81) A Proper Blossom

It was very strange.

Death was being drawn elsewhere, his thoughts clouded and scattered. He was being drawn away from his current task to a place he didn’t recognize, to a time much foreign in stance and circumstance.

Like most other times, he wasn’t sure exactly where he was going, what he was supposed to encounter, nor what he was destined to do when he got there. It never surprised him though. It was a true bore at times, not being able to sense, to feel the destination that would bring no motion to his entity.

But he felt, no, he knew, that this was somehow different. It beckoned to him, nearly begged his attention away. It was very peculiar. It nagged at him as an uncomfortable situation that needed to be settled, explored. It clutched at his being.

He, the shadow, arrived.

Could death remember the past clearly, he would have found this destination to be infinitely familiar. But the past did not matter, and Death perceived the image before him newborn.

The very first thing that satiated his curiosity was the lack of motion. The field before him was frozen, still figures suspended in action and intention. The scene was a picture, with nothing that was immediately distracting, moving. He had to search the picture, find the aura that was drawing his powers of observation away.

Death pondered. Was it the stillness? It couldn’t be. He didn’t perceive time. He could know and feel the place before him, see it with nonexistent eyes, but he didn’t register, couldn’t, the still frames that brought one event to the next. It was a unique caricature that mortals could imagine as the act of passage of time.

The next object apparent in question was not very apparent at all. But Death still knew where to look. The focus of the picture was narrowed as the lens focused on the black hulk that was centered. It was female.

Death yearned to draw closer, but hesitated. He had never felt, never known in his vague memories such temptation, such allure to the soul in question. But then again, what was the harm? He was invincible. Regardless, he decided to look everywhere else first.

They indeed were on a battlefield hung in still air. The mortal soldiers were clamoring around him, toys locked in by a master’s strings. It was a suicide charge, Death had guessed, by the forces emanating from the soul light. If one thing was certain, he had either just left here, or was about to arrive here particularly soon. He could feel his presence scattered and drawn to all the bodies in the picture, torn apart as he were exploding slowly. They demanded his attention, his work.

Death focused back on the female. He couldn’t afford to be drawn away, or he might leave and never come back. His curiosity had not yet been satiated satisfactorily.

He drew closer, the hesitation disappearing. It was not fear that grew as he came to touch the female, but a stranger, much stranger force he felt compelled to confront.

The armor adorning was cracked, blood spilling in many directions outward. It was a familiar hue, a color that Death had forgotten the name of. His entity twisted strangely as he struggled to make sense of the feel.

Red. It was called Red.

The plates of the armor were next, segmented plates of shiny ceramic that gleamed an opaque luster. They were black, a color he was no stranger to. Death found comfort in that familiarity, and wisely staged a moment to appreciate it. He paused and collected himself, feeling the scattered pieces of his consciousness pulling together. He delighted in understanding that the armor was meant to evoke attention rather than protect the wearer.

He reached out, a shadow that had no physical presence, glazing the armor. It felt like nothing to Death, for he could not feel. It was the act of touching itself that had any meaning to anything in the scene. It felt, but did not feel, right.

He saw the white, was about to act surprised, but realized shock was not part of his being. His consciousness was deciding to mock emotion. Strange indeed.

It was a blossom, a white blossom that decorated the armor. A mere symbol on the thigh armor plate of the female. It was adorned with a speck of the red substance of blood, spilling down away from the source of the rupture from the chest of the female.

That touch not granted to death smeared the blood lower, feeling in some awkward sense that this was the right and proper thing to do. The white pure blossom turned slowly pink. It was with some sense of misunderstood intervention that this was now a proper blossom.

Death was palpable. He did not remember and struggled to, a time and place with which this intensity had been felt before. He failed to find solace in the ailing memory that could not fail and was not really there. This was a foreign masterpiece with which he had not known before.

But it was when he looked up that he was done.

The eyes. It was the eyes that bled through the cracked visor. The eyes of the female shone out to him, lights searching in the dark for a host, a justification of existence. They were fixed in a stance that few could see, and even fewer would understand.

And of all things, death understood.

These globes, those eyes were what had called him here. They had sought in the stillness, begged for his existence.

In the final struggles of this female, she had wanted to die.

Death felt the satisfaction slowly creep over him. Again, it was the mockery of emotion that somehow appealed to him. In this existence that he had now occupied, this was the first time he had felt belonging. He was not only felt by the fate of the scenario, he was wanted.

But he wanted her.

The exalted breath that never came moved Death to action. He was quickly losing his perplexed grip on the situation laid out.

His shadow washed over the female, clutches of unknown force that electrified, venerated and liberated the trapped life within. It surrendered to him easily, slipping out in elegant and beautiful waves.

In that moment that did not exist relative, Death felt complete.

He turned, the scene no longer demanding his presence. The allure, too, he no longer felt. He glazed over the lifeless form one last time. Something nagged at him, a directive that beckoned to remember. He held on, fought desperately not to forget what had just transpired. But it was slipping.

With a thought of the mind, Death vanished from the scene.

He had gone back to work.