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There are a hundred petty psychopomps making their living by being the hand holding the sickle, a thousand scurrying hungry things that make their meal robbing casket and tipping cradle, a countless hoard of spirits that each bearing the moniker of the End of All Things.
But she cares not a whit for any of them. She does not trouble herself to learn all the names of all the things that have been, are, and will be Death because she knows that the only things that matter, the only things that mean anything at all, come in sets of three.
She had been something else when she came to such an understanding, something less, something insubstantial, nothing more than steam in the wind.
So, she doesn’t concern herself with the squabbling and quarreling of the legion, the politics, and the affairs. She knows that the only three psychopomps who mattered were the three that stood at the crossroads between what was and what would be.
And she has worked very hard to ensure she’s one of those three.
Because the Queen of the Clouds knows there are really only three kinds of death, three kinds that matter, three kinds that stick.
She is the hopeful death, and they are all stubborn, sudden, or young. Innocent to the point of unknowing, naive, and occasionally, deeply, endlessly, religious.
The Harvest Lord’s domain is the contented death, the peaceful death for those who’ve made their peace with death. The death of the aged and ancient who’ve had time to barter for their lives, the death of the suicide who welcome death in the door, but more often than not, the death of the crook, the criminal, the deviant that makes the choice that dooms them to the hangman’s noose. The dual death of the outcast and the innermost fold of society, the strange union between those gone too soon and those who go too late.
The Beast is the hopeless death. And he is a terrible and greedy thing, for his is the death of halves, the death of body, or the death of soul, and he will snatch his quarry up, regardless of if the other half intends to go on living. He is the death that encroaches in wasting diseases, in starvation, in freezing.
The Beast’s death is not a dramatic one. It’s barely a death at all. She doesn’t even feel the moment fire slips away and becomes smoke. She only notices in the moment she reaches out, expecting to feel him, and finds he is not there. The firmament of clouds that give her figure collapses apart the very second her touch meets nothing where something should be.
She comes to Pottsfield in a deluge, but she isn't quite sure if she sent it here or if the Harvest Lord whipped it up all on his own.
She doesn’t have the politeness to offer a greeting.
“Is he yours?” She asks and her voice is thin as a smear of stratus across the sky.
The maypole’s ribbons might have whipped about in the gale had they not been plastered into the mud by the rain. She wants him to nod so badly it rattles the sky with a quiver of thunder, but she knows from the moment he tips his head up to regard her, fabric framed unnervingly like a smile that he won't.
And worst of all, he knows from her question that she doesn’t have their mutual acquaintance either.
That’s what haunts her after the Beast’s death, not his ghost, but the spectre of the death itself.
She doesn’t know what kind of death it was, and it rolls in her chest like the angry crests of dark clouds.
Was it swift? Did his Lantern go out in a breath instead of guttering to the starvation he endlessly endured? Should she have sought out his soul to add to her chorus?
Was it anticipated and unfeared? Had living so long upon the precipice of being unmade forced him to accept the end long before it had come? Had he faced it glibly, defiantly? It seemed so like him, to make sure whatever happened to him, she could not have what was left of him after. Would the Harvest Lord pull up some strange corpse from his fields? Would he grow a poison tree in his orchard?
Or did he die like his prey, afraid, hopeless, dreading the end that had been inevitable from the very first moment he passed his Lantern into mortal hands? Who had claim of him then? Was he still, in some stubborn, impossible way, his very own?
She tortures herself asking, guessing, wondering, endlessly afterwards.
The Queen of the Clouds knows there are only three fates for souls, because, really, there are only three ways for a story to end.
To be reborn, remade, boiled down to something so quintessential, so mutable as a soul, and shaped into something new. This is her undertaking, her sacred duty, to hold that which is and make it into something that will be. She is a wish granter, a fairy, a godmother. She is a scouring cloth, wiping away sorrow, a blessing, returning innocence to those who have too soon lost it.
To endure, to live again, rising from the dead to dance, bones and fables and seeds that sleep beneath the earth, wrapped tight around memories of the sky. Enoch is the death that does not end, the death that is only a part of living, the death that does not destroy.
