Crowdfunding Creative Jam story: Afterlife Collection: Without Connection

[k_a_webb]

Written for ysabetwordsmith's title prompt 'Without Connection'.

The day that Charis moved on to her new life was the day that Richard found himself with no connections in the afterlife. For the first time since Charis had walked into his death and started teaching him to be Death he didn't have anyone. It was something he'd known was going to happen but that didn't change the loss he felt at suddenly not having anyone. Sighing, he walked along the beach, wondering if Charis had felt the same way when she'd first been given the power of Death. At least he'd had someone there to teach him. She hadn't had anyone.

Richard felt it the very moment she left the afterlife because of a lingering connection between the power of Death and her. The power itself even seemed sad, but then Charis had held the power for a long time. He knew it was likely that he would hold it for just as long, if not longer. Very few people wanted to become Death. When Richard stopped to think about it he knew that he hadn't become Death because he wanted to. If Charis hadn't walked into the room then he probably would have said no, but then he'd looked into her eyes and understood how much she needed him to take the position.

Sitting on the sand, Richard pulled the sword of Death out of it's sheath and stared at it. He thought about cleaning it, again, but there was no point. There'd been no point in cleaning it the first time, the tenth time, or the twenty-sixth time. It was just something he could do to take his mind off the loss of the only person he thought of as a friend. Charis had mentioned, several times, that he needed somewhere to live rather than wandering all the time. He'd put it off because it felt too permanent then, as though she could take back the power of Death at any time due to a mistake he'd made or simply deciding that he wasn't right for the job. With her gone there was no one who could take the power from him. He thought for a moment about the Council deciding that he shouldn't be Death, but he didn't even think they could take it from him.

With a thought he summoned the book of Death, which appeared on his lap, and a quill. Richard smiled, still amazed that he could summon it. Technically it was the twentieth book of Death, and all the rest of the volumes were on a bookcase in Charis' old home, which made it his book of Death. He opened it the same way he had several times before and looked down at the first blank page. Instead of writing in it he'd been keeping notes about everything that he'd been doing since the day that the power had fully transferred to him. The book was another thing that made it permanent and now that Charis had moved on he knew it really was permanent, at least until it was time to find the next Death.

© K A Jones 2011

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

This story is so bittersweet. It's a good part of Richard's story to capture.

>>the sword of Death out of it's sheath<<

That should say "its" above.

>>With a thought he summoned the book of Death, which appeared on his lap, and a quill.<<

Okay, how did he learn to write with a quill? If it's anything like a normal quill, that's a different skill than writing with a ballpoint pen. I think it would be amusing to see him trying to figure that out the first time.