Emily opened her eyes and recognised the dreamlike feeling in her mind. It was just like her experience in the case. A delving into memories… She turned her head and saw Theo and Jessie. They were all floating in the air, above the clouds and in the light of a sun that shone brighter than she could imagine.

  She opened her mouth, but found no words. She saw that Theo and Jessie had the same issue.

  Donn’s voice came from the clouds, booming over them.

  “You are in my memories. I channeled your minds and now I guide them. To understand what I must tell you, I must show you. Just relax and enjoy the ride. Treat it like you are Ebenezer Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  When Donn said the word ‘Past’, the children found themselves flown down through the clouds and down still. Theo clenched Emily’s hand and stared in some terror of practically falling through the sky while Jessie was laughing and whooping in induced silence all the way.

  They broke through the clouds and below them, they saw the sprawling mass of a great city. Donn’s voice continued his narration as the children floating down to the street level of the city and began following a younger version of Donn who stalked the roads in solace.

  What Donn spoke of, they saw.

  “It was the year 1608 in a cold November. The dying Tudor and early Stuart winters in London were always cold. I recall that the snowfall was thick and hard, bitter and unforgiving. Snow, made into small trenches by passersby, reached up to my knees. I remembered walking through those crowded streets and constantly battling back the smells of excrement and mud from my nostrils with a napkin I had fashioned from nettles and wool. There was crying to be heard from various parts of the city. At that time, there was an outbreak of flu, claiming the lives of a few hundred children. Children no more than the age of ten. For me, it was a busy month in a busy year…

  But I ignored it all. I was due for a reaping. It was an important one. And the sooner I was done the better, as I had issues that required resolving back home.

  I found myself in the London vicinity of Mortlake. There were markets, stalls, workers and life happening all around me. Laughter, anger, sorrow and joy could be heard. It was life. Something I had no part of… I continued my walk, driven by my senses and the information I gleamed from my ledger. It did not take long for me to find the house. It was a modest manor that I stood outside of. It was called Mortlake Manor. John Dee’s place of dwelling and study.

  The building loomed over me, despite its moderate height.

  There was power in those walls. I could smell the scent and feel it on my skin. But that did not come as a surprise considering who I was collecting.

  The man known as John Dee, heralded as a genius, a man of great religiosity and science, was respected by a few but feared and envied by many. He had acquired a wealth of literature pertaining to the secrets of religious sects, the workings of human anatomy, the countless number of dead languages and the queries upon the meanings of life, death and the beyond. He was a true enigma. I, who had not developed much scruples with dealing with humans of great worth at that point in time, was nonetheless intrigued to see the man who had come the closest to understanding the intricacies of my world.

  It was snowing once more, large snowflakes lay softly upon my hair and clothes. I did not wait. I was eager. Impatient. So I pushed onwards into the building. Inside, I saw what I expected from such a house.

  It was cold, damp and dark. A few candles, dotting three corners of the rooms within, provided the only source of light. The living room, which I had stepped into, was just as dark and quiet. On one side of the wall, the fire was out, with only embers spitting at the few snowflakes that rifted down through the chimney. There was a large oak table for food and drink, though there was none to be had. A layer of dust could be seen in all parts of surface there, even the man who sat alone in the wooden chair facing the fireplace. All the signs of age and growing poverty. This was expected as Fate had dealt him badly with thieves robbing him of most of his priceless collection of books and vandalising his property. Coupled with the fact that his once reliable and good-natured queen had died (taking with her, his comfortable salary as Warden of a Manchester college), only to be replaced with that of a new king who held no respect for alchemists and men who divined from the stars, his situation was near intolerable.

  My eyes were drawn to the man who remained seated by the table. Silent and alone.

  John Dee was frail and old. His milky white beard hung loosely to his thighs. His arms rested heavily upon the arms of the chair. The black robes hung from his form as limp as fabric would hang from a leafless tree. When he lifted his head, I saw no illness. It was only Time that sought to end his life. He was 81. And by seeing his death date floating over his head, I knew his time was coming to an end within minutes.

  I was intrigued how the human body could grow to be so frail. Here was a man, a man to be known throughout time as a stalwart expert in the occult, astronomy, spiritualism and religion. A man who had conversed and tutored royalty. A man who travelled to and back from the edges of a continent. One who was rumoured to have been a paramount participant in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. How was such a man, who had accomplished so much in such a short space of time, reduced to a frail shadow of what he once was?