But there was a fate that the endless immortal part of her rebelled against, not so much a fate, as simply an ending. It wasn’t in her nature, it wasn’t in theirs. Mortals spent their whole lives raging against it, clawing for any sliver of eternity, new or old. To be forgotten, to disappear, to be consumed, destroyed. Devoured.
It was unspeakable, unthinkable, the oldest fear of an ancient earth.
But he was perfect among all creatures to execute it.
Hungry. Bottomless. Starving.
He was made that way, or maybe that was the way all things began, and he was simply the only thing that had endured.
He was a fire first. Before he was a tree or a song or a beast, he was a fire flickering in the well of an iron lantern. He was a fire, and fire destroyed, burned that which lived down to charcoal, then burned that too, scouring souls from the earth to feed himself, vanishing children within his flickers of fragile flames. He was a sower of the forest just as much as he was its scourge.
Perhaps he ate himself, in that final moment, swallowed his own tail and vanished from existence, devoured and destroyed and leaving nothing more than a smear of ash lost somewhere in her own endless winds.
The Harvest Lord finds the body first.
In truth, she doesn’t think to look for one.
That was the domain shared by he and the departed.
He is unusually glib when he regales her with this fact, delighted to the point of being unseemly. But all psychopomps had strange feelings on death, and his were stranger than most. It had never disturbed him to the degree she felt it should that their mutual acquaintance was not simply a death but an unmaking.
The Harvest Lord invites her to see the Lantern, with a humor rumbling deep in his ribcage of corn roots.
She dresses herself in storm clouds. She is attending a funeral.
He wears his mourning black, his catskin’s fur, and with it, he wears a grin, sharp as the blade of the moon.
But he’s never believed in funerals, he barely believes in death. It’s all a grand wake to him.
Seeing the Lantern nearly stops her heart.
The Lantern is nothing , a hunk of metal and mortal handiwork. Neither divine nor arcane, it’s nothing but a bauble the departed had carried for all of living memory. It wasn’t the Lantern that had made the soul it carried what it was, there was nothing that set it apart from any other rail lantern but its contents. It had been special, only by merit of what it carried.
Without the soul inside to light it from within, it should be a carcass.
It should be unlit.
It glows in the Harvest Lord’s loft, though its well is empty and its wick long gone.
She gets closer to it than she has ever before been allowed, just to see, just to prove that there is no flame inside.
It is empty.
Except for the light. Like the afterimage of the sun it’s still burning, still throwing back the endless dark.
She’d always wondered if he’d been a little more like her than he let on. If he was a storm in a lantern, a lightning strike pinned behind glass. There’s a part of her now that wants to touch it, to taste it, to see if his fire tastes anything like hers, like it came straight down from heaven, like it had to split the sky to get here. She doesn’t. She doesn’t know how she would reconcile it if it did, she doesn’t know how she would if it didn’t. She doesn’t know if she can bear to learn anything more about him now that he’s gone.
The Harvest Lord says something, his tone rich with humor, but she doesn’t hear it over the wind whipping around her head in an agitated crown.
She can feel his reverence like a warbler’s song pinned between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.
It’s so strange to see the Lantern hanging off a post in the Harvest Lord’s loft, like an ordinary lantern. In truth, she thought he might have buried it. She would have.
If she had been like him. If she had been born beneath the earth, if she saw sky only when she was reaching up through roots, if she had loved the Lantern and all that it had carried. She would have buried it, tucked it close to her bosom forever.
The Harvest King doesn’t have funeral rites, his town doesn’t erect memorials, he doesn’t mark his graves.
She wants to contest his claim to the Lantern. She’s not sure why, what the feeling of dread so deep and black that twists around a coil of lighting in her stomach has formed from. She’s not sure why the slate of white within the Lantern’s mouth compels her so, why its blackened iron makes the nerves she doesn’t have burn to touch. She doesn’t know, and thrashes like the storm inside her chest.
But they don’t know what kind of death it was, and so they must defer to mortal laws on this regard, and he’s got a much better claim to next of kin than she does.
But still, she stares into the endless well of light and wonders what it means to become smoke in the wind.
There are three ways to live forever.
