It is like this: Reapers of new deaths are born when they first occur. If that death is rare enough, their following existence can be quite boring. And nothing is more horrible to an immortal than boredom.
It passed the time, and it was a comfort - not only to her, while she waited patiently for the call of her domain, but to those for whom the call never ceased.
Her mother was the Reaper of Drowning. She changed shape like the liquid that former her body - small and innocent, three inches of death in an unsupervised kiddie pool - enormous and mindless and roaring, crashing waves upon a great lake during a November storm.
After the rip tides had exhausted another unwary swimmer, she was exhausted too. And her daughter was there with gingersnaps, sharp against the tang of salt water.
The daughter made her own brown sugar, and her own rum, and rolled crumbled cookies into balls that warmed and comforted until her mother had quite forgotten that she, too, was a harbinger of death. The Reaper of Alcohol Poisoning eyed her homemade rum appraisingly and seemed to grant her a weary respect, at least. But brown sugar is very hard to fear. Certainly harder by far than the sea.
Her father was the Reaper of Workplace Accidents. Many were fast. Lightning-fast. Immediate, painless if you’re lucky, disfiguring and disabling for life otherwise. He was a steady being, not as changeable as her mother. He spoke firmly, as so often he needed to convince those he guided that they had, in fact, died. There. Look. There is what is left of you, caught in the gears. I’m sorry. Come with me. Few words, and quick ones - the slow deaths he hated, clothing caught in machinery, fate looming for dreaded seconds or even minutes.
His daughter was slow. She crept to him with a treacle tart once, after a pressure explosion had flattened a factory. Those were his favorite. The explosions, not the tarts - quick and done with and with minimal suffering, at least for the dead. He told himself it was because he did not like treacle that he turned down his daughter’s baked gifts, but as she rolled towards him, inch by sweet inch, he could only ever turn and flee with the swiftness of pressurized steam from that horrible sickly dread. She sighed.
Her uncles, the Reapers of Lava and of Pyroclastic Flow, were married one summer. They were scoffed at, for their deaths were so rare they had the time to indulge in such frivolties. What is a Reaper who has no job to do? Never mind how terrible their jobs, when done. Never mind that the latter uncle’s eyes were ash-gray and haunted by the thousands of souls he shepherded from St. Pierre, from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
She baked their cake, a towering thing of spices and chocolate, and went about the after-party nearly unnoticed. Slow, creeping, and without a death to her name since that which birthed her. The guests who saw her called her sweet, and forgot entirely what she was.
The former uncle drew her aside after the wedding, thanked her for the cake, put a hand on her shoulder and told her:
“We move faster than they think, you and I.”
In 1906, Vesuvius erupted again, and she went with her uncles to Naples. With one hand she helped the Reaper of Lava pull spirits from where they were trapped behind the flow. With the other, she offered them a plate of cookies, rich and well-spiced. She saw how quickly her uncle’s element could overwhelm. She stared at her flour-dusted hands and for the first time, saw how one day she might be needed. So she practiced, running to outpace destruction, plunging those hands into liquid horror to draw out flickering souls and cradle them.
Sometimes she was noticed, and mocked: “This is not your domain, little baker. You are too harmless to deal in such things. You are too sweet. Keep to your sugars and spices and do not pretend you understand death.”
It was thirteen years later that she would feel the call, would pull 21 souls to peace with those hands, would outrace a flood too viscous for her mother to wrangle and too slow for her father to bear.
Today still she bakes, for she does not expect to be called again for some time.
But when she is, rest assured, the Reaper of Molasses will answer.
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
snowghoul
janainaart