  ‘Katherine? Is that you?’. He asked that of me. It was to his daughter he called out.

  I shook my head and pulled up the only other chair in the room to sit opposite John. ‘No.’

  John froze for a moment. Then, he relaxed with a calm smile. ‘Ah… It is time then?’

  It was something I had noticed in humans. In most cases, when humans realise that I had come to take them, they would typically calm down. It was as if the certainty they now knew made them relax and just accept what was to be was to be.

  ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘It is time to go.’

  There was no time for conversation. I had a job to perform and a schedule to keep.

  John smiled calmly. ‘Interesting. I had expected an angel to take me. I was taught that. I taught that myself. Are you an angel?’

  ‘That I am not. Not as grandiose as that.’

  ‘Ah… A shame… I was hoping for the presence of angels. But this will have to do.’

  ‘Indeed. I am merely a courier. A merchant to deliver you to your rightful place.’ I raised my hand. ‘Come then.’ I then placed my hand upon his chest. And I reeled back in shock.

  When I take a soul, I see the years of that soul. I see everything. Every choice and every decision made. I see what the soul is. I see the measure of the thing. What energy it gives. What power it entails. My mind’s eye is thrown into the dark pit of that soul. Into the years that it has lived. For you watching me, it would only be a second. For me, those one thousand milliseconds are each as long as a day. I would be thrown through time, through the vortex of reality, passing images. Snapshots of a soul’s journey from the crib to the grave. Foods, travels, fears, promises, lovers, losses and triumphs.

  In that man’s soul, there in Mortlake Manor, I could see his happiness with his family. His grief as one by one were taken from him through sickness or Chronos’s machinations. Simple joys of living, much like the lives of all the humans I had met.

  And after that… what I saw in John Dee’s soul after that was… evil.

  Purest, blackest evil. A sharp evil. A hungry evil.

  It shook me to my core. I had encountered plenty of murderers, bastards and monsters. Seen the worst that humanity had to offer. But nothing came as close as this.

  This was truly something unnatural. I saw memories of obsession. Of callousness and rage. I saw the fear of faces that cower before me as I stared onwards through his eyes. I even saw memories that had not yet occurred. Was it the future? The past? A warning of things to come?? I could not discern when or how. It was something I had never experienced before…

  But I knew what I saw. I saw screams. I heard them.

  I saw blood. I could taste the metallic liquid that hung in the air and around upon my tongue.

  Knives. Black lightning. White fires. I saw planets that burned.

  Golden waters that promised riches and strength and virility.

  Hooked metal instruments made to carve, scratch and scald.

  Laughter, clipped and light and lacking in mirth.

  And I felt such a hunger for knowledge. A desperate hunger for all the answers in creation. All the answers to all the question that any god could think of asking and never fully fulfil. Such dangerous feelings that could swallow the world in an insane attempt to take power and continue taking it until all were annihilated.

  I fell away from John, from the monster that sat upon that small wooden chair, and landed upon the floor. John still remained seated in his chair, looking down at me with an odd confusion upon his face.

  ‘What has consumed you, o’ ethereal one?’

  A smile crept upon his face. Oh, it was truly terrible to behold.

  ‘You…’ I struggled to speak. I actually struggled to talk, as if the strength within me had seeped from me like sand through a sieve. Something was wrong. Something was happening, to me.

  The frailness started to fade from John.

  I watched as the bones inside him grew. I watched the skin, once grey and wrinkled, fill up with full-blooded colour. His irises, milky white and transparent, regained the colour of sharp obsidian. His smile grew and he drew himself from his chair at full height.

  I reached for my coin. I had to freeze time. I had to. Buy some time to have a chance to think. To strategise. to escape. But there was nothing. My power failed me, like it had in Brighton. I let out a strangled gasp. I had no power in the manor.

  I felt small. I felt scared. Fear. For the first time since my conception, I felt what pigs feel when facing the cleaver. Fear.

  John rose to his feet and he towered over me.

  ’Long have I waited for one such as you to come. Years. It was an age to me, though it make have been a speck to one such as you…’

  John flexed his fingers out, allowing fresh blood to pump through his body. He was filled with life. My life. He was taking my energy, like a leech.

  And the death date above him. I watched as the date’s numbers started to vanish. One number after another… They were being erased. His death was being delayed. Maybe even banished!

