The first time Death’s Handmaid comes for you, you are eight sweeps old, and it’s the night before you kill the old Empress in battle. You’re putting in a few more hours of training before dawn when she enters the room, slamming the door behind her. When you hear it you whirl around with your 2x3dent in hand, ready to put a few holes in whoever dared to interrupt you. Instead of the servant you expected to see, though, a woman stands there. She looks to be maybe five sweeps older that you, if that, but the way her eyes flicker and change color and the wands she holds leave no room for doubt.
The Demoness is here.
You cast your eyes about, searching for an escape route, but there is none. She steps forward, pointing one of her wands at you. It crackles menacingly, and you take a step backward.
“I’m here to kill you.”
“Seariously?” you ask, going for incredulous and missing the mark completely. Her mouth quirks up at the corners when she gets the pun, and you’re encouraged. Maybe you don’t have to die before you get a chance to do something important.
“I mean, it’s not like I’ve done shit up to this point. Can’t you at least wait a little while and figure out if I’m worth killing yet before you waste your energy on me?”
The Handmaid makes a show of thinking about it, and then lowers her wand. “OK, little fish,” she says, and for the first time you notice the faint accent in her voice. She steps even closer to you, so close you can almost feel the heat coming off her body (you can’t believe Death’s Handmaid is a rustblood, of all things), and leans in. She whispers to you, “Maybe I’ll kill you tomorrow.”
You blink, and when your eyes open she is gone. Only the goosebumps on your skin and the lingering scent of death remain to show she was ever there.
You wonder why she let you go so easily.
The next night, you spot her in the crowd. She blows an exaggerated kiss towards you, and you grit your teeth in anger and stab the Empress through the abdomen right then and there. Tyrian blood so much like your own gushes out onto the floor of the ring and the blueblooded referees rush out to crown you the new Empress, untangling the heavy crown from the old one’s hair and setting it on your head. In the background, you see the Handmaid laughing.
After the fight, you retreat to your new quarters in the palace, hoping she won’t follow you. But when the door opens and she comes in, you aren’t even remotely surprised.
“Well, little fish,” she says, and you realize this is probably your new nickname. “You’ve proved yourself to be worth my time.” She smiles, and it looks downright unnatural with her empty eyes. “So tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”
You rack your brain for a reason, anything, and then you shrug. “What good will it do? Someone else is just going to take my place eventually.”
The Handmaid smirks at you. “I had hoped you’d come up with a better reason,” she says, sitting on the edge of a nearby table and setting her wands down. They spark, singing some of the papers lying next to her. “Everyone says that, you know. ‘What good will it do?’ No good, usually. But you’d be surprised at the amount of harm one death can cause.”
“Fine, then if you’re going to kill me get it over with already.” You’re hoping to make her mad or spur her into action or anything. You just want her to stop playing with her prey.
“No,” she responds, shaking her head slowly. “Not today. Maybe I’ll kill you later.”
You wait for her to disappear again, but instead she leaves via the door.
The next time she shows up is two weeks later, when an assassin finds her way into your chambers. You’ve just started to relax when a scream comes from behind you, followed by a sizzling noise and a smell like charred barbecue. Turning around, you see the Handmaid standing over a burned corpse on your floor, staring at it. She looks at you, and you see a glimmer of anger in those constantly-changing eyes.
“She was going to kill you,” she says quietly. You get the impression that she’s trying to gauge your reaction.
You look at the body and then back at her. “I thought you wanted me dead.”
She snorts. “You should know that if you’re going to die, I want it to be by my hand.”
It’s not until she leaves that you realize she said “if” instead of “when”.
She becomes a constant, appearing whenever death insinuates its way into your life. The fifteenth time someone tries to slip poison into your wine, she’s there to watch you force-feed the would-be assassin his own work. When you hang all five of your advisors for high treason, she grins at you from the crowd. When you kill spies and mutants and people plotting against your rule, you know she’s watching.
When you’re two hundred and six sweeps old and your first matesprit dies of old age, you don’t see her at first. You wonder if she doesn’t care about deaths like this, deaths that weren’t violent or bloodstained. But when you enter your rooms that night, you find that she is already there, sitting on the floor and waiting for you. She’s helped herself to your books, and you almost laugh when you see she’s reading one of the books in your collection that document her role in history. Instead, though, you stride over and rip it out of her hands.
“Rude,” she protests, holding out her hand for it. You don’t move and she sighs, withdrawing her hand. “It was inaccurate anyways.”
“Why are you here?” you ask, ignoring her comments.
She pushes herself up and looks you in the eyes. “I’m just here, little fish. Isn’t that always the way it goes?”
It is, you know, but you’d be lying if you said you cared. “Leave,” you tell her, putting all your authority into the command, and she laughs.
“Make me.”
You sigh. You could try, of course. You could take out your 2x3dent and try jamming it into the soft skin of her throat, but you know all it would do is give her a reason to kill you like she’s always said she would. Instead, you turn and pull up a chair, sitting in it. “Maybe later,” you say. You both know you aren’t going to make her do anything.
It occurs to you that she should be dead many times over by now; after all, she’s just a rustblood. You consider asking her how she’s still alive, but you know you wouldn’t get a straight answer. Instead, you ask her “What happened to killing me?”
She walks over to you and brushes her hand over your cheek, moving a strand of hair behind your ear. “Someday,” she says, before walking out.
