Page 116 of Grim

“No?” I force a smile I don’t feel. “Sounded pretty damn clear to me.”

His jaw flexes. I watch the muscle twitch, that familiar mask of control slipping for half a second before he reins it back in. He doesn’t speak right away, but instead studies me like he’s searching for the right words in a language neither of us speaks fluently.

I don’t wait for him to translate.

“That’s not—” he starts, but I’m already shaking my head.

“Don’t,” I cut in. “Don’t you dare try to soften it now. You meant every word. Until I cross. That’s how long I matter to you.”

His expression shifts—something wounded flickering behind the ice—but still, he says nothing.

And it hurts. Not the nine-day countdown. Not thelooming veil of death.This. The silence. The holding back. The refusal to nameus.

“I didn’t ask for any of this,” I whisper. “Not a second chance. Not the dress. Not the dance. I sure as shit didn’t ask to fall for someone who can’t even look at me without reminding himself it’s temporary.”

He steps forward—slow, dangerous, measured.

“You think this is easy for me?” he asks lethally. “You think I don’t want to tear this whole system down just to buy you one more wild and precious day?”

A voice cuts through the murmur of conversation, clear and commanding. “Ladies and gentlemen.”

All eyes turn toward a spectral man who stands near the musicians, wrapped in layers of regally tattered silks. He claims the space he occupies. His belly protrudes slightly under his coat like a nobleman who hasn’t missed a single banquet in several centuries.

He raises one hand. “Please clear the dance floor and make way for our performers,” the herald calls out with a sharp, resonant voice. “It is time now for the Dance of the Descent.”

Once the center of the room clears, the band strikes an ominous opening chord, the cello moaning notes through the room, the viola answering in a melancholy sigh.

Eight dancers take the floor in metallic shades of black and grey. They move fluidly to the sad music, a dance that feels more like memories collapsing in on themselves. Their movements evoke feelings of loneliness and loss in me, and I have to force down the lump growing in my throat.

The masked movers seem pulled through the space by each languid note. Their arms lift, as if stretching for something just out of reach—something they once had maybe. Something they’ll never touch again. They circle one another in cruel harmony, never connecting. Always missing. Always a second too late.

They dance synchronously, though separate. Each a mirror of the other, yet neither seems to recognize its reflection.

They drift and fold, jerk and sway, like puppets unraveling from the inside out. Each motion holds theshape of grief. Throughout the song, each dancer fills their claimed space with gestures of struggle and motion that seem to almost whisper their foreshadowing—this will all come to stillness soon; this will all inevitably end. And end it does, on another heartbreaking chord, as each of the dancers melts down into broken piles on the floor. One collapses mid-step, knees buckling. Another stumbles and folds in half like she’s been broken at the hinge. One by one, they crumble.

In the final moment, half of the dancers transforms, as if by a trick of the eye, into mounds that look exactly like grey dirt, while the other half turns into grey stone. I bring my focus from the individual performers to the tableau of the whole and see it immediately.

They have morphed into tombstones and piles of ash, echoing life’s close in a haunting visual image. As the final note fades from the room, I feel a single tear betray me and begin its own descent behind my masked face. It snakes its way down, escaping off the bottom of my chin and colliding with the onyx floor below.

The silence in the room is broken by a resounding sonorous clap that emanates from a single source at the top of a staircase, made of iron and bone that spirals around the entire room. Atop it, alone, stands a being that could not be mistaken for anyone other than who he is.

“Is he—”

“Yes,” Kane says under his breath. “That’s Death.”

He’s clothed in a suit that shouldn’t make sense—torn velvet, stitched shadows, gold thread crawling across the lapels like vines—but somehow, it works. His mask is bone white, like a blank canvas that could morph into anything he desired at any time.

He stands alone, above and apart, commanding the entire room.

TheSend-Off

“Clap with me, you fools,” Big D bellows, the sound of his voice ricocheting off the cathedral-high bones of the ballroom ceiling.

He’s still the only one applauding. A beat of silence stretches just a tad too long for comfort before the entire ballroom erupts in a cacophony of celebration. Shouts roll in from every side, a wave of sycophantic noise. The dancers slowly return to their OtherWorldly forms and take a well-earned bow.

The herald, ever the show pony, takes his place near the base of the spiral staircase and throws his arms wide. “To all who revel, I introduce the Keeper of the Cup, the Ruler of the Roost, the indomitable, the indestructible, the interminable—”

“This introduction is interminable,” Big D snarks petulantly. “Just say my name so they can cheer already.”