utterly amused, while Eira and I scowled at her. I even cleared my throat to draw the swamp witch’s attention, but Lumi waved me away. “Oh, pish-posh! She’s just playing hard to get, and we don’t have time for this crap.”
Death shot to her feet, her silken dress rippling angrily across the black marble floor. Its edges crept toward us, itching to make us feel her wrath. I was tempted to stand back, but Lumi’s arm shot out, stopping me.
“Mind your tongue, swamp witch. I’m not someone you’d want to anger,” Death hissed.
Lumi’s glow intensified. She exhaled sharply, her voice shifting and startling me. I barely registered Eira’s hand gripping mine. “I know exactly what pisses you off, Sǐwáng,” Lumi replied dryly. “It’s having to admit your own shortcomings.”
For a moment, I thought this would definitely be curtains for us, until I realized that it was no longer Lumi talking. It was the Word, and Death seemed pleasantly surprised, if not downright amused, all of a sudden. Her behavior changed, leaving the rest of us speechless.
“I see you remembered my Chinese name,” Death said, putting on a most charming smile.
“Well, it was obvious by your décor here that you’ve retained your preference for the Far-Eastern peoples of Earth. You rarely change,” the Word replied.
Death moved away from her throne, gently gliding across the black marble toward us. My heart jumped in my throat as she stopped in front of Lumi. She was even more beautiful from up close, and my brain was dangerously close to a total shutdown in her presence. I could see the world’s beginning and end in those eyes, billions of galaxies exploding outward, racing across the universes, rushing to somewhere… At the very end, it all faded into the nothingness from which it would bloom once more. Rinse and repeat. I understood then exactly what Death thought of time, when she’d seen all these dimensions be born and then die, more than once. It dazzled me. My heart weighed a ton.
“I’ve missed you,” Death said to Lumi. “It’s an honor to have the Word in my home. Though I’d never thought you’d want to speak to me again, after last time.”
“What happened last time?” I heard myself ask, immediately regretting it.
Death and Lumi turned their heads to look at me. Their gazes were polar opposites, yet equally mesmerizing and terrifying. The night sky in Death’s eyes, versus the sea of pure white light in Lumi’s. The end of all things, and the Word… I understood then that my understanding of them both barely scratched the surface.
“I’m as old as Death,” the Word said through Lumi. “The two of us go a long way back. Now, be quiet. My sister and I need to talk.”
Your sister…
The shock removed my ability to speak, with the viciousness of a pair of pliers in the right hands. Eira and I were both reduced to a tomb-like silence, as this new reality began to unfold and sink in. The Word had been quietly watching through Lumi, waiting for her to find Death so it could reveal itself and address her. Death. The Word’s sister.
We’d come here searching for the truth and Death’s help, and I had the vague feeling that we were already getting more than we’d bargained for. I wondered if Lumi even knew about this connection between the Word and Death. Come to think of it, she probably didn’t. She would’ve certainly told us already. No, the Word had kept many secrets from her—we’d known that before. The swamp witches were individually limited in their knowledge of the Word, as it only gave them what it saw fit, what it deemed necessary for them to know.
The Word rarely, if ever, intervened. That much had been made obvious with the near-extinction of its precious swamp witches during Azazel’s reign. For a long time, Lumi had been the only one left, trapped in the basement of the Exiled Maras, on Neraka. This situation had to be quite the cosmic exception, to drive the Word out of its hiding place and into an open conversation with Death herself. Its friggin’ sister!
I didn’t know where this would take us, in the end. All my hopes and fears had been rammed into the back seat of my consciousness, while I watched the reunion of two of the most powerful entities. For a moment, I even forgot why I’d come here, in the first place.
Taeral
“We need to talk, sister,” the Word said. Lumi was merely