Chapter 22 #2
I do as the voice asks without hesitation.
My pace slows just a fraction, but I keep moving.
When I reach the bench, the wood catches my attention for a split second.
I study the grain and the shapes in it, then lower myself carefully to sit.
The moment I do, everything shifts. The scenery around me changes, and so does the stranger beside me.
The bench seems to stretch and widen beneath us, growing bigger with each breath until it is not a bench at all.
It is a thick, wide branch.
A willow tree.
“You finally made it,” the voice says. I lift my head to look at its owner and come face to face with my own reflection. “You realized what you were missing all this time.”
“I…” I start, and then stop. Halfway through the word, it hits me that I don’t know what to say, because I don’t even know what it means. Missing what, exactly? What have I been missing all this time?
“I know it’s confusing,” the other me says gently. “Sometimes I wonder why we were given a task this profound when all we are is human.”
“I don’t understand,” I manage to say.
The other me smiles, then turns her head to look forward. She lifts her hand, and in the blink of an eye a little Grim Reaper scythe appears in her palm. It’s tiny, a miniature version like the one Pain sometimes carried in his beak when he was still a raven.
I haven’t seen this form of the scythe in what feels like forever.
It’s nostalgic.
“The source of a Grim Reaper’s power doesn’t lie in anything external,” she says. “Even the scythes are nothing but vessels.”
She lets the miniature scythe slip from her fingers. I watch it drop off the branch and fall, and keep falling, swallowed by the darkness below. I brace myself for a thud or a splash or for any sign that it has met a surface, but nothing comes. It is as if it will fall forever.
“It can be falling like this forever,“ the other me says. “If that’s what you want.”
I turn to her, baffled. “I have a choice?”
“You always had and you always will,” she replies. “That scythe symbolizes your power, and it’s yours to do with as you please.”
“What about you?” I ask. “Don’t you have any right to this power?”
“I do,” she says, calm and steady. “And I chose to keep it from you until you understood why you have it in the first place.”
I sit with that for a moment, searching myself for some sudden revelation I must have missed. Nothing clicks into place. Not fully.
“Did I?” I ask. “Realize?”
“Partially,” she says. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to disclose the other part to you directly.”
The darkness in front of us shifts. The scenery turns fluid, as if the space has become water, flowing and flowing without end.
At first there is only motion, an endless current pulling at my senses.
Then color bleeds into it like ink, spreading in slow blooms until shapes begin to form.
Eventually, what settles before us is a place, unmistakable the moment it finishes taking shape.
My grandma’s home. The place where it all started. The place of my death.
Just as I used to watch it for all those years, I watch it now again. Except it’s not Mark’s and Jessica’s life that is unfolding inside it. It’s mine. Back when I was still alive.
I see myself in the kitchen, cooking, splattering something on my favorite clothes, then hurrying to the sink to rinse it out under running water. I see Mark upstairs in his study. I see time pass in a rush of ordinary moments, days stacking into months, months slipping into years.
And then I see something I never once let myself imagine I would see.
I see myself old, settled into my grandmother’s rocking chair, with Mark beside me on the porch, staring out at the sky.
The version where we both grow old together.
“You finally know what you are,” the other me says. “You are no longer part of the living plane, but you still grieve for it.”
My gaze locks onto the face of my older self. She cannot hear us. She is sealed inside her own universe, rocking back and forth, back and forth, as if the motion alone could hold the years in place. A tear stings my eye.
“But I wonder,” the other me continues. “Do you think this version of your life would have been better?”
My first instinct is to say yes. I want to say it without thinking, without touching the question at all.
But at the last second I hesitate. I look at Mark again, and it hits me that he hasn’t really changed.
He is still the same man, just housed in an older body.
The detachment is still there, the cold distance that makes warmth feel like something I have to earn.
We are sitting together, and yet I might as well be alone.
Would it have been better to spend that many years beside him? Would it have been better to never taste the love I found after I died?
“There is no such thing as a bad life or a good life,” the other me says. “You should know that by now.”
I think of all the souls I have carried in the five years of my duty as a Grim Reaper.
