Our Infinite Fates

IF I DID NOT reap my first soul by the end of the night, the Mother would destroy me. She would nail me to a bed of seething coals. She would cackle gleefully as the flesh melted from my bones, crack the knuckles on her wretched hands as I begged for mercy that would not come. I would never die, for I was not mortal. The suffering would be agonizing and eternal.

And dawn was but an hour away.

Seek out the moments of life and death , the Mother had said. Listen for the hopeless pleas, the desperate prayers. Look for love, and for the imminent loss of it. There you will find a soul for the claiming.

Yet tonight Lundenburg was at peace, no matter how transient. The savage Viking raids of earlier months had, for now, been vanquished, and the spring warmth had dispelled any lingering spates of winter sickness. The neat rows of thatched houses were quiet as dormice in slumber, illuminated by a supernova’s swirling smear across the night sky. The streets were ripe with the scent of tomato vines and freesia, hayricks and fresh-spread manure, the sour tang of warm bodies, the distant stench of a rat-infested tithe barn.