As the Fault faded further into the distance, the land began to change from the heavy untouched forests of the Sect into wide open plains and farms fed from the river. With the growing season well underway, the fields bustled with vibrant greens and ducks in the paddies quacked back and forth, enjoying the feast of insects delivered to them by the lure of the growing rice underwater.

  And yet it was the vultures circling ahead that drew my eye. The scavenger birds flew high above, bare specks of black and pink, though it was as they descended in a slow, sweeping arc that their true size was revealed; each was the size of a grown man, with a wingspan longer across than the width of the gate entrance to the Main Compound. They possessed a fleshy jointed beak split into four parts, which alongside their prehensile tongue gave them an uncanny level of dexterity that they could use to slowly pick and peel apart their meals to get at the good bits.

  My home village called them pinchers. Seeing them on the horizon was as good as a promise that Death was on its way, and to see them dive to the ground meant that Death had already come. I had already grabbed Isabella’s hand to pull her along faster, in the vain hope that I’d be able to do something for the body, if not the poor soul that had once resided within it-

  The old man sprawled out on the ground as if they had tripped, his hat and hoe having fallen to the ground alongside him. A basket laid spilled out, filled with weeds painstakingly removed from the field. With his hand clawed into the dirt as if to push themselves back up, I could almost believe that he was about to stand once more. But the old man’s eyes, open and empty except for echoes of pain, put the lie to that.

  Surrounding the body were the pinchers, but they did nothing. They groomed themselves and each other, shaking off their wings and flexing their beaks outwards in a parody of a yawn, but not one took a step closer to the body. Instead, they waited patiently, staring at the body with beady eyes.

  Because someone was already there. Kneeling over the body, her hand over his. Slowly, she pushed off and returned to her feet. Standing at some five foot nothing, dressed in shorts and a shirt, and with a scythe held loosely, she whispered a few words, before bracing. Then, with a single sweep, it was done.

  Then, she turned, and Isabella blinked at me.

  “What.” I turned to Isabella at my side, who returned my own stare. “What?” I looked back to the body, now alone except for the pinchers that surrounded it. What?

  “Right.” Isabella chuckled. “You haven’t actually seen me do my work, have you?”

  “What?” I grabbed her by both shoulders, shaking her. “What!?” How? Why? You? Two!?

  “Okay, okay, enough.” Isabella shrugged my hands off. I didn’t resist, still too…lost. The avatar of Death itself continued, “You didn’t think I’d stopped working, did you?”

  “I…” I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about the possible consequences of Death deciding to go on holiday. I put my face in my hands and groaned. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  “It’s okay, you’ve been…reasonably distracted by other things,” Isabella reassured me, awkwardly patting my back.

  “Yeah.” I pulled my head up, staring at her. “Just a bit.”

  “Come on, then. Might as well tell you about it while we walk. We’ve still got a ways to go.” Isabella gestured back to the road we’d left. I nodded wearily, turning to follow-

  “Wait. No. Hang on.” I span back around, to the horde of pinchers that had slowly begun to approach the body, their knuckled beaks opening and tongues flickering out towards the body. “Okay, no.”

  I walked forwards into the pinchers, who squawked and cawed as I pushed through them. One angrily wriggled their beak at me, which I returned with a raised finger. “Go somewhere else if you want a damn meal,” I told them, leaning down to pick up the body.

  With the pinchers complaining but no longer advancing on their meal, I took a moment to roll the old man onto his back. I stopped for a moment as I considered his empty eyes, now looking up to the Heavens, and sighed. Wishing you all the luck in getting there, old timer. I reached out to close the man’s eyes, before hefting his body up into my arms. I looked back to Isabella. “There was a house on the river a mile back. We should go.”

  “Oh.” Isabella opened her mouth, before nodding with a sad smile. “Of course. Come on, then.” Isabella returned to the road, and I followed after her silently.

  Or mostly silently, heralded as I was by the pinchers following after me, still moaning and complaining. I gave them a glare as I held the body up a bit higher, hissing at one as it hustled closer to poke its beak at my backside. “Go away! Gods, this is the most persistent I’ve ever seen them.”