I’ve seen so many lives, each one different, each one shaped by different choices.
In the end, every soul had to stand before its own judgment.
Not to be condemned, but to decide whether they could live with what they lived.
“All this time you grieved the prospect of a life,” she says. “The idea of one. But yours wasn’t bad just because it ended quickly.”
The image in front of me dissolves into darkness again, and with it, the air of this place changes. It feels like we are moving through the void, except it isn’t the void I know now. It’s the one from my memory.
My conversation with Death plays somewhere behind the darkness, the moment he told me to get rid of the wraith.
“Why did you agree to fight the wraith, Skye?” the other me asks.
“Because Death said he would destroy my soul otherwise.”
“And how would that be different from dying?” she asks.
“I… I don’t know,” I say, because the answer slips away the moment I reach for it.
The image shifts again. This time I see the Candy Maker’s wraith in the middle of the street, the air warped around her as she fought me. Behind us, my men lay crashed and broken, and I had been the only thing between them and oblivion.
“It wouldn’t be different,” she says softly. “You simply never wanted it to end.”
The scene changes again, and now I see myself forcing Cassian’s soul back into his chest, my hands shaking with a grief so sharp it feels like it could cut.
“I was so sad back then,” I mutter.
“Yes,” she says.
And suddenly it’s obvious in a way that makes my throat tighten.
If I truly didn’t care about life, if all I wanted from the beginning was peace, I wouldn’t have done any of it.
I wouldn’t have fought. I wouldn’t have clawed at endings like they were enemies.
I wouldn’t have dragged him back. The other me is right.
Everything I did, from the start to the end, was because I refused to move on.
But if that’s the case, then what does it mean?
Did Death even create me?
Or did he simply give structure to the chaos already reigning inside me?
“You cannot force someone to become a Grim Reaper, Skye,” the other me says. “Death gave you a deal to codify what you’ve already become.”
“Is this why I felt like me and the wraith are two sides of the same coin?”
“Yes.”
The rest of the answer arrives without her needing to speak it aloud, unfolding in the quiet space behind my thoughts.
A reaper is a soul that refuses to move on and channels that attachment into purpose.
A wraith is a soul that refuses to move on and loses coherence, consumed by the hunger of unresolved emotion.
The difference is a choice.
“What about the other Grim Reapers? Is this also what they want? They just want to live?” I ask, thinking about Rhea, and Alex, and the others.
“That’s right,” the other me says. “But it’s easy to lose track of this feeling. Injustice and grief can twist it into something else. A soul gets sidetracked on their way.”
I sit with that in the quiet. The scenery in front of us shifts one last time, and now the thing we are sitting on has changed into the end row of the bus.
Minutes pass with both of us just sitting there. I am simmering in everything I’ve just learned, and the other me is waiting. I don’t know what for, until I finally remember the thing she wanted to tell me in the first place.
“What is the source of a Grim Reaper’s power, then?” I ask.
The other me exhales and looks at me. “Do you really not know yet?”
I blink at her.
I think I do, but it feels insane to admit it. It feels too crazy, like I have always been able to move mountains without realizing it.
“It’s the same as the reason you’re still here.”
I look down at my hands.
“You called it grief once,” she says softly, “but grief is only love with nowhere to go.”
The world around us begins to shimmer. The glass walls of the bus ripple like water, and for a second I catch the reflection of my living self, laughing and crying and suffocating all at once. I swallow hard.
The other me smiles again, dimmer now, fading at the edges like smoke.
Then something drops from the ceiling. I can almost see it falling in slow motion, a small, shiny little thing tumbling through the air. I could let it hit the floor. I could catch it.
The choice is mine.
I extend my hand and let it fall into my palm. It lands with a faint, echoing jingle, and the bus engine rumbles back into focus. The shadows collapse. My reflection vanishes. I squeeze the little object once, and power floods back into my veins.
When I wake with my hand pressed over my heart, there is still something in my fingers. A miniature version of my scythe, shiny and white.
I could have let it fall forever, but instead I chose to catch it. With that choice, I found my way back to my powers. I have merged the split in my soul.
I am whole again.