They have been waiting for one another.

She rests one hand on the feather-puffed violet sheets. Her fingers have become so thin and white that she can feel the weight of the stone on each ring, pressing down, straining her bones—jewels, yes, but only rocks in the end, weighty with their pressure-born lattice-works of matter. The pillows laying like seals on the beach behind her head and neck are soft and downy; she feels that she might become one with them, become an airy thing with thoughts like feathers that fly away to lie discarded on the dim forest floor, unless she has something solid to feel.

Death walks in through the rat-tunnels in a wall that no longer stands; it was broken down to create the great master bedroom, and so it appears to the lady that Death emanates out of the air. Its narrow shins are sunk into the floor so that it wades rather than stalks toward her; it is walking on the original and ancient floorboards.

The lady says, “Finally.”

Death inclines its heavy beak toward her and continues forward.

“I have a gift for you,” says the lady, “if you but let me remain in the world a while longer.” Her eyes are slitted, her hands still.

Death moves forward. She can see the fan of broken ribs protruding from the charcoal-gray skin of its otherwise hourglass torso.

“I know what you want.”

Death pauses; its blind-white eyes stare out from the sides of its skull.

“You want lives.”

Death raises one hand, its claws pinching one limo wing, drawing it like a ragged curtain. The other wing still trails on the floor behind Death, like a cape, its thick edge strut melted away into strings of gelatinous marrow that barely hold the sinews, the black spray of feathers, together. It could never fly. Using its wing as a paintbrush it inscribes letters in the air, invisible sigils, but the lady finds that her skin has grown so thin that every movement of dislodged air impacts against her veins, and she can read the runes through their pressing on her blood.

Death writes, Why would that be what I want?

“What would your purpose be without us? Everyone is drawn to what they’re good at—so to scholarship, some to painting, some to stabbing others in the back. You’re a parasite, using humans. You’ve become good at taking lives; at varying the ways of taking them.”
Death’s black-bone beak dips as if into a bowl of water or a pot of ink. Life, excepting your own, is not yours to give.

The lady’s right hand, her painted nails and shimmering rings, dig into the purple quilt. Out through the shredded wooly edges of the wound in the fabric she pulls a mess of white feathers no longer than her pinky—the down. She raises one and inscribes the runes with it—The people here swear fealty to me, and I have signed my name under words about ruling and protecting them.

And I have children. Never tell a woman that life is not hers to give.

And the breezes of her words echo around and around the hollow bones of Death.

And so the war began, and the people said that theirs was a strong, and a lasting, Queen.