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“How is that even possible?” I asked, unable to look away from these strange and unexpected creatures. They looked more like me than the animalistic ghouls I’d become accustomed to. It was only their eye color that betrayed their nature. Nothing else. Only the blackness in their eyes. It spoke of hunger and solitude, of emptiness and a void that could never be filled.

The first ghoul gave me a faded smile. “There are many things we thought impossible, until they became possible.” It made his pink scar arch into a smile of its own.

“Then explain. How does a Reaper become a ghoul without consuming a living soul, when that is the very trigger that creates the ghoul in the first place?” I replied.

“Perhaps we should begin with some names,” my husband suggested, in a gentle bid to diffuse the tension that had gripped everyone present. No, I wasn’t supposed to be here, but they weren’t supposed to exist. There were questions that needed answering, and a hostile environment was not the best way to achieve that. “I’m Tristan, a vampire of The Shade.”

“A living creature! I might rip your heart out, just for kicks!” the scarred one spat, narrowing his black eyes at Tristan’s hand, then mine. “Are those wedding bands I see?”

“Yes. We are married,” I said, noticing the sudden shifts in the ghoul’s demeanor, jumping from agitated and bloodthirsty to calm and eloquent with incredible speed. “The union was blessed by Death herself.”

“Of course,” another ghoul grumbled. “Anything for her precious Reaper.”

“Odd. But I suppose we’ve all seen odder things come to pass,” the scarred one replied. “I’m Eneas. Once Reaper of the Fire Star. Now Ghoul Reaper of Biriane. That’s the best we’ve been able to come up with.”

“I’m Fileas,” the second one said, proceeding to introduce the others, too. “That’s Malin, Deas, Hadras, and Filicore. We’re all brothers in life and in death. Careful with Hadras, in particular. He likes to get rough.”

To prove that point, Hadras snapped his fangs at us, chuckling maniacally. The others were amused for a second, but they didn’t stick to one emotional state for too long. Tristan sucked in a breath, trying to ignore their outburst. “I thought I was losing my mind for a second. You all look so much alike. Did you die together, too?”

They nodded at once. “A terrible flood, eons ago,” Eneas said. “We died so our people might live. And look at us now. Worthless!” he snarled, then shook his head as if to push that rage back to the bottom of his consciousness.

“You sacrificed yourselves. Perhaps it’s why you were selected to become Reapers in the first place. Someone high up saw your strength and nobility,” I replied. “But I’m still not clear as to how you came to be… this.” I gestured at their eyes.

Around us, the afternoon began to settle slowly into shades of red. Plumes of purple and orange stretched across the sky, the huge sun melting into the western horizon with a heavy glow. The winds intensified, raising threads of white dust and swirling them through the alleys to the south. Once in a while, the particles flickered white, like diamond specks dancing in the breeze.

The whiteness of this city and the blackness of the Ghoul Reapers’ eyes had the same loneliness in common. They had been forgotten. Left here to exist without anyone’s knowledge but Death’s—and Anunit’s. Now mine and Tristan’s, too.

Eneas didn’t put his scythe away, and neither did his brothers, but I did notice a softening of his tone as he spoke. “What do you know about this place? About us? Someone clearly pointed you in this direction. Was it Death?”

“No,” I said. “Anunit.”

Filicore growled. It was in that sound that I recognized the primal bestiality of a ghoul. It sent shivers down my back. “She should have kept her mouth shut. We are all sworn to secrecy.”

“About the World Crusher?” I asked, drawing alarmed glances. “I’m told she is the true first Reaper.”

“She is,” Eneas replied.

“And she’s being held here,” I continued.

He nodded.

“You all serve to keep her safe?” Tristan asked.

“No, we serve to make sure she never gets out. At least that’s what we were told,” Eneas shot back. “Death summoned us ten million years ago. She said we had a great mission ahead. That the entire universe would thank us for our work. Little did we know…”

He sounded disappointed, even upset, by this predicament. I couldn’t blame him, considering what he’d been turned into. “Sorry to ask again, but how did you devolve into Ghoul Reapers?”

Eneas took a deep breath, gazing out into the incandescent sunset for a short while, just as the glowing orange disk dipped low and left a rippling mass of warm colors in its wake. “We came here as Reapers,” he said. “And we were honored to undertake this mission. The six of us, heroes of our realm, were chosen to keep the World Crusher bound, to stop her from breaking out. It wasn’t until much later that we learned the truth.”

