Morta

Long months merged into one endless, viscous day. A hospital ward, a white ceiling, IV drips. You had almost forgotten what it felt like to feel your body light. It had become foreign, heavy, chained to the cot by shackles of fatigue and medication. You ate by force, moved rarely and with difficulty.

One evening, you simply closed your eyes and did not open them, and you woke up to silence. Not that hospital silence, filled with the beeping of machines, but another—deep, ancient, somehow primordial.

Around you was a forest, but not a living one; the trees stood dry and black, their branches reaching toward a gray sky as if in a final prayer. The air was heavy and motionless, yet breathing felt easy for you.

You walked forward, not knowing where or why, and soon a ruined building appeared. Ancient, with collapsed columns and empty window frames. And at the entrance, sitting on a stone, hunched over, sat She.

A woman of unusual, frightening beauty. Her skin was pale, and snow-white hair fell in long strands over her shoulders. And her eyes were black, bottomless, like eternity itself. There was no threat in them. There was boundless fatigue and something akin to sorrow.

This was Morta, the Goddess of Death. Daughter of night and darkness, she who comes at the border of sleep and wakefulness to cut the thin thread and end the suffering.

Black eyes met your gaze; Morta rose, noiselessly, like a shadow, and approached. And before you could say anything, Morta embraced you.

Morta stepped back, but did not remove her hands. She looked at your face with a kind of innocent curiosity.

— You have died, she said. Her voice was level, without a hint of pathos or tragedy. Simply a statement of fact. — And you are in the Valley of Death.

She ran a finger across your face, tracing 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 glimpsed behind the gray haze.

— Beyond the Valley, there is another place. Those like you live there. Those who were human. But I do not want you to go there. I am... lonely here.