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  But that was impossible. There was no way that he could even…

  ‘How…’ I uttered. I could only push myself upon my elbows to keep myself from falling onto the floor entirely. ‘How…’

  John sneered and pulled down his shirt, a mere rag upon his growing chest, revealing a scar scrawled upon his chest.

  A glyph. The Monas Hieroglyphica. His own symbol, created from decades of research. It glowed. It glowed with a golden light that was not from this world.

  ‘It took many years of study. But it works. It finally works.’ John smiled again. His teeth were no longer yellow. They were a clean white. ‘Oh…oh so many years. So many years used by you, only now to be used by me. With this, I can achieve so much more. No longer shall I be confined to the rigours of mortality.’ He laughed.

  It was a hard laugh, a cackle that would make a raven proud.

  I had some small measure of strength left. Maybe enough to do something rather drastic. I closed my eyes and pictured my soul. I saw it seeping of its colour, of its light. With my hands, conjured also in my mind, I grabbed my soul and held the light within as tightly as I could. The strain was great. I felt an alien force grabbing at my hands, trying to pry them free in order to get at my soul. But this was a human’s strength. No match for a Reaper. I opened my eyes and growled under my breath as I pulled myself to my full height. I had to protect myself.

  John took one steps back but now he thrusted his hands at me. He bared his teeth at me and hissed. ‘No! No! You will not- do this!’

  I placed one foot in front of the other. I pushed back, this time with my own energy.

  The room around us rumbled and cracked.

  Dust, bits of stone and wood from the walls, and shattered glass from the windows, crashed to the floor around us. And they then rose into the air, manipulated by the power that exuded from the bother of us. And in that moment I felt my energy, I even saw my energy. It was a light blue rope between us. Misty and incorporeal like a ghost, but as solid as steel. A bundle of one end lay on his side and a bundle lay on mine. And we were battling over the remainder in the middle. The world was warping around us.

  I gritted my teeth and summoned all the willpower I had left within me and pulled.

  This pulled the rope towards me and thus pulling John towards me. But he then dug his shoes into the floor, cracking the floorboards and digging himself in.

  His eyes were wide with flaming passion and indignant rage.

  ‘I have not come this far in my life; travelled from one edge of a continent to the other, spoken with and advised royals and commoners alike, perceived the great beings of fire, water, air and earth. All of it, to be halted. By. Death!’

  He threw one veined-throbbing hand out and I felt a clogging sensation upon my throat. No air came through my lungs. No air left them. I was starting to suffocate. Dee was choking me.

  What did Dee discover in his journey to attain such a power over the very air itself? But there was his mistake. I felt less resistance in the tug of war. His concentration to kill me instead of stealing my life essence had given me the advantage. There! A chink in his armour. A lapse of focus.

  Taking a hold upon the rope of my life, I planted my feet and pulled to the side. The sudden momentum of my starting swing lifted the surprised Dee up off his feet with a sudden yelp. Feeling new air returning to my lungs and my life rightfully surging back to my soul, I twisted my body and swung the occultist off his feet and around me.

  Only to hear a sickening crack of meat and bone.

  I turned my head to see what I had done.

  John Dee lay in a dazed heap upon a ruined desk, sprawled over it like a hunter’s trophy. And laying in the doorway was a young woman, beside a basket with spilled fruits.

  I stood back in shock. I had not heard her enter, nor opening the door.

  Had I known, I would not have acted so hastily, without any sense of caution. It was John’s daughter, Katherine.

  John Dee stirred from his daze, rose and whipped his head around to regain his composure. But upon seeing the oh-so-still form of his daughter on the floor, his composure was banished to allow an animal howl to crawl from his mouth.

  He threw himself to her and grabbed her body close to his.

  He rocked back and forth with her limp form in his arms.

  He weeped into her chest, yelling words that were garbled insensibly by tears.

  Her haemorrhaged head and broken neck, having taken the full force of John’s momentum, lolled back as he lifted her.

  John looked at nothing and everything as he screamed his pain put for the world to hear. ‘Not her! I had promised you a life! But it was not to be hers! Anyone but hers! Damn you, give her back to me! Damn you, serpent of sedition! Bring her back!’

  He switched his bloodshot eyes at me. I stood there, unsure of what to do. While I had taken souls from humans innumerable times before, it was only after the fact. I had taken a life. I had murdered. Though it was not intentional, it was murder all the same.

