A Dance With Death

A Dance with Death (I Am Survival)

___________

Once, I danced with Death.

It did not start there.

It started with a hound, approaching, a twisted sketch of a wolf, inky and shadowed and singed with soot.

A reaper of sorts, harbinger of Death, here to harvest my soul, presumably.

I find that I am alright with this, this twisted turn of events.

… I find that I do not want to die.

(I find that I do not know what I want.

And yet –

What does it matter, my opinion, what I want?

What could it change?)

I meet Her in a field of starlight,

lorchel,

bloody fingers and blind eyes,

graveyard dust,

and Devil’s teeth,

reflecting the empty night sky like water reflects sunlight.

One minute (hour, day, year, millennia, how long has it been?) I am alone, stumbling along pale, spiked rocks that peak through the ground, tripping and tumbling across the stage, nothing to do but wait, and the next there is a figure, standing prone in the field.

Her back is turned to me – uninterested, perhaps, this old god, old author, divine facets unrepentant.

But there is no where else for me to go, nowhere else for me to be, but beside Her.

The flowers have turned to molasses and their roots threaten to trip me, send me sprawling into their depths, through the cracks of the spires that twist through the ground.

I push through.

(What else was there to do?)

Something about Her calls to me, compels me forward despite the innate sense of danger. Surrounding her, smothering me, yet the siren’s song whispers that she would never bring me harm.

I do not know which voice to listen to; I settle for neither.

Or maybe – both.

She turned, then, a two-three-step around towards me, fragmented face of Janus, deathly half to a living whole.

And –

“Teller of Tales,” She bemused, voice soft and melancholy,

voice of weeping souls,

voice of misted fields,

holding a spindled hand out to me, to lead as She pulls me into a waltz, of all things.

Barely an echo, heard so loud, “What will you charge, for this story, this song, this dance?”

“Who would I sell it to?” I hardly ask in return, barely a thought in my head. We spin, a step to the side, balanced on the spines of those star-spun wolves, who shove

and rip

and tear at my feet,

waves of quicksand, fit to pull me beneath. “There’s no one here but you and me – what use would you have with a story you’re helping to tell?

“… I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“That entirely depends,” She trailed off, pausing our dance with a step and a hop, now standing face to face.

Her hand raises, held out patiently towards me, as if She wishes for me to start our waltz again.

“On what?” Impulsively, I take it, and am pulled into yet another spin.

‘Round,

and ‘round,

and ‘round again we go.

A shuffle, a waltz – a spin and a twirl, and when we stop, my feet once again on solid ground, the field now cleared.

The both of us stand, hand-in-hand, on a sheet of nothing. What once was starlight and plants and bone is now void, and glass wings that move through the air.

(The massive wolves and their towering spines remain beneath our feet.

She guides me, from one to another as they circle like sharks, pleading for a meal.)

But – butterflies swarm the air.

Monarchs, with royalty painted on their crystalline wings.

“Do you want to be?”

Do I want to be what, I question, silent, absently watching the butterflies flutter.

Oh.

Oh –

“No, I don’t think so.

“I don’t know, really.”

She smiles, then, secretive and coy, a cat who has cornered a mouse. Only – the mouse is me, here, and I am not in danger. “That’s what I thought you’d say,” She laughs, as if we were discussing the weather and I’d told her the sky was beautifully clear on an otherwise rainy day. As if I had told her a joke. “I’ve been quite interested in you, Storyteller. We’ve had a wager placed on you, you know. On how long you’d last.”

She trails off, chuckling still. Her smile is as kind as always, but her eyes, dark as the void we dance on, have grown distant and just the littlest bit empty.

Glossy, maybe, although I do not think she is near tears.

She is reminiscing, I think.

Who? I want to ask. Who do you speak of?

I do not.

I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

(I don’t want to meet whoever would wager against Death herself, and live to tell the tale, nor anyone who’d want to. I don't want to ask about their wager with me.)

“What now?” I ask instead. It’s a good question – practical. If I am not dead, but still speaking with Death, then what will happen next?

Perhaps I should be more concerned about Her interest, and that of another and just as powerful unknown.

That’s not to say I’m not – concerned, that is, as much as I can be right here, right now, where terror cannot seem to exist. But what will it matter if I do die?

And, in the end… there’s not much I could do about it, dead or alive.

So I don’t. Worry.

Instead I wait, in a hurricane of static, burning wings, spirals of bone, still hand-in-hand with Death.

“Now,” She starts with a smile, squeezing my palms gently. It is one of the first sensations I’ve been able to feel since waking here, I realize, as we spin and dip once more.

(I should be glad for this. I think I am.

If I weren’t so numb, I imagine that I’d be in a debilitating amount of pain.)

“Now, we part. Until we meet again, Teller of Tales. Take caution with who you barter.”

I’m not sure when She left, or how, or why.

All that I could tell was that Death was gone. And I was alone, mooncalf at the mercy of mutts, our dance concluded.

(And I fell.)

I fell, through their star-speckled pelts, until we stood – stand – on equal footing in a desert, a wasteland of ice, spread across a vast expanse of grains of hail.

The hounds are back, here, in this icy desolation.

I fear their carnassial teeth, those nebulous sketches of hounds.

They circle, they pace, but they do not lunge, however much their stalking gaits said they wished they could.

Silent vigil of resolution and suspense, She holds them at bay, this untouchable pariah, this unknown, this stranger I have not yet turned to see.

It does not take much effort to put together that the figure beside me is my somber escort, here to guide me back to life.

It makes sense – as I am not dead.

(Not anymore.)

She is another facet of Death, the cryptic companion, opposites – and yet the same, forever destined to dance again.

(If I thought She would have accepted it, I would have thanked Her.

I might have, anyways.)

She laughed, then, voice dry as the desert She was spawned from as I turned into Her detached mask of tepid contempt,

the only warmth to be found in our frigid desolation.

And said;

“That is your mistake, there, Storyteller. You think me something kind.

“I am Survival,

“born from the screams of the things that thought they could kill me,

“and found they couldn’t.”

She turned to me then, as I stared unabashed, nothing but ice in Her face, Her eyes, Her cutting smile.

“And you will live to pay that price.”

The hounds at Her heels nipped, but did not surpass Her.

I nodded, in thanks, and acknowledgement, and everything at once, and there I was alone once more.

Not a dog to bite at my toes, with nothing but the cardinal wings of painted nobility to urge me to hold my tongue, and the sudden reintroduction of a sharp stinging pain in my feet.

(And Survival and Death exchanged bets, an everchanging gamble with the life of a Storyteller, immortal Teller of Tales.)