“She added seals to the walls inside. Additional charms. Any spell she thought might stifle me,” the World Crusher wrote. “The closer she got, though, the worse it felt for everyone else. The entire city died that day, and I had no way of stopping it. Death had locked me in here to stop me from killing people in my attempts to reach Purgatory. This was clearly worse. I wondered if she ever regretted doing it. Her obsession with being obeyed would eventually be Death’s undoing… or so I dared hope.”
“Once she realized how destructive my anger was in her presence, even with the spells she’d put on me—on the World Crusher, that is—Death left. Months later, the six Reapers came to Biriane. The former fae who’d been chosen to work directly for my maker. Eneas, Fileas, Malin, Deas, Hadras, and Filicore. They were handsome, stars shining in their wide eyes. They’d come here to make Death proud, to help and serve her.”
I saw them, and I couldn’t stop myself from admiring them. They’d been tall and bright and dashing, despite being Reapers. It tore me apart, realizing what they’d be forced to turn into. How that must’ve felt. The horror in their dying souls.
“They got to work fast,” the World Crusher wrote. “The city was already dead, and other people would soon come to investigate, to bury those they had lost, to settle in their place, perhaps, or to burn the whole thing to the ground in hopes of salvation. I didn’t know, and neither did the Reapers. But the magic they put on… it only helped for a while.”
I witnessed the death of Biriane in real time, and it made me cry. The pain, the loneliness that the last of their kind must have felt as they saw the inevitable demise, it tore me apart. And it only happened because of Death and her inability to manage her own mistakes.
And the World Crusher had been a mistake.
“I thought so, too,” the Reaper wrote, and I once again had the sharp sensation that she’d latched onto my thoughts. That she was talking to me through the book. I blinked several times and re-read that sentence. “I thought it would,” the text actually said, the visuals of the story surrounding me once more. “No one could stop it. Not even I. The anger just spread and sickened and killed until nothing lived. Not the people. Not the animals. Not the trees or the grass. All those souls were lost too, because the anger destroyed them. What it did to the Reapers, it did to the people of Biriane too. No one was spared.”
The desolation that followed crippled my senses. The pain I’d grappled with began to numb me as I watched Death’s biggest mistake unraveling before me. All the wasted lives. It was too much to endure, but I kept reading. The World Crusher should never have been made. There was too much power inside her. She lacked the soul, the actual soul that made this entire universe special and full of life. She was just an empty form with enough discernment to put one foot in front of the other and feel things, but without fully understanding what being entailed. My siblings and I had been modeled after real spirits. We had the spark of existence. The World Crusher did not, and therein lay the difference, because she lacked the emotional and spiritual equipment to understand certain complexities of life, death, and everything in between.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, opening them slowly. Eneas and the Ghoul Reapers were watching me. Their lack of souls made me shiver, but I could not fault them for it. They deserved better. Looking down at the page again, the last two paragraphs stood out.
“They call themselves the Ghoul Reapers now. Remnants of what they used to be. Death bound them to my book. They cannot leave unless I leave,” the World Crusher wrote. “Their failure to keep my anger contained upset her, even though she’d failed, too. Her ego was and always will be monumental and perhaps bigger than this very universe we all inhabit.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. Eneas’s gaze found mine, and he knew. He knew I would not be able to set them free. “You’re bound to the tome, and I can’t… I can’t let her loose. She’s nothing but destructive anger. She has no sense of right or wrong or consequences. She… I cannot. I’m sorry.”
This was where it ended, I realized. My dream to have a family of my own body and soul. This was where I drew the line. Unlike Death and her selfish ass, I had a limit. This was it. Setting the World Crusher free would cause too much damage, and I doubted I’d be able to control this Reaper. From what I had read and from what I had seen, she was infinitely more powerful than I was. She was on Death’s level. The mere thought of her roaming around with a colossal chip on her shoulder… no. It just couldn’t happen.
“We stop here, then,” Tristan murmured, noticing the sadness in my voice.
Eneas scoffed. “I figured you might say this…”
“I’m truly sorry. If there was any other way, I would, but Death—”
“Death is a stone-cold bitch!” Eneas cut me off, fury flashing in the blackness of his eyes. “I know! I was just… We were all dumb enough to think you might want to stick it to her after everything she did. Biriane is dead because of her. Those souls never made it into the Afterlife. The World Crusher’s rage is the worst thing to exist in this universe… I thought you’d understand.”
“I do, but
