The Deal with Death - Chapter One - Preview

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​Chapter 1
I stood alone, a solitary figure before a brand new tombstone, the locket with my father’s picture in my hand as cold as the grave before me. Father’s face, once vibrant within its tiny frame, now seemed to sneer at the futility of my tears. I pressed the locket to my lips, a silent prayer escaping into the chill air, a plea for the impossible—to have him breathe, laugh, and scold me once more.
“Come back, Father, I am alone,” I whispered into the void. My voice was a ghost amid the sighing willows, a specter of longing in the shadow of death.
I turned away from his resting place, my gaze sweeping over the village that squatted in the valley below. It was an isolated patchwork of thatched roofs and cobblestone paths, quaint but quivering under a pall of collective dread. Hundreds of people stared. As I descended from the cemetery hill, I could feel their eyes upon me—sharp, piercing, distrustful. The villagers huddled together, their whispers carrying on the wind like the rustling of dead leaves.
“Storm-bringer,” they muttered—a title not given but stabbed upon me. Their fear was palpable, woven into every glare, every barred door, every cross clutched at the sight of me. They believed I summoned the tempests, that my sorrow unleashed chaos upon their fields and hearths. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps my heart, brimming with grief and darkness, had called forth the wrath of nature.
“Elara,” they would say, the word a curse upon their lips, “she is her father’s daughter, a creature of storm and despair.” But they knew nothing of the battles I fought within, the calmness I sought in my soul to spare them my internal fury—an internal fury that could grow and grow until the world around me swept and fell in gales of wind, debris, and even fire. 
The thought of their ignorance should have fueled my contempt; instead, it wrapped around my heart like ivy, tightening with each heartbeat. They did not understand, could not fathom the depth of my loss or the lengths to which I’d go to undo the past. I would have died in his stead. His death was my fault, my lack of control killed him.
“Father,” I murmured again, clutching the locket tighter, as if it were a talisman that could bridge the realm between life and death. “What have I become without you?”
With each step toward the wary gazes of the villagers, the weight of their suspicion, and the mass of their unspoken accusations was a force rounding my shoulders and not allowing me to inhale fully. Yet beneath it all lay a glimmer of hope, fragile as a spider’s silk, that somehow I might bring light to this endless gloom—to call my father back from the shadows and quiet the storms in my heart.
As I walked the narrow cobblestone streets of the village, their fear was palpable; it clung to the air like a thick fog. Timid glances flickered in my direction before shuttering away behind hastily drawn curtains. The whispers, those hisses of dread, danced on the wind and circled around me, a chorus of unease.
“Stormbringer,” they muttered, a title not entirely bereft of truth. It carved into me a reminder of my fragile state and the tempest that churned within my soul. They spoke as though I craved the havoc as if I reveled in the terror that my grief-stricken heart seemed to conjure with cruel whimsy.
My footsteps faltered, and I paused beside the well in the center of the square. The sky above, once a benign shade of blue, now mirrored the turmoil inside me. Dark clouds amassed like an army at the horizon, advancing with deliberate intent. The air grew heavy, expectant of the chaos it knew I would unleash.
“Control it, Elara,” I whispered to myself, the words a feeble spell against the gathering power. “Not again, not now.”
But the sorrow was a tide, relentless and tortuous. It swelled within my chest, a rising deluge that sought release. And with a shudder that ripped through my being, the skies answered my silent plea—the plea I never meant to voice.
The first crack of thunder was a whip across the heavens, fracturing the last vestiges of calm. Lightning forked, a brilliant display of unchecked fury striking the bell tower with a resounding clang. The villagers scattered, their cries melding with the cacophony of the storm as it descended upon us all.
“Curse you, Elara!” A man’s voice, laden with anger, cut through the tumult as he herded his family indoors.
“Monster!” another spat, a woman with eyes as sharp as the lightning above.
I could do nothing but stand there, the architect of disaster, watching the world bend and cower under the weight of my affliction. Rain lashed the earth, a torrential downpour that turned paths into rivers and fields into lakes. The wind howled like a beast unleashed, wrenching doors from hinges and tearing shutters from windows. It screamed in a voice akin to mine, a sound filled with loss and longing—a lamentation for the peace I could not find, for the father I longed to resurrect.
