“Come with me,” I insist.
“I cannot,” he says, his voice hoarse. Worse, I feel his devastation as though it’s my own.
He gives me a tight smile, and nods to the people waiting for me. “Go to your loved ones. They are waiting for you.”
This is where I should feel fear, but the closest I come to it is confusion. This … isn’t supposed to be how we part. But my essence is being called towards my family and it’s hard to ignore.
“I love you, Thanatos,” I say, taking him in. “Forever and always. Nothing will ever change that. And I’ll be waiting for you when even you, the Angel of Death, meet your own end.”
Chapter 75
The Beyond
October, Year 27 of the Horsemen
Death
Lazarus’s words are nearly my end. I have endured much over my existence, but this moment makes all past traumas pale in comparison.
How am I supposed to let her go?
Despite her words, she lingers in front of me. I stare down at her as, with a spectral finger, Lazarus draws a shape on my armor.
To her, it must simply be a mindless doodle, but the shape her finger idly makes, I know that symbol.
Opotu.
Love.
Realization slams into me, so potent that I can barely catch my breath around it.
I knew God had given me a word, just as She had my brothers, a word that was both a lesson and a choice wrapped into one. I even knew early on what my word was—life. I thought I had figured it out and pressed on.
But I hadn’t understood my task and my challenge, nor had I understood the word. Not until now.
I was wrong. I misunderstood it all. The word—the choice, the lesson—it was never life.
It was love.
Love.
And for whatever reason, that shifts the way in which I see everything.
Lazarus frowns, her eyes regretful as she glances up at me. “Until we meet again, Thanatos,” she says.
I can feel the sharp edge of her love as she moves away from me.
She looks over the gathered crowd once more, her eyes searching. I know who she’s looking for. It’s the one human she loves above all others, the one she tried to bargain her life for. Ben.
The moment Lazarus saved that baby and claimed him as her own was also the moment she truly stopped fighting me. She gave up humanity for that child because she loved him.
There’s that human selfishness—to pick one human over millions.
But is it selfishness?
That choice made Lazarus vulnerable to my brothers’ manipulation—and to my own. All for a little boy she just happened to save. Perhaps you could call that selfishness, but perhaps you could also say that what she had was a love so intense and selfless that it eclipsed everything else.
My lungs seize up at the thought.
That same love made Lazarus desperately bargain her life for her child’s. An extraordinary sacrifice—one I didn’t accept—but also one I’ve heard many, many times from humans.
My life for theirs …
I would do anything …
And perhaps it was that same love that made Lazarus turn her blade on herself rather than sinking it into my own flesh.
My brothers and I have assumed we were better than these humans we were tasked to destroy, but we have been the ones pitting their compassion against them.
I have followed orders this entire time. That’s what I’m good at. Even Lazarus was fated to me by God, so she too sat comfortably in my world … until, of course, she didn’t. She gave me raw, painful, messy humanity. With all its spontaneity and beauty. She awoke me, and no matter how today ends, I cannot go back to who and what I once was.
I see Lazarus hesitate and look back at me. I see plainly in her eyes that she doesn’t want to leave me, even though the afterlife and all her loved ones are calling her home. My heart aches so fiercely at the sight of her.
I quake at the thought of existing without her.
What will you do? It is your decision in the end.
Those words ring in my ears. They feel like a trick, even though that is not the way the universe works.
Cities have crumbled and legions have died and I have felt nothing. But the sound of Lazarus’s laughter has stirred my heart, and the slide of her body under mine has awoken my soul. How many lonely miles have I traveled with the memory of her voice keeping me company?
What would my future look like when Lazarus is nothing but a memory once more?
The thought is like a physical blow. That future is unfathomable.
You don’t even know what loss is, she said not so long ago. You’ve never loved anything enough to care if it goes.