Fading Echo

First Encounter

Death and Time walked through a mountain pass in the waning light of a westering sun, a path they'd walked many times before.

As he walked Time's body cycled between youth and age, but whether he skipped with youthful exuberance or hobbled along on his walking stick, Death's tread was ever constant, and eventually he would always catch up to Time.

Whenever Time stopped to rest at the end of his age cycle, Death covered him with a new blanket until the child shaped re-emerged, sticking out his tongue at Death, sprinting away as fast as he could. Death would take the remains of the blanket, now full of holes, moth-eaten, frayed and rank, and pack it away in a satchel he kept on his back until the next cycle.

Then Death would rise and plod behind, the mountain winds snapping at the hem of his black and crimson robe. The bone handle of his scythe served as his walking stick, making puffs of dust, or crunching gravel, or click-clacking on stones, or making divots in the soil, depending on the paths they walked that day.

His rhythm never varied.

Time never waited for Death, but Death always waited for Time, though there were moments Death grew impatient and pulled Time along before he was ready. Time wept the hardest when Death took him away because sometimes he simply wasn't prepared to go; there were more memories to share, more places to explore, but Death would not hear his pleading.

It didn't matter to Death; his world was ever silent.

Where Time saw colors and seasons, meadow and river, flower and tree, birds and animals of all kinds, where he heard their songs and braying, and watched them breed in springtime, vibrant with life, strength, and beauty, Death saw only cracked, discolored bones, twisted trees and blackened flesh; the only splashes of color in his world were scarlet and sepia. The sepia turned to black when what he'd seen centuries before passed from being merely old into ancient. From there the things he knew began their long, slow descent into the Mire.

They worked in tandem to nourish the earth and comfort the living, but other than that, they meandered in endless circles around the earth. Their modes of travel were as varied as the world they trod, using walking trails, the backs of wagons, walking the tracks of animals' migrations or to where the seasons were changing. 

At times they traveled by air, flying through the dark, spinning inside the maelstroms of calamitous storms of rain, or sand, or the slow slaughter of tornadoes.

Other times it was by sea, riding the backs of drifting clouds across oceans and continents, Time all the while proclaiming what would be. 

Death would peer and follow Time's pointing finger as he observed, waiting to proclaim when it would not.

****************

Time was cycling toward the end now, coming out of the uncertainty of musky puberty into the more mature stability of manhood. His whiskers grew full and shiny, black as crow feathers, black as Death's own mire.

His muscles filled out hard and rugged. He could bid instruments of violence and creation fill his large hands at any given moment, depending on his mood. Sometimes the instrument was one and the same, like when he used a hammer.

Today would be different.

Through what he thought a trick of the light in the shadowy canyon, Time saw a face inside the rock.

"Death, do you see?"

Death turned his eyeless sockets on the place, and nodded sagely, turning again to look at Time as if to say, "What of it?"