The Fine Line Between Death and Life

Liv Palubeckis

You walk a fine line between dust and wind, between water and fire. Everywhere you go, life shudders before you, death cowers in the dark. Reflections are pushed away from you as you walk, shadows avoid your steps as your foot slams onto the ground in front of you. The edge of the world nears. The black cliffs tumble as gravel frequently misplaces itself and crumbles into the depths of nothingness below. The starlight shines a misty red light above, sending plumes of flame down onto this otherworldly planet of destruction.

You see yourself in the lenses of reality as they stare at you, watching you walk your path not in life, yet not in death either. They watch. Listen. Observe. Yet they never once step foot onto your path of doom, not to help you but not to stop you either. So you continue. With each step you walk farther and farther away from your reality, on an unobstructed pathway to nothing. You walk with confidence in your steps, stretching your legs as far as they go and swinging your arms, almost as if you want to run, sprint, to the end of your path, yet there is no end. Each step you take, you fill your lungs with more disease, a disease with no cure. There is no end of life for you, no death for you either; you are trapped on this walk of yours with no end in sight.

This fine line of yours that you walk, on the edge of a cliff with roaring ambition to your left and crystal calamity to your right, with golden stars above you and an endless black drop below you, you risk it all. You risk yourself again and again, every day, over and over and over. There is no straying from this path; there is only the walkway of small black stepping stones that you stand on as you hover over the abyss. Onward you walk, conscious yet oblivious to the chaos lunging around you, trying to tear into your heart and mind with bent blades of wrath and fury. Yet you are untouched by their attacks, invincible to any noise they might send your way to move you off of this path of yours.

With your clothes swaying in the silent yet noise-bending wind, the red cloth around your face lies still, never once doubting this righteous yet dark path you walk. The ribbon tying your soul in place rips violently against the invisible chains wrapped around it, holding it down in the abyss, trapping you here in this place between life and death. Your knee-high black boots click with each long, confident step you take, never holding you down but never helping you stand up. Your long white hair gently pulls against your skull in the soft yet agonizing wind, your piercing white and black eyes stare into the emptiness in front of you, never looking back, your echoing hands tattered with pulsating purple lines stay in fists clenched at your sides, your left hand clutching a black blade of death.

With different names on your list you hold close to your heart, each of your steps crosses a new name off, erasing it from this list that holds billions of souls. These names are of the souls that have wronged you, wronged others. You barely feel a thing as you cross off a name with every step you take, taking a soul away and giving it to the entity called death. Your blade is rarely swung; it remains still, silent, at your side. You’ve only ever heard it scream once before, when a new threat to your existence had entered this thing called life. Since then, your blade hasn’t spoken a word, leaving you all alone in this dark, dark place.

You rarely enter the world on the other side of the mirror, but when you do, you have always donned your mask. Souls stare in terror, fearing that if they were to move then their flames of life would be distinguished, promptly squeezed out slowly and agonizingly, by you. They stare into the face laying on top of yours, the black mask with a black haze expelling itself from your eyes as your own soul chips away, slowly, painfully, fading into a black ash under the light and purity of the millions of souls you feel in your mind. The only times you’ve felt this have been when you yourself have had to track a soul to the ends of the realm. Those souls that have run from your grasp have never escaped you; you have always caught them trying desperately to slip out of the chokehold that you, death, has gripped around their throats. They have always scratched at your elongated nails you trust into their hearts to tear their souls from their bodies, your blade sucking in the white ghost of their soul. They always stare pitifully at you, begging you to spare their lives. You never do. You never will. You will always perform your duties as the reaper of souls, the stealer of lives. You will always embody death.

Every time after you return to your place in the mirror of dimensions, the mirror of reality, your soul starts to piece itself back together, the black particles that had been chipped away in the mortal realm reappearing on your path in front of you, prompting you to continue your walk. You always do. You tell yourself you never had a choice, but you did. Long before this walk even started, you had the choice that changed the fate of your life. But you don’t regret it now, even though you have no way off of this plane of unreality. You feel satisfied with what you’ve become, because you tell yourself that some other soul could be you. Someone else could be going through this torture. So you walk, so that no one else has to live a death like you do.

As you approach the next step, you can see that this soul is trying to run, trying to hide. You stop, hold out your blade in front of you. You slash downwards, tearing a rip in between dimensions; your place in unreality and the mortal world known as Earth. You step through, donning your mask as you go. Your soul starts chipping away. This soul that thinks they can hide from you is not human. No, this soul, you can feel, is different, stronger than any soul you’ve reaped before. You welcome the challenge.