The touch of her fingers lingers on your skin, and you shiver.
The day you decide that Alternia has become too crowded and take to the stars, she stands in the control room of your battleship with her hand on your shoulder. If she were anyone else, you would have culled her for familiarity like this long ago. Right now, though, you both just watch space fly by at incredible speeds and stand together in silence.
“Did I do the right thing?” you ask, breaking the quiet. You’re not sure what you’re asking about- crushing the revolution, moving all adult trolls off-planet, killing the Empress so long ago and securing your rule. You don’t even think it matters now anyways. But the question is already out in the open, so now you have to wait for an answer.
The Handmaid looks at you appraisingly. “You did what I would have done.”
You guess that’s a no.
You’ve been in wars. You’ve been on the front lines countless times. You’ve dropped bombs from your battleship and killed millions, stabbed more presidents and kings and queens with your 2x3dent than you can count. You’ve blown up entire planets before, crushing your enemies like ants.
But when she kisses you, the explosion that goes off inside your chest is like nothing you’ve ever known before.
She pulls away, running her thumb over your mouth one last time.
“I’ll probably kill you in your sleep.”
“Liar.”
You know her like the back of your hand. Even better, maybe; your hand changes from day to day, accumulating scars and writing and drips of nail polish, but she never seems to change at all from one meeting to the next.
She is the one solid thing in your life.
The next time you see her is at a gala you hold on one of your palaces to celebrate your arrival there, on a planet far, far away from Alternia. You motion to her to come over to you, but she shakes her head no. As you watch, she leaves the party with another guest, an important government official. You manage to keep yourself from following for a whole three seconds before you go after them, striding down the hallway they disappeared down.
You hear voices from behind one of the doors and creep closer to it, placing your ear against it to try to hear. It’s completely unnecessary, though, because the next sound that comes from the room is a scream that makes your ears hurt even through the wood. Smoke wafts from under the door, and you cough. The scream stops abruptly when you do, and you hear footsteps towards the door. Whoops.
The door opens, and the Handmaid stares down at where you’re crouching, most likely looking like a guilty wiggler caught doing something they shouldn’t have. You hastily straighten, trying to regain your composure, but judging by the look on her face it’s a lost cause.
She grins at you. “Naughty, naughty, little fish. Didn’t your lusus ever teach you not to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations?”
You smile back. “I’m just making sure you do your job correctly. Someone has to, after all.”
She takes one last look at the wrecked body of the official and shrugs. “If you want to inspect my handiwork, be my guest. But I think we can both say I’m done here.”
She steps out of the room and makes as if to walk away, but you grab her hand before she can leave. She turns back towards you, her look questioning. “Excuse me, did I say you could leave already? The party’s not over yet,” you say, aware of how warm her hand is under yours and how soft her skin is. “Dance with me.”
She raises an eyebrow at you. “The Empress, dancing with a rustblood? You know this would ruin you if it ever got out.”
You slide the hand that isn’t holding hers around her back and pull her closer to you, reveling in this moment. “The Empress, dancing with the legendary Demoness of old. Who would believe it even if it did?” And with that, you begin to dance with her to the quiet strains of music coming from the ballroom. She hesitates slightly, but follows your lead, and you twirl and move and sweep around each other like you’ve both been hatched to do this. When the song ends, you hold her in your arms, and she looks at you with her unfathomable eyes.
“Why are you dancing with the woman who’s going to kill you eventually?”
You laugh and pull her in for a kiss instead of answering. Silly Handmaid. She should know by now that you’re a legend, too, and legends don’t die.
The last time Death’s Handmaid comes for you, you are older than even you know, and everyone else is dead. The psychic noise that devastated your empire echoes through your head as you look at her, standing on the deck of your battleship like she stood in your room the very first time you saw her so long ago.
“Why are you here?” you croak, your clothes and hands stained with the blood of too many of your crew members. You tried to revive them, each and every one, but apparently that’s beyond even your powers.
Her face is sad when she looks at you, sad like it hasn’t been for all the thousands of sweeps you’ve known each other (sweeps during which neither of you seemed to age, when she was more an advisor than your advisors, more a friend than your friends). She points both her wands at you and they begin to glow menacingly, sparks moving along them. “I’m here to kill you,” she says, resigned to her task.
Before she can, you unsheathe your 2x3dent and move forward. You’re hoping to stab her in the shoulder, to scare her, to make her drop the wands so you can talk her out of this, but she shifts position and the prongs slide into her chest. There is a sickening noise as one of her ribs snaps, and you flinch, dropping your end of the weapon.
The Handmaid drops like a stone, rust-colored blood oozing out of her wounds and onto the deck. You run to her, preparing to try to heal her, but she grabs your wrist before you can. “No, little fish,” she whispers, and you stop.
“Why not?” you ask, tears blurring your vision as you look at her. She lets go of your wrist and touches your face, smearing blood on it.
“Thank you,” she says. And then the lights in her eyes fade to nothing, and you’ve killed the last member of your species.
You cry fuchsia-tinted tears for her, lying down on the deck next to her body and begging her to come back. You mourn her as a person and as the last thing that stood between you and being all alone forever, and you scream your anger at her betrayal at her corpse. You cry and wail and yell, and on that bloodstained deck of a battleship in space, something dies in you.
She was right when she said that if anyone was going to kill you, it would be her.