“The World Crusher would never be able to break out of the sigil spell on her own,” Fileas continued, sitting on one of the temple’s steps. The others seemed to relax as well, though none put their weapons away. “We were brought here to keep her rage from infecting this world. Imagine being locked inside a damn book for so long, unable to move, unable to leave, unable to do anything other than brood and contemplate an eternity in absolute misery.”

“Her rage…” I murmured, remembering my situation on Visio. It rang a painful bell.

“Yes. The World Crusher has been like this since before you were made,” Malin added, giving me a bitter smile. “That look on your face tells me you know a little bit about what it’s like.”

I told them about my time on Visio and how I was able to break free. They listened, hanging on every word with childlike interest. In the end, these creatures understood exactly what I had been through. As it turned out, they shared a similar plight.

“Death bound us to Biriane,” Filicore said. “She wanted to make sure we wouldn’t abandon our posts. Granted, we weren’t deprived of ourselves or our powers, but we’ve been stuck here for ten million years. You know what that’s like after your imprisonment on Visio.”

“I do, and I’m sorry,” I replied.

“So, the World Crusher’s rage seeped out through the book in which she was sealed,” Tristan said. “What were the effects?”

Hadras motioned around him. “Isn’t it obvious? My brothers and I fortified the temple’s magic as best as we could. We added new protection seals, and we carved a thousand charms into the columns and the walls to keep the poison from spreading… because that’s what the World Crusher’s rage feels like. Poison. It burns through your brain, it makes you vicious and always angry. It eats away at your soul until there is nothing left.” In that sense, this situation differed from my own. My suffering had manifested through the Black Fever, mimicking physical disease and making people sick. What they were describing was something much deeper. “Our measures didn’t help much.”

“You feel her, don’t you?” Eneas asked, watching me with renewed interest. I nodded once. “For what it’s worth, we do apologize. We failed to contain it. The poison spread, and it corrupted the people. They fought over everything and nothing. They killed one another in the streets. They started wars. They obliterated their own civilization. The last people standing after the Doom of Biriane, as we called it, took up knives and went for each other’s throats. It didn’t stop with the people, either. It did the same to the animals. Every insect, every beast from the woods, every bird—they tore through their own. Pecked out eyes and hearts. Killed relentlessly until nothing was left. Until Biriane became this…”

“And then the trees started to die,” Malin said. “The grass. The flowers. Life itself succumbed to the World Crusher’s rage, forcing the first Reaper to live up to her name, I suppose. This is all that remains. What you see before you. Stone and dirt and dust.”

“Plus, a pretty sunset,” Filicore chuckled bitterly.

The more I listened, the angrier I felt. How could Death have let this happen? “Where was Death in all of this?” I asked, a fire burning in my chest.

“Oh, she tried to do something, too. After the Biriane people were gone, she came down here. We showed her everything we’d done, and she laid charms of her own. Powerful stuff based on words and sub-words that we didn’t even know,” Eneas said. “None of it worked. You see, you may be powerful, Unending, but the World Crusher is more so. In terms of strength, she’s closer to Death’s level than you will ever be.”

Tristan sighed deeply. “Death could never bring herself to destroy her own creation. Not until the Spirit Bender, at least.”

“Technically speaking, the World Crusher cannot be destroyed,” Eneas replied.

“What do you mean? Anything that Death makes can be destroyed,” I said, alarm bells ringing in my head. The implication of his statement terrified me. At least the Spirit Bender could be tossed into the nothingness. Any of my siblings could suffer the same fate, effortlessly, at the hands of Death. And yet the World Crusher was somehow exempt?

“Not the World Crusher,” Eneas declared. “I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but Death was convinced that her first could not be sent into the nothingness because there’s too much of Death herself inside this Reaper. Something about rapport of power and concentration of death—literal death. Point is, she couldn’t destroy the World Crusher.”

Tristan touched my arm gently. “We have to remember that Death was… young, so to speak. Just like she was when she made you.”

“Worse, actually,” I replied. “Worse, if she didn’t even consider making her creation vulnerable in some way.”

“And so, here we are, the suckers of the universe,” Fileas said with a shrug. “Death forbade us to leave, saying we’d simply have to keep renewing the charms and the spells indefinitely. We had already succumbed to the rage, anyway. We were Ghoul Reapers by the time she got here, and our condition is irreversible, it seems, because our souls perished in the process.”

“Much like other ghouls,” I murmured.

“Not really. We never ate a soul. World destroyed ours. This is us, ages later… empty, black-eyed, and miserable.” Eneas came closer.