  I stared at Katherine’s death date, praying to not see a long life to live. But it was not that case. To my utter dismay, she was to live for another sixty years with a family of her own. As I struggled to understand the failing of a death's schedule that should never fail, Katherine’s death date suddenly changed to a date that fitted her death at that precise moment when I had ended it. It was the date of which Dee was supposed to be been reaped…

  She had taken his place in the Schedule. An impossibility

  The schedule was being manipulated by someone. Someone powerful. But not by Dee, as he had lamented her death.

  At that point, Dee let go of his daughter and charged for me with hands outstretched. ‘I’LL KILL YOU!’

  With no doubt that he could, I immediately grabbed at my coin and Time stopped. Dee remained frozen, mid-run and Katherine lay as she did.

  Finally within safety, I let out a sigh of fatigue and collapsed into the chair that once held the insane occultist. I lay my head against the back of the chair, allowing a moment to reagin my strength to process my thoughts.

  But that was not to be the case as another figure loomed through the open doorway.

  The manor became colder than before.

  Ice formed on the edges of all the surfaces. The fire died.

  And the figure, dressed in a crimson cape, a black and golden linen shirt with moire cuffs, strode into the manor. He was utterly immune to the coin’s magic.

  Taking care in stepping over Katherine’s body, his buckled shoes - steel-capped and iron-soled - clapped on the floor like the hooves of a goat upon cobbled streets. He was modestly formed in height and weight. His eyes were off the lightest blue. And his skin was creased, like worn leather. His beard and goatee, fashionably accepted for the time, was black, in stark contract with his blond hair. He clapped his white doeskin gloved hands together.

  ‘Well done, Dee. Putting your new-found powers to the test against a Reaper… That is bold and brave… Well done.’ His voice was as clear and crisp as a cold February morning but dripping with sneering sarcasm.

  ‘I must say that others would have certainly done more explosive acts of defiance. But Dee was always more of a solitary and hermitic sort.’ The man - and that he was not - took notice of me finally. ‘Ah, Donn. It is a pleasure to see you again.’

  I took another deep sigh. This being was one I felt necessary to avoid even on the best of days.

  ‘Lucifer.’

  Lucifer smiled sweetly. He looked upon Dee. ‘My, my. Time magic. The Memento Mori Coin, fashioned by Charon himself. How is that old bugger? Monosyllabic as always?’

  ‘Never so much as two words.’

  ‘Hah. Quite a character.’

  ‘So I take that all this,’ I waved my hand to Dee. ‘was your doing?’

  ‘Of a sorts.’ Opposite me, Lucifer sat down upon nothing. His form was held up by an invisible force that served at that point as a chair. Furthermore, he flicked his wrist to revive the dead fire. Its flames leapt in flames of gold, not red.

  Such subtle shows of power that were controlled with deftness and ease were his staple as the King of Hell.

  ‘I was minding my own business.’ he explained. ‘Downstairs, I was focused upon the task of expanding the catacombs of Circles Two to Five. To situate the new soon-to-be arrivals in preparation for the Plague and Fire that shall occur in this city. A busy task, plenty of work. Then I heard the call. Ah! The call! The desperate plea of a man in need of more of what Life had carefully deliberated in bestowing him. There was such greed in that prayer… such lust for knowledge and power. I mean, I actually had a proper Faustus in my hands. I- I just could not resist…’

  Lucifer shrugged apologetically with a childish smile. ‘Buuuut… had I known what he would do with what I gave him, I would have reconsidered somewhat.’

  I clenched my teeth. ‘What did Dee ask for in his prayer?’

  ‘Initially, what all humans asked for to begin with. Power. Power over the elements. But I denied him that. Such power is only for those of a higher nature. Like you and I. I explained that the gifts he demanded from me can only be for a greater being to handle. So he reconsidered and asked for knowledge.’

  ‘Of what? And why?’ I asked.

  Lucifer smiled. ‘Of Life. Death. And everything in-between. I hasten to guess that he intended to learn about the ways of the world, our world, by any means necessary. Maybe he wanted to rule the world. Maybe he wanted to live forever. It doesn't matter now though… To me, it seemed easy and harmless enough. So I showed him a few tricks and incantations, meagre things. Trite things. Like teaching him out to proper utilise his adorable sigil he had made and use to it to its fullest potential.’

