Masters of Death

by Olivie Blake

Do you know what it really takes to make someone immortal? Rid them of fear. If they no longer fear pain, they no longer fear death, and before long they fear nothing, and in their minds they live eternal—but I’m told my philosophizing does little to ease the mind.

Fond as I am of him, he does chronically suffer from a touch of motherfucker—a general loucheness, or rakery, if you will—so I suppose I’ll just have all of eternity to deal with it.

There is nothing more telling about a person’s character than the silent wishes they keep to themselves, buried in the little nooks and crannies of their hearts.

“And for your troubles, you will have windows of love,” he says. “They will be brief and wonderful and rapturous; they will fill your heart until it bursts. You will feel a kinship like you’ve never known, and pain like you’ve never imagined, and each parting will tear the breath from your lungs and fill you with a longing that will never be quieted. Agony inseverable from ecstasy,” he says, “neither of which can ever be taken from you.”

“You care about nothing,” the second chides the first. “I’m not built to care,” the first says. “Only to last.”

I know that given the choice, you’ll only walk away again, unscathed, as you always do, and I cannot bear to watch you do it.

Things are so much sweeter when they have an ending; things are so much more painful when they can be ripped away.”

“I don’t serve them,” she said. “I serve a world that may collapse on itself at any moment without someone to believe in it. To choose it.”

So then it was a curse, existence. Life was a death sentence, after all, and even the sweetest of loves would still always end.