he looks like one of you. Among the Ondionts he was a serpent, and yet dissimilar. Obsidian of eyes and sheathed in bone. Unlike us, he had arms, thin as reeds and supple, down the sides of his body. We knew him the instant he arrived, and he did not dissemble, but came right to the point.
“I want to know,” he said, “how it is that you have all stopped coming to me.”
The elders, who had been unborn when Missansha was sent away, shuffled meekly up to him. They replied as one, “We don’t know what you mean.”
“There are rules,” he explained. “I for my part must adhere to them, as must you. Else what sort of a world would we have? You, for your part, seem to have ceased to die, and I wish to know how you have done this—what magic or art now protects you. I’ve traveled a long way for the answer and I will not leave without it.”
Now, none of them understood Death’s accusation. Ondionts had been born and had died as always. Our insignificant island would have become surfeited otherwise, and our caverns jammed with wriggling tenants. Death saw this for himself even as they protested their innocence. He noted the tower rising in their midst—something no snakes had built—and his sinister arms pointed at it.
“Why is that erected?” he asked.
Before they had even finished reciting the now mythic story of Missansha, Death gestured them to silence.
“You think then that by placing a problem out of sight, you resolve it? That is your notion?”
“But how could we punish her?”
“Forgive me, did I suggest you should have punished her?” answered Death. “And yet you are of the opinion that she relishes her imprisonment. That placing her in a tiny room in the sky is not a punishment to her?”
“But…but she wasn’t put to death!” exclaimed one of the elders, who immediately regretted his outburst and shrank away. For a moment he had forgotten to whom he spoke.
“No,” agreed Death, showing his teeth. “She was not. Not to death, but surely to madness have you condemned her. You are not people who fare well when isolated, and she began life more isolated than the rest of you.” With that Death passed through the crowd. One by one they lay down before him. At the tower’s base he stared up into the sky, to the very tip of it. He imagined himself there and a moment later he stood at the top, for that was how Death traveled.
His hands pressed that barred door, and it opened to him. Inside, it was dark and cobwebbed. Spiders had busily taken over the space. They dropped from their webs as he passed beneath them.
Deeper into the chamber, Death saw tiny lights burning—an entire wall of them. This struck him as unlikely. The lights sparkled. They were round like the eggs laid by Ondionts. They were eggs, in fact, and the fire in each was a spark of life. He reached the wall and pried one loose from the mucilage that held it. He held it in his hands, and with his needle-like fingers, he cracked it open and let the light escape. Like a flame it leapt up at him, and then through him. He heard it, saw it, experienced its life in a burst, because that is what the soul is—every moment of the life that was known, compressed into a flame of existence. It sang to him as it passed from this plane of being. And from the darkness behind him, a voice unused to speaking croaked, “What was that? How did my little song escape?”
Death turned and there she was. Impossibly alive, thin and ancient, and yet to him unutterably beautiful.
“I let it go,” he said.
Missansha gasped. She uncurled and rose to his height, the height of his voice. She’d learned to do that as a child, as a way of protecting herself. “How did I not hear you enter?”
“No one hears me enter, just as no one can surprise me. And yet you have just done that impossible thing.”
She didn’t need eyes to identify him. The sense of him burned her like heat.
“These,” he said, and turned back to the wall.
“My songs,” she replied. “Long ago they began to come to me here in this chamber, I don’t know from where. They entered me, pierced me, and then I birthed each one. So long ago that began, I can hardly remember the time before it.”