And then, one day, Death turned the scythe on herself.

And then, one day, Death turned the scythe on herself.

It had finally got too much: the sobbing, the pleading, the bribes and promises and, worst of all, the lies.

No, wait; the prayers. The prayers were much worse. What sort of vacuous marketing executive had decided to associate her with evil? It was moronic and, were she the litigious type, she’d go as far as negligent.

She had stuck through it all: the quivering lips, the screams and cries, the pleas of innocence (what was that about?). How many millennia had she trod this earth?

She thought back to when she heard only grunts and gasps of wonder.

But the last century had worn on her. Not satisfied with delaying her (and to think they had once called her Mother), they had come up with increasingly inventive ways of rendering her irrelevant.

She trod these cities, these battlegrounds, to find them already husks, hollowed out by Power and picked clean by an ever greedy Time.

And she wept for those who fell, sobbing with relief, into her arms.

So she stopped and sat. She watched the war zones grow and merge, and saw hatred and fear (more powerful than any of her viruses) spread across the earth.

And so, at last, she turned the scythe upon herself, and fell into her own arms, satisfied humanity was doing well enough without her.