  “Probably has to do with your soul,” Isabella commented.

  “My soul? Agh, off with you, fucking bird!” A few more were beginning to get a bit closer now, curiously testing at my shins with their disturbingly fleshy beaks, the sharp beak-points emerging forth like overgrown nails. “Seriously, what do you mean by that?”

  “They see souls. You didn’t know?”

  I paused for a moment, the scavengers gathering closer around me as my step stuttered. “No. No, I did not know. How in the Hells do you know?”

  “Whenever I see some of them near a body, they’re always looking at the souls. I think they wait for the souls to depart.” Isabella smiled at one of the pinchers trying to fondle my leg. “Probably the most polite vultures I’ve ever seen.”

  I looked at the man-sized bird right in front of me. Its small black eyes stared back, beak letting out a small cluck of curiosity. It leaned in, beak drumming against my arm, and cried in slight outrage as I pushed it back. I looked around at the rest of the pinchers, who all stared with the gaze of a child confused as to why dinner was on the table but they couldn’t eat.

  I shuddered. “Fuck these birds. Let’s just go.” I pushed through the flock, who fell back into line as they waddled after me, cawing and clicking as their beaks yapped and snapped. I gave them one last glance, before turning pleadingly to Isabella.

  She caught my look, and nodded. “What do you actually think being Death entails?”

  “You collect the souls of the dead, and return them to the Cycle,” I said.

  “Do you ever wonder how that actually works?” Isabella lifted the scythe, running a hand up to its blade. “Death is natural. As much a part of the world as the ground beneath your feet, or the stars in the sky. You don’t question it, it just is.”

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  “So you deliver it?” I guess. “Or are you…part of it?”

  “I just am,” Isabella declared. “As soon as I picked up the scythe, I was…made part of Death. And now I’m here, and everywhere else too. ” She grimaced. “Everywhere there is death, at least.”

  As good as everywhere, then. I chuckled weakly. “I don’t suppose your boss listed lots of travel as a benefit?”

  Isabella just gave me a flat look. “Do you think I get to enjoy the view? Or that I get to take a break?” The scythe thudded into the ground. “Some asshole gave me all the power in the world, but I’m not a fucking cultivator, I don’t get to play around and do as I please. I don’t get to kill whoever dares spit in my direction, and then walk away from the consequences. I’m not a god, I’m a janitor who picks up the mess. And it’s all a mess.”

  “Right. Sorry,” I apologised. “It’s…not really a laughing matter, is it?”

  “I try to laugh about it. I know I do every time a cultivator self-combusts,” Isabella sighed. “But you get tired of it. And you get tired of being tired. But there’s always more work to do. I’m working right now, just as much as I ever have.”

  “And you really can’t stop?” I asked. “It’s…you stopped for me, didn’t you?”

  “You can see me,” Isabella stated. “That’s never happened. Ever. In ten thousand years. You’re…” Isabella floundered for a moment. “You’re the first person who’s talked to me in all that time.”

  “That’s-” I couldn’t help the nervous laugh. I remembered Isabella mentioning it before, how not even the greatest cultivators had ever been able to do so. Just the only person who has ever talked to the Reaper themselves, and it’s Ryan the failed disciple. No pressure.

  “And what do you think would happen if I stopped for everyone, Ryan? How many souls would be stuck here?” The scythe’s haft thudded into the road, again and again in an even rhythm as Isabella walked, her eyes fixed ahead. “How many? How many do I collect every year? How many, every day? How many, every second?”

  “It’s…unfathomable.”

  “For you,” Death countered, marching onwards. “But I remember all of them. That was Xing there. His heart gave out and he didn’t even realise it. His last thoughts were hoping that his wife had made barley soup. Before that I’d just collected Meiying from her bed, when that last cough killed her. And then I had to pull Quincy out from under that rockfall that crushed him and his cart, and a moment before that it was Piotr with an axe through his chest and Szymon with a knife through his.”

  “Isabella.” I shifted the body- Xing, onto my shoulders, reaching for Isabella as I jogged after her.

