakami
The story of Lady Death is not one with a happy ending. There is no magical resolution, there is no Prince climbing a tower, no kiss that saves a life, and definitely no running off into the sunset. The story of Lady Death is a story of death. In that vein, this story could be considered a tragedy, because it was prophesised, from the moment of conception, to end that way.
Though, maybe we should start at the beginning – if there is one.
What is a beginning? The moment the stars blink into existence? Or when a gas cloud becomes a planet? Or, perhaps, it is that moment they now call the Big Bang. When the Universe expanded due to high density and temperature. When suddenly there went from being nothing to being something.
One thing most religions can agree on is that when the Universe first comes into existence, it is quiet.
There are creatures moving around, ones that Lady Death must attend to. She watches through passive eyes as the world develops rapidly before her: thousands of years blending. Microbes to invertebrates and vertebrates. She watches the trial and error of the evolution of mammals – coming from the sea and suffocating to slowly developing the ability to be on land.
There are those few though who don’t change. Who barely notice it pass by them. Those are the ones she finds the most interesting – the fish deep in the sea who sink further away from the rest as time passes, the mammals that lay eggs and appear to be from both land and water. When they die, they are the ones she is most careful with.
Yet, she does not bother to learn their names, because at that point there were none. Language was fickle, there were other ways to communicate. Communication never needed to just be spoken word, but could be movement and gesture, sounds that may not seem to have meaning but carrying everything.
It wasn’t as though Lady Death needed to communicate. She was not a physical being, but one of spirit and thought. A whisper in the wind as one passed in the night, or the sharp pain of broken bones before succumbing to the loss of blood.
Later, she will refer to this time as the age of silence. Not because it is silent; no, the creatures that roam the Earth emit sounds, their feet rustle in the grass and thunder still crashes in the sky. But silent because there is not the sound she will later come to find endearing. There is no conversation, no crying, fighting. There is only the sound of life living for the moment, no worries about what the future will hold.
The world continues to evolve in front of her eyes. Those low-lying creatures become larger, first evolving into rhynchosaurs and cynodonts; and then getting bigger until they become what will later be known as dinosaurs.
It is also the first time that Lady Death finds herself intrigued by the creatures. Instead of passively watching as she always had, she watches more closely. The way they interact with each other, the way some go towards the tall leaves, others the low-lying fruit. Some attack their own species, using the smaller creatures for substance. She watches how they communicate, how they care for their young.
In this time, she notices the other creatures too. The small ones in the water or that can hide beneath the foliage. How the smaller ones adapt to avoid the larger, the prey avoiding attack when it is inevitable.
Lady Death watches so much, that her own work begins to sideline. Spirits start to pile up, so much so that when she notices there seems to be ripples in time itself. The fabric of reality starts to tear until she is there to patch it up with wayward souls and their sinew and bones. These creatures have no names but that does not mean they are any less important – and she finds that her time tending to them takes her longer and longer. The longer she is gone, the more the dinosaurs evolve.
At least, they did.
She wasn’t on earth when it happened. A massacre on Mount Olympus calls her away. And when she comes back, it takes her a moment to notice the destruction.
A meteor smashing its way into the delicate surface of the earth. Fire across the lands, creatures hiding away from the worst of it in dug outs and the water. It’s a white noise almost indescribable, the roaring of flames and the putrid smoke it creates.
The biggest thing she notices though, in those moments, was the lack of the large creatures. The dinosaurs are gone, bones left behind sinking into the earth. Lady Death watches, her own form shuddering at the mass amounts of carnage left behind.
Her powers, what would later be considered magic and will thus be called such, pour out of her. The green whisps curling around the singed tissue and bones, pushing them into the ground and bringing new coverage – green grass and trees – from it, untouched by the burning around them.
In those moments she feels something. Something she isn’t supposed to feel because Lady Death does not feel. She does not know what this is though, the staggering breath and the chill as she stares out at the land that once had houses the creatures, she had grown fond of.
There and then, she created the first rule: Death was never allowed to become attached to living things, because all living things died and there was nothing she could do about it.