#and sephie knows that death kisses like electrocution and caresses like hypothermia and fucks like burning alive

[words-writ-in-starlight]

readera

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Sabbatical

This was ….. Amazing! Can we have more? * holds up bowl ala Oliver Twist

Sephie opens her eyes and the woman is still standing over her, but the asphalt is...cold.  And dry.  It’s dark, no rosy dawn colors fingerpainted across the sky, and the woman is dressed all in white--different white, not, thick swathes of cloth like burial shrouds draping down her arms and falling to puddle at her feet like water.  Sephie thinks something might be on fire to provide enough light to see, but the light is pale and wan rather than being warm and golden.  The woman is leaning on her scythe, and her eyes glint like the blade when the light catches them, metallic and sharpened to a cutting edge.

“You’re awake,” the woman says without looking down, and it doesn’t sound like she’s asking.

Sephie sits up and it’s easy, blissfully easy, no pain or tacky blood sticking to her skin.  She’s wearing something unfamiliar, a plain dress in the same white liquid cloth that the woman is wrapped in, leaving her arms bare, and when she presses a hand against the floor, she thinks it’s stone.  Marble, maybe, with only a trace of gloss, stretching away in all directions until it meets the walls, where it seems to merge seamlessly into the vertical climb to the cave-like ceiling, dripping with stalactites.  The throne at the far side of the room is plain, barely more than a chair with a table beside it, both apparently sculpted wholly out of the floor.  

“I’m not, though,” Sephie says, and it’s only by speaking that she realizes her voice works.  It’s strong and firm and not at all lifeless, and Sephie closes her mouth, gathers her will to stand.

“You know,” the woman muses as Sephie considers the matter.  The stone is very hard--if she tries to stand and falls, she might hurt herself.  Or, of course, she might not.  She doesn’t know if it’s currently possible to hurt herself.  “I expected a great many things when I went on my sabbatical, but you were not among them.”

“I’m sorry,” Sephie says as she pulls her legs beneath her and nudges the dress out of the way.  “I think.”

The woman looks down at her at last, startled, almost distressed, and says, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that.  My sister may have some adjusting to do, but you wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t quite attached.”

“Your sister,” Sephie repeats as she rises cautiously to her feet.  She doesn’t know if it’s that her mind still expects her body to be broken or simply that it’s been a very long day already, but she wavers dangerously, and the woman puts out a hand that Sephie catches hold of at once.  The hand is long-fingered and delicately calloused and pale--unhealthily pale, deathly pale, Sephie had always thought, and she bites back a titter now.  Deathly pale!  The hand is also strong, and the arm attached to it equally so, and the smile on the woman’s face is warm enough to make up for the cold stone still chilling Sephie’s bare feet.  “I’ve met your sister.”

“Yes,” the woman says.  “We fought in your coffee shop.  Or, rather, my sister came to yell at me in your coffee shop.  She has some strong opinions about my sabbatical.”

Sephie nods, slowly, and realizes that she’s still clutching awkwardly at the woman’s free hand.  The long, strong fingers hold her own in a grip as firm as stone, though, and so instead of trying to let go, she holds on tightly and asks the obvious question.

“Am I dead, then?”

“That’s correct, Persephone,” the woman says, apparently delighted.

“And this place is?”

“The audience chamber.”

Sephie nods again, even more slowly than before, and looks up at the woman.  It was less noticeable with the counter between them, but the woman is a full head taller than she is, her masses of white curls storming down her back like a crashing wave.  The scythe does not reflect light, for all its perfect polished shine, and the letters on it are in a language Sephie has never seen and yet seems to be a textual equivalent of a long-forgotten tune.  She can read them anyway, for all that they try to skitter from under her eye, and thinks of a Latin phrase she heard once.

“And...”  Sephie takes a deep breath with lungs that do not breath and listens for her heart that does not beat and thinks to herself--with neurons that do not fire--that she is hardly even surprised.  “And who are you?”

The woman smiles at her, and gives a small twist of their hands so that the grip is less awkward, and raises the knuckles of Sephie’s hand to her lips.  The touch is electric--quite literally.  It kicks through Sephie’s chest like the time she let a finger rest on the prong of a plug as she touched it to the outlet, her vision flaring brightly for a moment until the woman’s lips leave her skin.  

“I have many names,” the woman says as she lowers their hands again.  “Many of them forgotten, some of them remembered.  You can call me Death.”