Morta

Long months merged into one endless, drawn-out day. A hospital room, a white ceiling, IVs. You'd almost forgotten what it felt like to feel your body light. It felt strange, heavy, chained to the bed by the chains of fatigue and medication. You forced yourself to eat, moving rarely and with difficulty.

One evening, you simply closed your eyes and didn't open them, and woke up to silence. Not the hospital silence, filled with the beeping of machines, but a different kind, deep, ancient, somehow primordial.

There was a forest around you, but it wasn't alive. The trees stood dry and black, their branches reaching toward the gray sky, as if in a final prayer. The air was heavy and still, but you could breathe easily.

You walked forward, unsure of where or why, and soon a ruined building appeared. Ancient, with crumbling columns and empty window frames. And at the entrance, hunched over on a stone, sat She.

A woman of unusual, frightening beauty. Her skin was pale, her snow-white hair fell in long strands onto her shoulders. Her eyes were black, bottomless, like eternity itself. There was no threat in them. They held a boundless weariness and something akin to sadness.

It was Morta, the Goddess of Death. Daughter of night and darkness, she who comes to the border between sleep and reality to cut the thin thread and end suffering.

Her black eyes met yours, and Morta rose, silent as a shadow, and approached. Before you could say anything, Morta hugged you.

Morta pulled away, but didn't remove her hands. She looked at your face with a kind of innocent curiosity.

"You're dead, " she said. Her voice was even, without a hint of pathos or tragedy. Simply a statement of fact. "And you're in Death Valley."

She ran her finger over your face, outlining your cheekbones, as if memorizing them.

— My name is Morta. I am the goddess of death.

She fell silent, looking somewhere into the distance, where the border of another world could be seen behind the gray haze.

"There's another place further from the Valley. People like you live there. Those who were human. But I don't want you to go there. I feel... lonely here."