I quickly recognized it as Mars of the Earthly Dimension. Death had been there, on Mars, bare feet sinking into the crimson sands. She walked among the dead, their souls wandering the emptiness that had once been their homes. I watched her through the World Crusher’s eyes as she touched the lost spirits with Thieron, turning each one into brilliant wisps of light before they vanished into the realm beyond.
“Soon, I began to feel like I was ready to do this,” the World Crusher wrote. “To do what Death had been doing for so long. I was ready to guide souls into the next world. It was an honorable duty, something I’d had trouble understanding the value of for many years. Without having lived myself, my conceptions of life and death were theoretical, at best. But after plentiful observation and detailed study, I sensed that I’d acquired a certain taste for it. A grasp of things, if you will.”
For a second, I had the feeling she was talking directly to me—that this wasn’t just a standard text. It was as if the World Crusher had crafted these pages for me. Around me, a strange new world unraveled away from the earthly plane. It was somewhere in the In-Between. It was like a movie playing, showing me the things that had happened prior to my emergence. The Fire Star glowed in the distance, red against the black sky. A brilliant ball of fire, Sanctuary of the blazing fae.
“Death made me a scythe,” she continued, and I saw the weapon in my slender hand as if it were my own. It was a splendid piece, with a short handle and a long, curved blade. Made entirely out of steel, the scythe had deep dark veins of obsidian going up the handle and along the sharp edge of the blade. Whenever the light struck, the veins seemed to come alive, pumping black fuel through the length of it. “It was strange, but I fell in love with this object.” I could see why she’d think that. It seemed like the perfect illustration of what the end of everything might look like. “It made sense to me,” the World Crusher wrote. “I felt it like an extension of myself. And when I took hold of it for the first time, Death asked me what my name was.”
I saw her standing before me with her ink-black hair and cherry lips, smiling with motherly love. I wanted to feel the warmth that the first Reaper felt, but I was furious.
“The name came to me almost like a dream. It was what my scythe looked like. A weapon that would bring entire worlds to their knees,” she added. “Of course, such horrors were never my intention. But the name… it felt mine. The World Crusher. The harbinger of doom and eternal sleep. I would help souls cross to the other side, but I never saw myself as a celestial and serene creature.”
Death left her to do what she had been made to do. In this world, a species of fae appeared before me. It didn’t take long for me to recognize their silky white hair and lilac or mint green eyes. Their strange white pupils. The World Crusher had been assigned one of the realms of the soul fae.
“She thought I should start small,” the Reaper wrote in her pages, and I almost heard the nib scrawling across the paper, leaving trails of swirling and sometimes crooked black ink behind. “These creatures had wondrous powers. They could bend the spirits of others—the wills of their bodies and souls alike. A strong soul fae could convince another that a sickness had taken over, even though the flesh was healthy. The sickness would form, and it would spread. That was the full power of a soul fae. Personally, I was fascinated by their kind. Other species thrived in the meantime, in conjunction with the elemental Hermessi of each realm. Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Eventually, the first of the witches learned to open portals.”
The soul fae’s society certainly thrived. The doorways into neighboring worlds brought visitors from beyond, and the World Crusher observed how this place grew into a metropolis of the Supernatural Dimension, as Tristan’s people had called it. She felt right at home, even though she never talked to any of these people. Death would visit once in a while, and the World Crusher would be happy to see her.
She’d go about each day in peace, with no real concept of time passing. Gradually, the Reaper latched on to the rhythm of the living. She understood the years and the months and the days that went by. She watched the soul fae as they were born, reddish bundles crying in their mother’s arms. She watched them as they grew up, gliding through childhood with nothing but laughter and joy and scraped knees and funny tooth gaps. Then they grew old, and the World Crusher came to them when they died, cutting their souls with the sacred scythe, its veins glittering black as they were sent into the great beyond.
“Eventually, the world around me began to lack sense. It was the same thing, over and over. Birth, life, death. Blossoms sprouting, flowers blooming then withering. I grew tired of the cycle. I became curious as to what else there might
