PROLOGUE
candlelight
featuring:
an unexpected guest
/
Death?
No.
I'm afraid you are mistaken.
While an endearing colleague of mine, Death is not here yet. He has been held up in Munich. I have been asked to preface this new endeavor of his.
So who am I, you ask?
/
✸ ✸ ✸ A SMALL CLUE TO WHO I AM ✸ ✸ ✸
I am much scarier than Death.
Much, much scarier.
/
Hello, human. My name is Life.
/
I don't see the point in an introduction. You know who I am. But since this is a formal sort of thing and I'd rather be in Thanatos' good graces, I'll explain:
I am laughter. I am tears. I am crawling, walking, running, sprinting. I am the wind in your lungs, a brazen gust one moment and the frailest rattle the next. I am tree and snake and fish. All things moving. All things breathing. All things alive.
Colors? I am all of them, each one just a facet of my whims. The color-master is me; Death just has a knack for appreciating them.
I am fire, burning bright and fierce and fleeting.
/
✸ ✸ ✸ A THOUGHT ON HUMAN BREATH ✸ ✸ ✸
& CANDLES
Breath is what lets you humans live.
It is the essence of me, in some cases.
But breathe on a lighted candle and
the flame—deflates. It dies.
How can life be a tool for death?
Since when was I a weapon?
/
But I digress.
What was I saying?
Oh, yes.
Fire.
/
Let me put it this way.
Darkness is not independent. Darkness exists because somewhere, in another corner of the world, light thrives. Somewhere, a fire blazes; it illuminates some infinitesimal space in the backdrop of the cosmos; it creates that crucial contrast between flame and shadow.
This same principle applies to an abundance of other things.
Joy and sorrow.
Stars and night.
Success and failure.
Death and Life—well, Me.
/
✸ ✸ ✸ A SINGLE PACKAGE DEAL ✸ ✸ ✸
The good & the bad.
/
What am I, after all, but a candlelit path that ends, invariably, in darkness?
/
I can picture the complaints already: I'm too pessimistic, I'm being unfair, there are children in the vicinity and all that garbage. I'm not being pessimistic, I'm being factual. And it's an established fact that Life is not fair, isn't it? As for the children—
Well.
I'm indiscriminately harsh to every stage of life. Children do not get a free pass for being cute.
But you'll find that out soon enough.
First story in over a year, haha! One of my favorite books is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and while rereading it recently I was inspired to write a PJO fanfic but narrated by Death. An amusing number of things lined up with the narrator of The Book Thief and Thanatos from Heroes of Olympus: the dry sense of humor, the style of talking (in fragments. Like this.), the job. So they're pretty much the same character in this story, but you really don't have to have read The Book Thief to understand anything.
Also, the title. It's dumb. It's a parody. The Lightning Thief? the Book Thief? I thought it was funny, but I have a weird sense of humor. It has some symbolic meaning, too, but don't dwell too much on that.
A short disclaimer: I tried my best to imitate Zusak's writing style, but definitely didn't do it justice. Hopefully it'll improve as I continue writing this story!
Updating schedule: I have a very, very vague idea of the plot. Updates will be erratic, but I hope you enjoy this story nonetheless.