Three immortalities.
All of them terrible.
To be a parasite. To live the life that belongs to something else, moving through a body taken by force, ever seeking new bodies, ever trying to translate between the true self and the borrowed one, ever pretending.
The Harvest Lord grins at her from behind the catskin’s eyes.
To be a ghost. Moving through the world without touching it, exerting force on it like an ephemeral mirage, to be a whisper on the breeze, a stirring in the air and a prickling on one’s neck. To be unable to stop anything, to haunt everything. Only able to touch the things that are exactly as real, wishes, dreams, stars.
She’d been able to touch him. When the sun was bright, and the birds chirped cheerily, and no one could think of winter or hunger or fear, she’d been able to reach out and feel the oil-matted stiffness of his fur prickling against her skin. She could have landed, wrapped in feathers, and set her feet upon the twisted wood of his antlers, could feel the shift of bark and woodgrain beneath her fingers when she touched his cheek, dipped her fingers in his shadows, and stirred them, perhaps even pulled them aside if she’d tried hard enough.
She so rarely did.
She’d touched him fewer times than she had primaries on one wing.
She hadn’t been able to at night. When the moon was high and the darkness thick as brambles. He was too real at night, when travelers quaked beneath their tents and mothers held their children closely against their breast.
Her fingers pass through the handle of the Dark Lantern when she reaches for it.
She doesn’t reach for it again.
“Will you ever stop wearing your mourning colors?” She asks, even though she knows his fur was black long before dying was a thing they did.
“I think it’s customary to mourn half the time you knew them.” The Harvest Lord says, and he doesn’t imply, because the Harvest Lord never implies anything he can get away with simply saying, but she knows, suddenly, that Enoch will never mark an end to his knowing the Beast, will never bury his carcass, will never let what’s left of him die.
Only half of forever will be long enough for him.
She’d always thought he’d bargained for the worst share of immortality. That his forever had been lesser, shorter, than hers or the Harvest King.
A corpse. Soulless and empty and dead in every sense of the word that mattered except the one that didn’t. His body was only a husk, animated by a self-inflicted necromancy, wood which grew and strained towards the sun, which could not draw up life through its roots and so withered and rotted and decayed, and fed itself on its own festering bark.
He’d clawed out his own soul, rent it from the rest of himself, hollowed out of himself what was all of her, all of the Harvest King, all of every human that had ever lived.
A body without a soul is not alive. A body that is not alive cannot die, cannot be dead.
It can only be dying.
Endlessly.
But she is quickly learning there is another way to live forever.
To be a song, sung forever. To be a superstition, handed down like a resemblance. To be a story, that never ends.
It doesn’t matter how long the woods are silent. It doesn’t matter how many years pass beneath her hands, how many dozen moons since a strain of opera stirred the trembling leaves, someone is always singing, someone is always humming, someone is always tapping a tune, drumming it back into the woods with their fingers.
The voice that sung lullabies for all the babes without a mother, that sung serenades for all the youths without a lover.
Even those who never heard him sing, heard his song dripping from the lips of another.
The notes are different, the meter changed, the lyrics grown fuzzy and warped with age, but she still turns her head, still falls like a star from the sky, to find that what is dead, has not really died.
The fire dies, but the light never fades.
The song dissipates, but the echo never ends.
And at night, when the wind is loud and the ground is cold and the moon is weak and watery, he’s still real.
Still real enough to keep them huddled in their homes, still real enough to make children quiver in their beds, still real enough that travelers keep themselves to the paths. He’s still real enough that they don’t dare to venture into the dark without a lantern in their hands, still real enough they gather their children close and warn them of his wrath.
She does not hope, because hope is real, hope is tangible, hope passes right through her hands.
She does not hope because he’d devoured it, sunk his teeth deep into her, and swallowed it whole.
She does not hope because hope is a bloody thing, a thing with a pulse, a thing with bones, and she is a thing with neither.
She does not hope because she’d long been in the habit of seeing that he starved.
She does not hope because she is so long out of practice.
She simply knows.
Like a song she’s never heard, like a melody she can't stop humming, she knows, that one day, she’ll meet him again.