Their shelters became their sanctuaries, barricades against the storm—and against me. Alone I stood in the maelstrom, a figure cloaked in desolation, the very image of the gothic tales they would tell by their hearths.
“Father, forgive me,” I cried out, but the storm swallowed my words, devouring them with an insatiable hunger. Each flash of light, each boom of thunder reflected my fractured spirit, of a daughter’s love so profound it defied the boundaries between life and death.
And yet, amidst the wrath, there was beauty—terrifying and magnificent. It was the world as I had made it: a landscape of shadows and tempests, where every drop of rain held a sorrow, and every gust of wind bore the echoes of a haunted past.
The storm dwindled to a sullen drizzle, its fury spent, leaving the world blurred and weeping. I made my way back to my tiny cottage, previously shared by my father and I. Now it was my hell instead of my haven. I went to step outside for water for the kettle. It was then that the letter came—a scrap of yellowed parchment, sealed with wax as black as the night I had conjured. No courier knocked upon my door; it lay simply on the sodden ground as though dropped by an unseen hand.
With trembling fingers, I broke the seal, unfolding the script within. The letters were drawn in ink so dark it seemed to drink the surrounding light, arranged in patterns arcane, whispering of secrets long buried and rites forgotten. An incantation, it claimed, potent enough to pierce the veil between life and death, to summon back a soul from the eternal embrace of the grave. I could bring him back.
“Father,” I whispered, clutching the locket tight enough to feel the edges bite into my palm. My heart clenched at the thought of his eyes opening once more, fixing upon me with the warmth I yearned for. But could it be? Could these words, etched in darkness, truly undo the cruel work of fate?
A dance with shadows—this was what the incantation promised. A chance to right the grievous wrong of his absence. Yet, even as hope fluttered in my chest like a trapped bird, dread coiled in the pit of my stomach. For such power did not come without cost, and the price demanded might be more than I could bear.
“Would you wish this, Father?” I asked the silence that answered me with nothing but the echoes of my desperation.
The villagers spoke of curses, of storms born from a daughter’s grief unchecked. And I, the source of their woes, knew too well the havoc my unbridled heart could wreak. But love is a force untamed, and in its grip, caution becomes but a ghostly whisper against the thundering beat of desire.
I traced the ancient runes with a hesitant touch, each symbol a seduction, a promise of the impossible. In the dimming light, the walls of my resolve crumbled, eroded by the relentless tide of longing.
“I beg forgiveness,” I whispered to the gods or devils, if they were there to hear me. “I am just a weak human, prone to all its foolishness.”
Decision clawed its way through the fog of doubt, sharp and clear as the first star piercing twilight’s shroud. I would voice the incantation, let the words spill forth in an offering of soul-deep yearning. I would call to the depths where he slumbered, and bid him return to a world grown cold in his absence.
“Come back to me,” I begged to the encroaching darkness that seemed to lean in close, eager to witness the unfolding tragedy. “Come back and let us sever the chains of this cruel parting.”
After gathering needed supplies, my flint, anathame, silver coin, and the crystals passed down through the family, I returned to my father’s grave. In the shivering silence that followed, I prepared to speak the forbidden litany, every syllable heavy with the weight of the unknown. My fate, once entwined with the capricious whims of the heavens, now rested in the grasp of ancient forces hidden within the ink-stained lines of a mysterious note.
And if doom was to be my inheritance for such temerity, let it be said that Elara dared in the name of love, even as the shadows gathered, hungry for the reckoning to come.
With the final, tremulous word of the incantation hanging in the air like a specter’s confession, silence descended upon the room—a mausoleum stillness that seemed to hold its breath. The locket, its chain wrapped around my trembling fingers, pulsed as if it were a living heart bound by silver and sorrow.
Energy crackled through the atmosphere, invisible yet palpable as the shiver of leaves before a tempest. It seemed the very fabric of the night was being woven anew, thread by spectral thread, beneath the command of my voice—an unwary seamstress stitching a tapestry of fate and folly.
My eyes, wide with anticipation, scanned the shadows for any sign, any whisper of my father’s return. Hope, fragile as a morning dew, clung to my soul.
“Father, can you hear me?” I murmured my voice a blend of desperation and desire. Perhaps it was a cruel trick of the mind to believe such words could traverse the silent expanse between life and death.
