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The worn, well-used chairs and tables of the bar stood empty, no bustling people and raucous laughter bouncing through the stately wood panelled room. Yellowish lamps lit the only two people there; the bartender, wiping down glasses, and a traveller, dusty from the road. Outside, stagecoaches rattled by, but no one pushed through the swinging doors to the usually busy saloon.
“Why do you call this place The Valley of Dead Roses?”
The traveller sipped from a glass of amber liquid, wincing slightly at the taste, his dark gaze fixed on the bartender who kept a hat low over his eyes, obscuring them. The man tipped his head at the traveller, indicating he’d heard the question. The bar echoed with no other voices, no other customers clamoring for a drink.
The bartender’s raspy voice dragged an involuntary chill over the traveller as he chuckled humorlessly. “I’ll tell you the tale, if you’ve got a strong enough stomach for it.”
“‘Course I do.”
“If you say so.” The bartender smiled. His thin fingers dropped the half-clean glass he was holding onto the scratched bar and he reached back in time instead, grasping the floating thread of the legend, spinning it from the yarn of memory into the cloth of a story.
“Years and years ago this town shared its land with demons. Spirits. Spectres of punishment, life, speed, or magic, among others. But everyone knew Death, or came to know him eventually.”
The bartender still did not look the traveller in the eyes as his voice got colder. “You may hear ghost stories about cold imprints of departed souls here to terrorize the living. That isn’t what a soul is. A soul’s the thing that gives a body life, warmth, personality. That’s why you go cold when you die.
“Now, the roses..” He smiled. “When you died, Death left a rose. A red one for a life full of more goodness than evil, a black one for the other way around.”
The traveller interrupted sharply. “Black roses don’t exist.”
“You’re listening to a legend about Death himself. Do you think the color of the damn rose matters?”
The traveller shut his mouth and slumped in his chair, grasping his drink. “Yeah, alright. Go on.”
The bartender sighed. “The roses were an indicator, as well as one last sign to the dead man. It came as quite a shock to some families when they found their beloved father dead in a trap of black blossoms. From that point it was finding out what had made him so evil.” He chuckled grimly.
“Death collected souls whose time had run out. His physical form was frightening to behold: the figure of a clothed man strung over bones, sleeves too long to see the deathly fingers. But most terrifying of all was his head, a horse’s skull that glowed with an otherworldly light from the eyes.
“That was where he kept the souls he reaped, his skull. At midnight, he travelled deep into the desert and let out the souls who had been good in life, let them into the cosmos to become stars. As for the evil ones, he didn’t trust them enough to let them out. He trapped them in his hollow eye sockets, kept them close. In a bone prison just like the prison that had held them when they lived.
“The evil ones, of course, were livid. Only the evil fear Death, fear judgement, and their fear turns to fire. Death’s constant battle was keeping them in so as not to wreak havoc and corruption on the world, while keeping them out of his own consciousness.”
“Sounds demanding,” the traveller remarked. His eyes were a little sharper and he leaned forward, invested in the story now, though he tried to mask it.
The bartender took a breath. “Sure was.”
He grasped a glass on the table, absentmindedly tipping it on an angle and rotating it in a circle. The glass made an eerie, rhythmic noise against the worn wooden table. They sat in silence that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, but simply was. The traveller leaned back a little and looked down, taking a sip of his drink, waiting. The bartender broke the silence.
“Death fell in love once.”
The traveller looked up, eyes alight.
“His duties brought him to this town every day. Here lived a mortal, both beautiful and handsome, somehow, in his own way. He was as kind and gentle as a lamb, as fierce as a lion protecting those he loved. Someone who celebrated both Life while they had it and Death when it was given.” The bartender’s voice was little more than a whisper, a wistful, faraway gaze on his face.
“Death was not one to notice anything but the goodness, or lack of, in humans, but something about the mortal drew him in, like a spider pulling a fly into its sticky trap.” The bartender paused and shook his head. “No, no. Not like a spider. Like a magnet, both attracted and repulsed, was Death. His duty was to secure dead mortal’s souls, to keep captive the evil and to reward the good. Not to moon over someone he could never have.
“And yet, Death’s pull to the man became stronger and stronger. He was all he could think about. His resolve slipped. The wickedness inside of him began chipping away at their prison.
“At first, he could manage. Yes, he knew the mortal was there. Yes, he wanted him, his fierce loyalty and his gentle hand. When one spends their entire existence touching only cold, dead corpses, it is to be expected that they long for warmth. But to touch the mortal would be to kill him, and that Death could not bear to do before the man’s time was up. It would break him.
“The evil inside of him knew this, and they squeezed into his brain. They whispered.
‘To kill that mortal, would you not get just his body, but his soul for yourself?’
“It was not the mortal’s body he loved, but his kindness, his warmth, his respect. He kept this in his mind, but while the mortal lived he could not drive out the corrupt souls that sought to corrupt him. It was a sort of limbo, caught between a rock and a hard place.
“He didn’t know if he could last until the mortal died naturally, but to kill the mortal earlier may break him, so that the evil took him anyway. Death was the impartial judge; with a bias towards good came opportunity for evil.
“Did, then, he choose the temporary evil or succumb to it?”
The bartender forced a sigh from his nose. The traveller imagined his eyes downcast, deadened, but they were still covered by his hat, by shadow, in an almost unnatural way. This myth, this legend...that was all it was, wasn’t it? Why did he feel the heaviness of Death’s choices as if the spirit himself were telling the story?
“I suppose no one knew that answer but Death himself. When the townsfolk awoke in the morning they found a home filled with white roses, feeding off the husk that was no longer the mortal Death had fallen in love with.
“Death regained control over the wicked souls, but knew he had made a grave mistake he could never make again. He took his skeletal fist to his own face and shattered his mortal sight, cracked the empty eye socket’s rim.
“Not only did it shatter his view of the mortal world forever so he could be free from the temptation of any man who crossed his path, but it served as a reminder. The bone prison cracked so that if Death’s will ever weakened again, there would be little to stop the iniquitous from wreaking havoc.
“The villagers were enraged at Death, for they knew the mortal had gone before his time. They were afraid of the pale roses, which they had never seen before, and they grew hostile, terrified, and began driving away any spirits they saw. Death was supposed to be reliable, and humans are not prone to change. They drove the spirits out of their town, and the spirits haven’t been seen since.
“The Desert Witch, the Red Devil, the Wild Spirit, Death. Simply gone. Perhaps they’re still here, invisible, or perhaps they maintain their routines from afar. Perhaps they’re gone forever, or asleep. This is what the villagers speculate.
“I, however, know that they’re still here, waiting, hiding among the mortals until they can return. They carry out their jobs secretly because of Death’s mistake. He’s since repaid them, and been forgiven…”
The bartender tilted his head and smiled a little. A group of three entered the bar: a young, dark-haired woman, and a girl and a boy, different yet clearly siblings, laughing together.
The traveller twisted to glance at them and they stared at him with a grin, eyes flashing a little in the lamplight. Then they turned to the bartender and motioned with their hands. Come.
“Perhaps, here, you'll see some spirits, if you’re lucky.” The bartender growled with a beckoning sort of irony in his voice.
When the traveller turned back to him his eyes met the storyteller’s for the first time that evening.
They were the cracked, hollow eyes of Death.
The traveller blinked, and the four beings were gone.