All Chapters of The Reaper's Pet : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison. They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the

With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea. I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull. I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of

No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare. Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood. There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s

Sol’s Umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks vaguely familiar because of the band posters on the walls. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless acoustic guitar and sobbing piteously. Back on Sub-level 5, I must’ve drunk some of the River Lethe’s water mixed in with the slime of the River Styx because it still takes a moment for me to put two and two together and realize that Sol’s grieving. For me. All at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the speed and force of a hundred grams of ecstasy, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence: {In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sol that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The woman lying in the hospital bed is Jan but at the same time not her. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell. She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pal

“As a child, Oriana was no stranger to death,” Septimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere {inside} the father’s bedroom. The words sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself as a separate phenomenon isn’t lost on me. I catch the faint smell of his cigarette like the fading echo of an echo. “There had been far too many partings around her, as always there are around each and every fleshie. First, there was Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother’s traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even more difficult not understanding what was going on and not being able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of