This place called Earth is different. The souls stare at you, yet continue their ways, not petrified like so many other souls become. You feel different because of this, unnerved. But you can’t let these souls distract you from your mission. You walk onwards, following the blood red trail the soul you’re chasing has left, a neon color against the shades of gray you always see.

With every step you take you leave bits and pieces of your soul behind, unmoving and frozen in time on this planet. The red gets bigger as you approach the runaway soul. You begin to recognize the smell of the burning ash carried by the wind. Your blade suddenly jerks in your hand. It starts to scream, a lost feeling that you haven’t felt in millenia. Your eyes widen, your pupils constrict until they are small slivers of red in your black and white eyes. You feel a smile creeping onto your face, you feel anticipation. How is this soul back again? You start to wonder. But it doesn’t matter how; the soul of Hatred has once again returned to the realm of life. You intend to place it back in its rightful home, the realm of death, the endless abyss below your pathway of stepping stones.

The red grows until it is a red haze completely filling your vision. A few more steps, and then you see the faint black outline, claws scratching on the ground as it walks, a smile full of vicious white fangs and eyes that glow white. It leaps back and forth around you as you grab your blade with both of your purple hands. The red scarf around your face whips back and forth, caught in the momentum of Hatred’s pulling movements. You can’t help but copy its smile, grinning sadistically with your white teeth becoming elongated into fangs. You laugh maniacally as you swing your death blade at Hatred’s smoky figure. It dodges then lunges at you suddenly, but you recognize its motions as the same as when you last fought it. You swing your blade up and into its jaw, piercing its head as it lets out a last piercing shriek, matched by the screams of your blade as it once again tastes the blood of Hatred. Once its white soul tainted black is eaten by your blade, you calm yourself. The trail of red behind you vanishes into the atmosphere, scattering and finding souls to latch onto.

Your teeth become teeth again, your face once again becomes a blank sheet of paper. You start your walk back to the tear between dimensions, with your long confident steps leading the way for the rest of your body. Your soul still leaves pieces of itself behind, untouchable by the mortal souls that become curious by what they see. Your blade leaves a trail of blood that evaporates into red mist when it drips down onto the ground. Your mind becomes free of emotion yet again, the feeling of happiness of something different happening vanishing. You start to feel something else. Misery. You are already beginning to miss the thrill of the fight with Hatred. You feel… strange. 

The portal before you shimmers with black and white lightning streaks of a glowing golden haze. You once again step forward one last time, entering your dimension, not quite up but not down, not dark but not light. In between. Belonging nowhere. You remove your mask and take out your sheet of paper with billions of names written on it in immaculate black ink. At the bottom of the list, you write the name you’ve not heard in such a long time: yours. You hope that one day, when every other name is gone and yours is the last soul, that your soul too will vanish into the depths of the abyss below your pathway. Hope. Such a strange word, you think. As you continue on your path, you hope you will one day have the feeling of your soul shattering into a million pieces and give you the blissful feeling you long for so much, freedom.

As you walk, while you are thinking this, your soul fights against your mind as it pieces itself back together, black fragments fitting together back into the mess of puzzle pieces you left behind on the place called Earth. Earth. Such a mysterious place, you begin to think. Maybe Hatred will yet again return. You then realize that there are other emotions that you’ve fought through time. Agony, Anticipation, Hope, Fear, Terror, Angst, Bliss; so many emotions you’ve slaughtered. But as you continue to place one foot in front of the other, those tall black boots you wear clicking with each movement, you continue down the pathway of stepping stones.

The glow of golden lights seems to hum as your blade of death shivers in your cold grasp. You pause and look down. It seems to be shaking, but you don’t know why. It starts screaming, a familiar yet slightly different sound than that of Hatred. Desire. Desire is an emotion you haven’t sent to the realm of death before, it never appeared on the plane of the living. This experience will be new. Slowly, the same smile as when you fought Hatred appears on your face, teeth again elongating into fangs, pupils constricting into thin lines. Your blade swings up and once again cuts through dimensions. You jump through, feeling anticipation for the thrill you’re about to experience.

This time, you see a new color. Not quite red but you are unsure of how to describe it. It seems softer than the red you saw while chasing Hatred, almost lighter. You don’t recognize where you are as you don your black mask and your soul begins to chip away. The atmosphere seems heavy, small flickers of bright light appearing and disappearing quickly. You begin following Desire’s trail, walking on your path to track down yet another soul that doesn’t belong. But then again, you don’t seem to belong anywhere either. You shake off the feeling of similarity between yourself and your emotions you hunt as you begin to follow Desire’s trail.

