[ WP ] You are a child lost in a jungle . Something is hunting you .

It started ten days ago. No, I do n't mean the story can reasonably be given an origin at ten days in the past, because the back-story of me ending up in the Amazon Rainforest alone at the age of 8 is part of the story, and all of that began months ago. What I mean is that the *hunt itself* started exactly 240 Earth hours ago ( and 15 minutes, but who's counting? ). I first realized I was being followed when I made the observation that the strange rustling, which I had started to hear ten minutes prior, had n't stopped, or gotten quieter or louder, and I understood that I was being followed. At that moment in time I did n't yet fully comprehend the principle of being hunted, but I did understand that there was another being travelling with me on this particular stretch of road in the Amazon Rain-forest. 
 
 
 The first time I saw the being, I was just settling down to sleep in one of the climbable trees encasing the spindly jungle path, when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a figure, simply standing there, frigid and statue-like. The creature was a humanoid, its bottom half essentially identical to one of an adult man. Its top half, on the other hand, was simply a skeleton, arms outstretched, one holding a scythe, the other a large piece or parchment. The paper simply had 5 huge letters scrawled across it, covering the entire page. I squinted, struggling to make out the letters, until eventually I managed to discern my name, *Kevin*. 
 
 
 At first I was terrified. This was the creature that had been giving me chase! However, as I continued to stare at it, my terror started to subside. It seemed to know that I was aware of its presence, and it seemed to be communicating as best as it could that it posed no direct danger to me. I then understood what its presence met: even little 8 year-old me knew how Death was represented by popular culture, and the top half of this creature fit that representation to the tee. Eventually, my mind managed to piece together what the presence of Death himself meant, and the terror returned. *He's waiting for me to die! * I thought to myself as we continued to stare at eachother, and I realized that that was also why he posed no direct danger to me. After all, *Death the being does not itself cause death, Death is just the result of death. * Embarrassingly enough, it took me a couple more minutes to fully comprehend the fact that the presence of Death meant that I was going to die soon, but hey, I was 8! 
 
 
 Surprisingly, death is n't all that bad, and Death is overall a pretty nice guy. Over the next 9 days, I learned to ignore his presence, even if said presence did signify the imminence of my own demise, and when I did finally die, during a particularly vicious encounter with the native fauna of the Amazon, it was n't all that surprising. After I was dead, Death embraced me with open arms, said his first words to me ( apparently the dude ca n't talk to the living ), which happened to be `` Welcome'', and together, hand in bony hand, we descended into the life-less, light-less abyss.