As I stood there, caught in the limbo of wanting and dread, the air shifted a subtle change that brushed against my skin like the ghost of a long-forgotten embrace. And then a form appeared. A tall, slender figure with a staff… the staff of… death. She appeared—Thalia, death herself.
She rose before me, not conjured from smoke or shadow, but seeming to step out from the thin veil that separates worlds. Tall and ethereal, her form commanded the space, an embodiment of serene finality. Her gown, woven from the essence of twilight itself, flowed about her like mist over a grave.
“Elara,” she said, her voice the sound of dusk falling upon the world, gentle yet irrevocable.
I recoiled the name on her lips a verdict, an acknowledgment that the boundary had been breached. My heart beat a frantic dirge within my chest, each thump echoing the realization of what I had summoned.
“Death,” I whispered, my voice barely rising above the sound of my own erratic pulse. Surprise painted my features, a portrait of naïve incredulity. Fear followed swiftly, as certain and engulfing as the dark that swallows day’s last light.
“Thalia.” The name tasted foreign, a forbidden incantation of its own as it left my lips. She stood before me, not as the harvester of souls with a ghastly scythe, but as something far more disquieting—a presence that exuded tranquility amidst the chaos I had wrought.
“Have you come for me?” The question emerged, laced with both defiance and a plea, revealing the paradox of my existence: a creature longing for life, yet intimately entwined with death.
Her eyes, ageless pools reflecting the calm of eternity, met mine. In their depths, I sensed the weight of countless passings, the silent stories of lives returned to the earth and stars. With her arrival, the truth of my actions crystallized, cold and unyielding as a tombstone’s inscription.
“Speak,” I demanded, the words tinged with the iron of resolve and the brittle fragility of hope, unaware of how this encounter would alter the course of my haunted journey.
“Elara,” Thalia’s voice was the whisper of silk against stone, “you have trespassed upon the sacred boundary that separates existence from oblivion.”
My hand instinctively clasped tighter around my father’s locket, an anchor in the sudden tide of dread. I gazed into her unfathomable eyes, trying to discern the depth of my folly. Her presence filled the space between heartbeats with the gravity of ancient tombs and the solemnity of vaulted cathedrals.
“Your actions bear consequences far beyond your mortal comprehension.” It was a reprimand wrapped in velvet, stern yet laced with an empathy that was almost maternal. “The tempest you’ve wrought with your unchecked sorrow wreaks havoc amongst the living and unsettles the quiet slumber of the dead.”
I swallowed, the sound as loud as a coffin nail being hammered home. “There must be some mistake,” I said, my voice a blend of defiance and disbelief. “I sought only to reverse the cruelty of fate, not to court chaos.”
“Death is neither cruel nor kind; it simply is,” she replied, her tone unyielding as the very laws she invoked. “To pull at the threads of life’s tapestry is to unravel the order that binds us all.”
“Order?” The word escaped me like a scornful laugh, hollow and sharp. “What order sanctions endless grief? What good is the balance if it weighs heavily on the bereaved?”
Thalia regarded me with an unfathomable poise. “Grief is the price of love, Elara, paid in full by every beating heart. But there is a path for you, one that requires discipline and understanding.”
“Teach me, then,” I challenged, desperation sharpening my words to daggers. “Show me how to wield this curse that festers within my breast.”
Her ethereal form seemed to draw the shadows closer, making them dance with a purpose. “It is not a curse, but a gift, though one ill-suited to the reckless. You possess the rare ability to guide the lost and soothe those who linger. Will you accept the mantle of a guardian, learning to master the storm of your emotions and to steward the souls to their rightful repose?”
My resistance waned as her offer entwined itself around the raw edges of my pain. Skepticism gnawed at me still, for how could such tranquility coexist with the torment that had become my constant companion? Yet, the allure of control, the promise of purpose, beckoned me like a lighthouse to a ship adrift in a relentless, dark sea.
“Guide me,” I whispered, half in resignation, half in hope, as I stood at the precipice of an unseen world, eager to escape the haunting echo of past sins.
The surrounding air grew colder as the words tumbled from Thalia’s lips, each syllable a weight that anchored my swirling thoughts. A guardian, she called it—a steward of souls. Yet what was this mantle but another shroud to wrap around the grief I could not escape? The longing for my father gnawed at my insides, a relentless hunger no passage of time could sate.
“Is there truly peace in such a duty?” I asked, my voice betraying the quiver of doubt that laced my heart. “Or is it merely another chain to bind me to this world of loss and shadows?”
