Chapter 4: 4 | You and me

All the world’s a stage,

and all the men and women, merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

 

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In the frosty daylight, the eerie silence amplified my heavy footsteps through the debris-strewn street. 

Along the way I passed signs of lives once lived plaguing every corner of this uninhabited city—rusty vehicles abandoned in the middle of the road, old signboards creaking sullenly in the wind, broken doors sighing on their hinges. The late afternoon sun was beating down as I approached a building which looked to be in better shape than most. The big red cross hung dismally above the blockaded entrance. 

“So this is where they put all the corpses,” I muttered, looking at the indiscriminate mounds of dead bodies strewn on the gravel. Those at the bottom layer were zipped up in body bags, but it seemed like the clean-up crew didn’t have enough for everybody and unceremoniously threw the rest on top of one another. They probably didn’t have time to burn the piles before succumbing to the poison themselves. And I haven’t been claiming souls since the armageddon began, so all of these bodies should still have their threads of life intact. 

I slowly examined the pile closest to me. The bodies still appeared mostly fresh, likely because they couldn’t decompose naturally. Their glassy eyes stared blankly at me, as though they could see past my mask of calm. That thought unsettled me somewhat. 

I shook my head instinctively to clear my troubled mind. Focus on the immediate stuff first. I got to connect my levenslied with hers through the orb . And to do so, I needed as many threads of life as I could gather to harness her levenslied.

But threads of life are a fickle thing to collect. Just one wrongly-positioned flick of the tip of my scythe can easily snap a thread, and if I don’t reclaim it in time, the snapped thread will remain in the world in the form of a ‘ghost’, as humans call it. Usually it’s harmless to leave them be, but sometimes they can cause trouble to people who are more sensitive and I have to deal with the ensuing mess. 

Right now, the piles of bodies in front of me are my only hope at fulfilling my promise to her. I began pulling bodies out from the nearest pile and laying them face-up in a straight row. Forcing my hands to be still, I carefully aimed my curved blade at the neck of a grey-haired woman and slashed downwards. 

The cut was so sharp that her neck appeared unblemished as before. I slowly retracted my scythe, and there, hanging from the curved tip of the gleaming blade, was a silvery thread. It was so thin that it appeared just as invisible as a fine speck of dust, yet there is an unmistakable weight to it.

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The weight of a human soul. 

I’d heard that a man tried to measure its exact weight once. He came up with the number of twenty-one grams, and though that number is meaningless to me, I can’t help but wonder, what can drive a man to measure something as intangible as the soul? The limitless imagination and curiosity of her creations never fail to astound me.

While I was pondering over the number twenty-one, I had gotten through three more bodies. At the rate that I’m currently going, it would probably take me a month or two to finish my collection. I doubt that I have such patience left in me, so I decided that one hundred threads would recover enough of my power for my purpose.

Not long after the sun had set over the city, I finally collected the hundredth thread and hummed a levenslied to twine them all into one long thread. In the darkness of the night, the thread shone a soft, silvery light, reflecting the splendour of one hundred lives to my eyes. The air, brimming with the potent power of life, shimmered around it as if with heat. 

This was it. This thread, made purely from her threads and my levenslied, was going to be the connection between me and her orb. I could only hope that the connection could withstand the inherent repulsion between our powers.

After all, Life and Death are two sides of the same coin—but are forbidden to meet on the same side. 

Life has disregarded that one rule by entrusting her power to me. Now I can only hope that her levenslied will accept me as her replacement.

Steeling myself, I held the orb together tightly with one end of the thread while linking the other end to myself. I had braced myself before making the connection, but still a wretched cry escaped from my gritted teeth as a searing flash of pain burned into my hands. The orb was hot—unimaginably scalding hot, as if I was touching the sun itself—then abruptly it became frigid, so cold to the point that my fingers froze around it. Suddenly it grew sharp jagged spikes which venomously tore into my flesh and ripped apart my tendons; the next moment, it emitted a blood-curdling screech that pummelled my eardrums and pierced into my head. 

The orb did everything in its power to reject my touch—and the waves of sheer agony it sent crashing into the deepest echelons of my mind nearly blacked me out. Fighting to stay on my feet, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to search for a song within it. 

Her song. 

The heavy air began to stir; the brittle earth shifted beneath my feet. I could hear soft susurrations of the wind from over the desolate lands and undulant seas, swelling, gathering and condensing around me. I felt the orb pulsing faintly in my trembling hands, almost as if I was grasping a newborn heart. 

Then, everything stilled. The intense emotions twisting and swirling inside me soothed to a lull. 

I took in a shaky breath and opened my eyelids. The orb had become greyish in colour, its previous iridescent colour and pulsing energy nowhere to be seen.

Her power, however little, was now a part of mine. 

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