  Death kept moving. “Gwynedd, dead to a fall. Himawari, thinking she’s still dreaming. Nahuel, died to his namesake. Ambika, so happy that it’s finally over. Sindiwe and the daughter who never even took her first breath-”

  “Isabella.” I grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back. She didn’t respond, still staring off into the distance. I slowly took the scythe from her hand, tossing it to the ground where it clattered and bounced.

  Isabella didn’t pull away. She didn’t cry. She just sighed, her head drooping, arms at her sides. “Her child had died first,” Isabella said quietly. “Before Sindiwe passed, she told the midwife she wanted her girl to be named Kanyisa. Because if her little girl must join the spirits so soon, then she should do it with a name to light her way. And then…she joined her daughter.”

  I thought of home. Of the small farmhouse, with a window carved into the wattle and daub and covered with a crude wooden shutter. I remembered my father, so stern and serious, and my mother, so quick to lecture and even quicker to laugh. I remembered the guests who had passed through that home, and how none had ever stayed long enough to be introduced on their Nameday.

  I remembered the last time my father and I had held my mother as she cried.

  His name would’ve been Luke, she told me.

  I took a deep breath, holding it as I gripped Isabella’s shoulder and stared out at the sky above her head.

  “I’m so tired of it, Ryan,” she muttered. “It hasn’t been ten thousand years. It’s been each second of every minute of every hour of every damn day of those ten thousand years.”

  I swallowed, still staring over Isabella’s head to the horizon. “I hope you don’t take any offense if I say this, Isabella,” I managed to say, “but I truly, utterly despise death.”

  Isabella let out a single bark of laughter. “You and me and every last person in this world. And the good deaths are so far between that it never feels like it’s worth it.”

  And yet.

  “It is.” Isabella bit out. “Because any death is good when compared to the miserable, selfish existences that cultivators lead. They refuse to accept death, and can never understand the point of life. If I ever say it’s not worth it, then those bastards who have run rampant and killed their way to power would have been right, and I will die before I give them that honour.”

  Those who refuse to accept death. I’d heard that turn of phrase before, bandied about by Disciples who fancied themselves Elders. It was the point of being a cultivator, they said, to refuse the fate that the Heavens had planned for you, to be more than just a mortal servant. And if you weren’t ready to take control of your own destiny, then what worth were you? And then they would laugh and clink their glasses together, before moving on to gossip about their families and politics and whether their parents would increase their allowance.

  I thought of those cultivators, and the way they’d never struggled a day in their lives. Who’d been given everything they’d ever asked for, who lounged and lazed about, stomachs filled with Replenishment Pills and Imperial Blends. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel a hint of envy for them. All the riches in the world and they’d never done more than stagnate, like pigs wallowing in silks. Refusing death wasn’t the same thing as embracing life.

  “It’s worth it.” I wiped my eyes against my free shoulder, before resettling Xing once more. “For this alone, it’s worth it. Come on.”

  Isabella followed, as did the pinchers. Minutes later, we arrived at a small house with a window with no glass. From inside, I could hear a song so familiar to me, though the words were subtly different.

  I knocked on the door, and waited. The song stopped. “Xing? Is that you?”

  Isabella fiddled with her scythe, her face hidden by her hair. I squeezed her shoulder again.

  Eventually, the door opened, and a stooped old lady appeared. Her eyes narrowed at me, then widened again as she saw the body over my shoulder. “Oh. Oh, Xing. Oh, you fool, you damn fool, you twice-damned fool-”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” It was all I could muster. Except. “He was- he said to me, he wanted some barley soup.”

  The woman sobbed, and laughed. She hugged me, and I hugged her back.

  Under a tree not too far from the house, I dug a hole six feet deep, and laid Xing to rest. The old lady, Ren, told me that Xing was a damned fool who worked when it was too damn hot and when it was too damn cold, and that he’d done so for sixty summers and winters straight. She told me he loved her barley soup more than he loved her, that he was the finest man that the First Son had ever seen, and that she couldn’t wait for the day that she’d see him once more.

  We left the morning after, with a well-made bag filled with bread and a sealed pot of soup. Neither Isabella or I mentioned the lost day, or the pinchers that had begun to follow us. Instead, I hummed a song that reminded me of home, and started walking.