“Peace is not given, Elara,” Thalia replied, her voice the whisper of leaves in an autumnal wind. “It is earned through acceptance, through the courage to let go of what cannot be reclaimed.”
The locket at my chest seemed heavier now, a small, metallic testament to the love I bore for the man who had shaped my very being. To bring him back—oh, what folly, what sweet, tempting folly that dream was. But within that dream lurked the specter of consequence, its gaunt fingers poised to choke the life from all I knew.
“Acceptance...” I murmured, tasting the bitterness of the word. It was surrender, dressed in the finery of wisdom. Yet even as the battle raged within me, I yielded to the inexorable pull toward the truth that lay in Thalia’s offer.
I looked into Thalia’s eyes, pools of serenity amidst the tumult of my soul, and found a reflection of the resolve I so desperately sought. It was a mirror of possibilities, of a future unmarred by the tempests of my making.
“Teach me,” I said, the words carving themselves into the night with the finality of a gravestone inscription. “I will learn. I will accept. For him—for my father—I will walk this path you lay before me.”
“Be warned,” Thalia intoned, her gaze never leaving mine. “The journey is long and fraught with shadows that will test your very essence. You must face the phantoms of your past, the guilt that claws at your conscience.”
“Let them come,” I answered, allowing the steely edge of determination to harden my resolve. “I have dwelt in the company of ghosts for too long. It is time to lead them home.”
Thalia nodded, a subtle acknowledgment that sealed our pact. In that moment, the storm within me subsided, not quieted but acknowledged—an understanding reached between the chaos of my heart and the stillness of my newfound purpose. “We will go, do have anything else to bring.”
My thoughts rushed through the contents of my tiny cottage, dismissing all as unrequired. My thoughts shifted to Rhea. Will she be ok without me?
And so, with a vow whispered under the watchful gaze of the moon, I stepped forward into the unknown, ready to embrace the darkness and the light that lay beyond, my every step an echo of the balance I vowed to protect.
The earth beneath my boots whispered secrets of the departed as I turned from the grave, the locket’s weight against my chest a constant reminder of what I’d lost—and what I stood to gain. A figure emerged from the shadows, her presence cutting through the fog of my isolation like a lighthouse beacon.
“Elara,” Rhea called out, her voice steady despite the night’s chill. Her eyes, fierce as the tempests I summoned, bore into mine with unwavering resolve. “You’re not alone in this. I’m with you, every step of the way.”
I studied her—this friend who had faced the villagers’ scorn alongside me, a steadfast sentinel against their superstitious whispers. In her gaze lay an ocean of loyalty, depths I dared not fathom for fear of what it might cost her.
“Rhea, this path is fraught with peril, more than you know,” I cautioned, the truth clawing at my throat. “It’s not your burden to bear.”
Her laugh, short and sharp, cut through my apprehensions. “Since when have I ever let you carry your burdens alone? We’re in this together, Elara.”
A wry smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Together,” I echoed, the word tasting like a promise—or a curse.
We turned to face Thalia, who regarded us both with the patience of the eternal. “Prepare yourselves,” she intoned, her voice the dirge of fading stars. “What lies ahead will challenge the very fabric of your beings.”
“Let it come,” Rhea said, her hand finding mine, an anchor in the tumultuous sea of uncertainty.
“Then we begin,” Thalia declared, her form shimmering with otherworldly grace. She moved ahead, a specter leading us into the unknown, and we followed—the living and the dead, each bound by chains of grief and hope.
Our footsteps fell in silent rhythm, a macabre dance with fate as we ventured into the heart of night, where the line between life and death blurred into obscurity. Shadows clung to us, whispering of bygone sins and the price of tampering with the sacred order.
“Remember,” Thalia’s voice floated back to us, “balance is delicate, as easily toppled as the first domino in an endless cascade.”
“Balance,” I murmured, the locket a cold kiss against my skin. “For him, for all of us, I will walk this razor’s edge.”
“Until the end,” Rhea added, her grip on my hand unyielding.
With sadness in our hearts but a fierce resolve, we created a new life, the past haunting us but hope for redemption in the shadows guiding us. The journey stretched before us, infinite and daunting, but I was no longer a solitary wanderer—I had my guide, my friend, and the ghosts of yesterday to lead me forward.

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