“What do you feed on, then? If you’re part-ghoul, for lack of a better term?” I asked. His proximity made me tense from head to toe. Unwillingly, he’d become a vehicle for the World Crusher’s rage. The poison didn’t just ooze from inside the temple. It had found a beacon in the Ghoul Reapers, whose physical forms amplified its effect.

“On our own rage. On the distant dream of freedom,” he replied. “We don’t need food. Technically speaking, we’re still Reapers, so we don’t need to feed. Our souls just died, so the ghoulish degradation is in a limbo. I assume we’ll become beasts if we eat souls, but we’ve never felt the urge. Of course, by the time World killed us on the inside, the people of Biriane had already been destroyed and were long gone. But I look at you now and I look at your husband, too, and… well, let’s just say I don’t feel peckish. Consider us an anomaly.” The closer he got, the worse I felt. It forced me to take a step back and apologize. “Forgive me, Eneas. It’s too much, even for me.”

“Imagine what it’s like for us!” he hissed, slipping into a sort of fury.

Tristan reached out to me telepathically. Be careful with them. They’re twitchy and volatile, likely a side effect of the World Crusher’s rage. They might seem okay now, but there are micro-expressions I keep seeing, faint signals of alarm. They’re not stable.

I gave my husband a faint nod, then smiled at Eneas. “How can we help?”

“Start by telling us why you’re here,” he replied.

“I wanted to know if it was true, what Anunit told me. How were your conversations with her?” I asked. “She didn’t tell us much.”

Hadras grinned coldly. “We beat the living daylights out of Anunit and sent her away with a promise to do worse if she ever came back. I don’t sense her now, so I assume you two came here alone.”

“We did,” I replied. “Please, allow me to apologize on behalf of our maker. I’m afraid she has left you here to be… forgotten. I wasn’t even supposed to know about you.”

“But you do,” Eneas shot back. “What else do you wish to do here? She’s real, you know that now. So what next?”

I thought about it for a moment, choosing my words carefully. Tristan’s warning persisted in the back of my head. The last thing I needed was to burn this bridge before I could cross it. “Can I see the book where she’s kept? I’d like that very much.”

The Ghoul Reapers exchanged fleeting glances, and Filicore took the lead as he got up. “Unless you can set us free, you will not get past us.” He pointed his half-moon scythe at me for good measure. The dusky light bounced off it in fractured shards of amber and pink that persisted at the corner of my eye for a second or two.

“You want to leave Biriane?” Tristan asked, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Would Death allow that?”

“Of course not!” Eneas barked, obviously insulted. “She cannot even undo this state we’re in. World’s rage did such a number on us that it’s practically irreversible. Our souls were destroyed without us eating other souls. We got the ghoulishness but without the bad deed that usually leads to it. It’s still ghoulishness. Irreversible, regardless. So, no, Death wouldn’t want us to leave. But Unending here is her precious baby. She knows death magic that we don’t. The kind of death magic she could use to let us leave this wretched place. Don’t you see? Biriane is dead. There is nothing here left to protect. We failed, and Death failed, and the World Crusher will keep rotting away inside that damn book, regardless. We don’t have to share her fate!”

Knowing Death as well as I did, I didn’t dare express certainty in my ability to give them what they wanted. There were several factors to discuss first—there could be repercussions to releasing them. I had no idea how Ghoul Reapers might react once they were free. Where they would go and how I might be able to track them. On top of that, I wasn’t sure if their status depended on the World Crusher’s. Would they leave her rage behind, or would they carry it with them? Would it then infect others beyond this realm?

I couldn’t talk to Death about this. Not without risking her intervention and potential demand to abandon this trial before I uncovered the whole truth. No, I had to keep this between Tristan and me for now.

“I think we should discuss this further,” I suggested.

Filicore sneered, baring his white fangs at me—another sign of the ghoulish nature taking over the former Reaper. “I think we’re done talking.”

That sounded like a threat, which worried me. Were they ready to pounce? Were they so irrational that they would jump us before we could even consider helping them? It sounded counter-productive, but their condition was unique and without precedent. I had no idea how they would react or how to prevent a potentially violent outburst.

Tristan and I had waded into dark and unknown waters. My primary concern was to keep us safe. Nothing else mattered. Nothing, unless Tristan and I were in it together. Looking at the Ghoul Reapers, I understood that they had been betrayed and deceived by Death. Where would I even begin to repair the damage she’d done to them without causing more damage to the universe itself?