A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones - Bella Forrest Page 0,54

had to make sense. It had to.

Unending

The more I read through the World Crusher’s pages, the stranger reality felt, like a foreign dimension I no longer belonged to. This Reaper’s emotions were intensely conflicted as she existed alongside Death, learning the values of a beginning and an end, of all the realms that made up the vast universe, and of the forces that governed each plane.

Because she had not even had the impression of a life before, the World Crusher didn’t understand some aspects of existence. There was no empathy for the living in her mind, and so the loss of someone’s beloved left her cold and uncaring. It ultimately affected how she engaged with the living. She was also developing a problem with authority, increasingly displeased with how she was told to handle certain things in her developing job as a Reaper. As the years went by, she stayed by Death’s side, watching souls being reaped and sent to Purgatory for judgment and the eventual Afterlife. Time did not exist beyond this realm. It was the one thing that made sense to World, because there was no time where she’d come from, either.

“I listened carefully to every word that Death said to me,” the World Crusher wrote in her sigil book. “I learned from her actions, and I worshipped her like a mother and a goddess. I didn’t always agree with her, and at times I went against her. But in the end, she prevailed, one way or another, though usually through thoughtful argument, not force. She was my supreme entity, the end to everything and the beginning, too… But nothing truly ended with death, did it?” I found myself seeing the world through her eyes once more, her emotions coursing through me like wildfire and ice combined. “Death was omnipresent, so she could easily be in more places at once to reap souls and send them into the beyond. But even Death had her limits, as the universe developed, and more people were born so far away from one another. In a distant galaxy with a single sun and eight planets, I watched the fourth planet’s atmosphere crumble, turning it into a red waste.”

I quickly recognized it as Mars of the Earthly Dimension. Death had been there, on Mars, bare feet sinking into the crimson sands. She walked among the dead, their souls wandering the emptiness that had once been their homes. I watched her through the World Crusher’s eyes as she touched the lost spirits with Thieron, turning each one into brilliant wisps of light before they vanished into the realm beyond.

“Soon, I began to feel like I was ready to do this,” the World Crusher wrote. “To do what Death had been doing for so long. I was ready to guide souls into the next world. It was an honorable duty, something I’d had trouble understanding the value of for many years. Without having lived myself, my conceptions of life and death were theoretical, at best. But after plentiful observation and detailed study, I sensed that I’d acquired a certain taste for it. A grasp of things, if you will.”

For a second, I had the feeling she was talking directly to me—that this wasn’t just a standard text. It was as if the World Crusher had crafted these pages for me. Around me, a strange new world unraveled away from the earthly plane. It was somewhere in the In-Between. It was like a movie playing, showing me the things that had happened prior to my emergence. The Fire Star glowed in the distance, red against the black sky. A brilliant ball of fire, Sanctuary of the blazing fae.

“Death made me a scythe,” she continued, and I saw the weapon in my slender hand as if it were my own. It was a splendid piece, with a short handle and a long, curved blade. Made entirely out of steel, the scythe had deep dark veins of obsidian going up the handle and along the sharp edge of the blade. Whenever the light struck, the veins seemed to come alive, pumping black fuel through the length of it. “It was strange, but I fell in love with this object.” I could see why she’d think that. It seemed like the perfect illustration of what the end of everything might look like. “It made sense to me,” the World Crusher wrote. “I felt it like an extension of myself. And when I took hold of it for the first