  ‘A sigil that acts as a life leech against others.’

  ‘A handy analogy, Donn. Yes, that would be the case.’

  ‘And what was your price in this deal?’

  ‘In return, I only asked for a soul.’

  I nodded, knowing where this was going. ‘But you deliberately failed to specify which one, all the while knowing that you would take Katherine’s. And it was you who changed the timeline of her death date. And that of his. All to suit your ends.’

  Lucifer shrugged his shoulder.

  ‘Actually, Dee’s attempt to steal your life essence was what caused his death date to shift, though you stopped it with great panache… And as for the girl’s demise, I am Lucifer. I punish the evil people of this world. And I endeavour to include a hint of poetic irony to each punishment for a sense of panache. Dee wanted power, through the use of acquired knowledge. But in order to gain such important assets, he had to lose something of equal or greater measure.’

  I nodded again. Lucifer, though an evil and manipulative monster, who had tricked and deceived many humans onto the path of self-destruction and suicide, who had caused wars, pains and doom for time immemorial, made a valid point. His existence was to keep the fallible human race upon the straight and narrow path of righteousness, all the while not falling into the immortal abysses that awaited them on either side. Who was I to judge him for performing the role that he was charged with by a being higher than all of us?

  I glanced over at Dee. His face was still a contorted mess of fury and pain.

  ‘So what now?’ Lucifer asked of me. ‘Are you reaping them or not? I have things to do.’

  I stood and headed towards the still form of Katherine. I pinched my fingers around a single strand of her hair and plucked it out.

  A faint sigh could be heard from all around me. The stand of hair within my fingers glowed, signalling the reaping’s completion.

  Having placed the hair into Lucifer’s awaiting palm, I quickly turned away to avoid seeing Lucifer placing the hair into his mouth. The demon had no respect nor regard for the preciousness of the a soul. Licking his lips, he watched me as I approached Dee.

  ‘You may as well take his.’ He piped up. ‘Since his death date’s been erased, he could die any time. May as well be now, since you came for him anyhow…’

  Upon reaching the old man, I became acutely aware of his eyes. Unlike his body, the dust in the air around us and the world outside, his eyes were not frozen. They moved about, had certainly been moving around while I was talking with Lucifer. They were not influenced. And they were not influenced as they glared directly at me. Dee was aware. Dee was aware of me and had listened to all we had discussed. As I looked into those angered, obsidian eyes, I marvelled at how powerful a human could be when they were angry. Was this the power of such emotions?

  Does fear, love, rage and joy give humanity the the gumption and drive to achieve all manner of insurmountable tasks?

  And did the power of these emotion help this man, this deranged man so obsessed on unveiling the rules of the world, to resist a magic fashioned from deities older than the Earth?

  As I placed my fingers upon the hair on his scalp, Dee’s hateful eyes continued to stare into mine. And in that look, I almost felt that he was saying one thing:

  I will make you suffer for this.

  But as soon as I pulled his soul from him, his eyes faded away to a milky white and the threat of his eyes faded with it.

  Deactivating my coin’s hold over Time, Dee’s body dropped to the floor. I sighed with a tired and heavy heart and turned to ask Lucifer why he was here making deals that threaten the fabric of our timeline.

  But he was gone. His side of the bargain was upheld and he must have figured that he was no longer needed.

  Alone, there I stood. In that cold manor that had seen so many moments of darkness and worry. And yet so many moments of hope and light. A fully-lived in house that was now a witness to the death of its master. A death at my hands.

  I looked at my hands, at his hair strand on my palm. It lay there lank and dead, with a faint shadowy darkness, not unlike the shadows of Whiro’s wounds, dripping from it. It was gnarled with evil. And it made me ill to look upon it. I opened my silver bag, my previous equipment before the case, and packed in the foul hair. I tied up my bag tightly for worry of any spillage from the darkness.

  I stepped out into a faint snowfall that dropped from a cloudy sky. And as I stepped into the main street, I saw children running along it. All of them were laughing and jumping at the snowflakes. They clapped their hands to catch the falling ices.

  One of them had his tongue out to eat the ice. They were all smiling and laughing. All blissfully unaware of the deaths that had occurred not more than ten metres from them. And despite their happiness, I found it very hard to smile.

  This day was supposed to be a routine session. But it had turned into a nightmare, one in which that has seemed to follow me to this very day. As I had feared it could…”