The Day I Fell Into a World Without Death
I was in the middle of my usual duties as a grim reaper—quietly guiding a lost soul toward the afterlife—when the ground beneath reality simply gave way. One breath I was moving through the familiar veil between worlds, the next I was tumbling headfirst into somewhere that felt… wrong. The air was too still. The colors too muted. And worst of all, I couldn’t feel the pull of the Underworld anymore.
Before I could even orient myself, she appeared.
Long hair the color of faded lilacs, eyes like molten gold. A saint, though I had never seen one quite like her. She stood among rows of the sick and the wounded, people who should have passed on centuries ago yet still breathed, still suffered. When her gaze locked onto me—specifically onto the skeletal mask I wore to hide my face—something shifted in her expression. The exhaustion that had weighed down her shoulders seemed to lift, replaced by a spark that looked far too much like hope.
Then she spoke, voice soft yet carrying the weight of five hundred years of isolation.
I froze. This was not how reaping was supposed to go. I had protocols. I had superiors. I had a perfectly reasonable phobia of blood that made the very idea of killing anyone—saint or otherwise—send my stomach into immediate revolt.
Before I could explain any of that, her fingers closed around my wrist. The grip was gentle, almost reverent, but I could feel the immense divine power thrumming beneath her skin. There would be no breaking free by force.
Her golden eyes shimmered with centuries of loneliness as she looked up at me.
My name is Sashin. I am a fragment of Thanatos himself. I faint at the sight of gore, I file meticulous reports in triplicate, and I have never once failed to guide a soul to its rest.
Yet as this beautiful, broken saint clung to me like I was the answer to every prayer she had whispered across half a millennium, I realized with dawning horror that my perfect record was about to be ruined.
Because she was never going to let me go.
And some part of me—the part that had always been too empathetic for a god of death—was already wondering if I even wanted her to.