You cut through a dark forest teeming with energy. You see different kinds of souls everywhere your eyes dart; a small fluffy soul, a large soul with wings, another large soul with a curly tail, a small soul that darts back and forth around your tall black boots. But you ignore everything around you and focus on the not-red color in front of you. Desire’s trail grows larger as you move closer. Your steps become larger and your face starts to show emotion as it did with Hatred. Finally the not-red haze grows so large it surrounds you and covers your eyes in color. You let out another laugh.

Desire’s claws can be seen through the red haze just in front of you. It looks different than Hatred, not by much, just not as evil. It has the same smile and eyes as Hatred but, as with the not-red, Desire is a strange color, not black, but you don’t know how to describe it. Strange, you ponder. Desire leaps at you as you swing your blade up and into its head. Both your blade and Desire let out an eerie screech as its blood drips onto the red painted ground. It fades away in a stream of not-black particles and disperses amongst the world around you.

The walk back to the rip in reality you had made is bleak. The small and big souls still skitter around you, the same small soul darting around your legs. Your own soul leaves traces of itself behind, the same black particles frozen until you return to your place in between. You continue your walk.

You don’t understand what’s happening to you. You had already decided to write your own name on that list of yours that you hold so closely to your heart, and you thought that that would be the end of it, that your feelings would go away again, diving down back into the depths of the abyss. That’s another truth you had yet to conquer: the emotions you had slaughtered mercilessly had been created by you. They had come into the in between as the physical embodiments of yourself and then you’d crushed that weight of feeling by killing them. Then you’d forgotten. Until you started longing for something different, Desire, and then you’d begun to nurture a feeling of anger, Hatred. And they had reappeared to your call, only for you to carve your blade onto their blood and watch them disappear yet again.

The black stepping stones seem so lonely to you. As much as you try to ignore it, you long to feel something, anything, again. You begin to question how your pathway would look if all of your emotions walked it beside you. Desire would have a not-black color, Hatred a deep black, Sympathy yet again a not-black color but not exactly blue, either, Hope not-black but not-red, Happiness not-black but not-pink. Color. Your life has all been black and white and gray since you began this lonely walk of yours. You’ve only ever seen tints of red from the souls you’ve chased, never any other color, never any other meaning in your life. But this feeling, this feeling of longing, is something different, new, curious. Curiosity. It would have a not-black but not-yellow color to it. You feel anticipation; not the anticipation you have felt of walking into a gruesome battle, but a good anticipation, something you’ve never experienced before.

You start to hear the clicking of talons beside you. You glance to your right. Hatred. Hatred is walking on the same path as you, flanking you tightly. Left. Desire walks on your left, flanking you as Hatred does on your right. Together, the two conquer your mind with feelings and color. The golden lights in the place in between seem to pulse faster and faster and faster and faster until they finally spark and fizz into streams of color. You gasp. Never has your place in between done this before. Your head turns back to your right, towards Hatred, and your eyes widen as thousands of emotions are walking their own paths next to Hatred, all fanning out, each slightly behind the one in front. You whip your head to your right and towards Desire and see the same thing. You’re overcome with millions of different feelings at once. It overwhelms you to the point you stop in your place. Your emotions that follow you stop in their places as well. You look around once more. Each emotion has a different color path they walk. Yours, Desire’s and Hatred’s are all the same, only slightly different, while the others all vary into shades of neon and pastel and white. The only colors you now see are lighting up your vision in sparks and flames. The golden light flares in front of your face as the in between realm turns black.

Below you, the abyss seems somehow lighter. Though you strain to hear, you realize there are no more sounds of scraping and clawing coming from the deep dark below. All of your emotions you’d hunted down are now walking beside you on your path, following your every movement and allowing you to feel once more. The realization burns your diseased lungs. You and Hatred and Desire still walk a very fine line on these black stepping stones, between dust and wind, water and fire. Everywhere you go, life shudders before you, death cowers in the dark. Reflections are pushed away from you as you walk, shadows avoid your steps as your foot slams onto the ground in front of you. The edge of the world nears. Fire still rains down above you, black gravel still tumbles down, down, down. 

You walk this path of yours alone, with only yourself and the emotions that you have created. You are not lonely anymore. You are contempt with your existence in this place of yours that’s stuck in between the realms of life and death, up and down. You have a long walk ahead of you, your red scarf still lies in place even though the wind bursts through your white hair, your boots continue clicking with each step you take, your arms remain at your sides with your right fist clenched and your left clutching your blade, but your emotions now mirror you. You are now one and the same, the reaper of souls, the stealer of life, you are death.