A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones - Bella Forrest Page 0,78

I hated myself. I hated the entire world. Death should’ve ended me, but she was selfish.” That rang a painfully familiar bell. “She couldn’t bring herself to destroy and return me to the nothingness from whence I’d come, so she chose to let me simmer here, stewing in my undead juices.”

“It took the Biriane people a while to figure out what was happening. Much like a slow-burning fire, my anger was hottest here, in the epicenter. The closer they were, the sicker they got. Time went by, and they started dying.”

“I saw them, and it was the worst death I could imagine. They just dropped like logs, pale and lifeless and soulless. The only symptom they had was an utter exhaustion that took months to settle. One by one, the people of Biriane died. Their corpses were given funerals and buried by their loved ones, but there were no souls for Death to reap. It shocked her to learn that she wasn’t the only one with the power to destroy a spirit. It shamed and frightened her, though she would never admit it. Too proud, dear Death. Alas, she’d kept Biriane a secret from everyone for a long time, but by this point, the Reaper society was growing. I was still the first, but no longer the only Reaper.”

Death walked over, appearing out of nowhere. I was in this very temple, in the middle of a white sandstorm, many moons ago. I could see her, as if my consciousness had been imbued into the building itself, into its walls and crevices, its stones and pillars and windows. I could see Death taking each step toward me, saddened by what she was seeing. My anger was growing more toxic, more powerful… thousands were dying. Dropping. Lifeless. Soulless.

“She added seals to the walls inside. Additional charms. Any spell she thought might stifle me,” the World Crusher wrote. “The closer she got, though, the worse it felt for everyone else. The entire city died that day, and I had no way of stopping it. Death had locked me in here to stop me from killing people in my attempts to reach Purgatory. This was clearly worse. I wondered if she ever regretted doing it. Her obsession with being obeyed would eventually be Death’s undoing… or so I dared hope.”

“Once she realized how destructive my anger was in her presence, even with the spells she’d put on me—on the World Crusher, that is—Death left. Months later, the six Reapers came to Biriane. The former fae who’d been chosen to work directly for my maker. Eneas, Fileas, Malin, Deas, Hadras, and Filicore. They were handsome, stars shining in their wide eyes. They’d come here to make Death proud, to help and serve her.”

I saw them, and I couldn’t stop myself from admiring them. They’d been tall and bright and dashing, despite being Reapers. It tore me apart, realizing what they’d be forced to turn into. How that must’ve felt. The horror in their dying souls.

“They got to work fast,” the World Crusher wrote. “The city was already dead, and other people would soon come to investigate, to bury those they had lost, to settle in their place, perhaps, or to burn the whole thing to the ground in hopes of salvation. I didn’t know, and neither did the Reapers. But the magic they put on… it only helped for a while.”

I witnessed the death of Biriane in real time, and it made me cry. The pain, the loneliness that the last of their kind must have felt as they saw the inevitable demise, it tore me apart. And it only happened because of Death and her inability to manage her own mistakes.

And the World Crusher had been a mistake.

“I thought so, too,” the Reaper wrote, and I once again had the sharp sensation that she’d latched onto my thoughts. That she was talking to me through the book. I blinked several times and re-read that sentence. “I thought it would,” the text actually said, the visuals of the story surrounding me once more. “No one could stop it. Not even I. The anger just spread and sickened and killed until nothing lived. Not the people. Not the animals. Not the trees or the grass. All those souls were lost too, because the anger destroyed them. What it did to the Reapers, it did to the people of Biriane too. No one was spared.”

The desolation that followed crippled my senses. The pain I’d grappled with began