[ WP ] The personification of Death is a very discerning creature , and has n't let you die for centuries . This is your 200th meeting with Death .

Quietly and with no great sense of urgency I slipped back to the warm presence of my dearest, longest-lived friendship. We had known each other for what must have been a myrieteris or more. When you know someone for that long they start to seem less like a friend, lover, or family member. They start to seem more like another aspect of you. A different, physical personification of all the deep things in your heart. 
 
 Like most of my deaths I barely remember dying. Sometimes I feel pain, sometimes I do not. In a few of my deaths I were surrounded by loved ones, passing quietly without affair. In others I passed so quickly I found myself back in this place where an eye-blink before I was standing tall and proud, alive. And in too many deaths to want to remember I lingered in suffering. **Death** has seen the other side. It dares not look too long. 
 
 So he keeps me here. 
 
 The same person put back again and again to live new lives, to experience new things, always to return to **Death's** door with new pleasures, new pains, and new depths of emotions for it's delight. Why it picked me I'll never know. 
 
 Maybe I picked *it*. 
 
 Sometimes I forget. I'll live an entire life unaware of what death means for me, and at **Death's** door I'll remember. I think it likes those deaths the most, the sudden despair and anguish as all my myriad lives slam back in to focus all at once. 
 
 And the worst part of it all? It chooses. It chooses every time. **Death** makes a great show of the process, too. It'll weigh my soul, stare in my eyes, pick through my memories. The first time I came here it reached up and wiped a tear from my cheek, and at its touch I quivered through to my bones. I felt it reach through me - *past* me - and tug the threads of what I was before. 
 
 Before I was me. 
 
 Death was supposed to be my release, the period to give my life sentence meaning. I remember my tears at my first embrace with **Death**. They were n't from sadness or sorrow, or anger or fear. They were tears first of relief, then of disbelief, and finally, they were tears of *rage*. 
 
 I wanted it to end. I wanted that end to give me my meaning. 
 
 **But you and I are not so lucky. You and I are fated as one. We are one, together. I at my eternal guard, you to keep my eternal sanity. You chose this. I chose this. Do these last 16,432 years weigh on you? Would you like to see beyond my door? ** 
 
 He asks. Every time he asks. 
 
 **I have seen beyond the doors of death, *my* doors, and I choose my path wisely. Would you look at all that your death can offer and walk away? ** 
 
 There is a reason I'm here. There is a reason **Death** keeps me here. 
 
 **There is no reason that I have to keep you here. You keep yourself. Come. Look. ** 
 
... 
 
 Beyond the doors of death lay knowledge. Knowledge of what I once was, of the threads from before. Laying there stretched across an empty, infinite plane with no beginning. And no end. 
 
 The threads have no individual sense of self, but tied together they *move*. And mine move beautifully. I peak in closer and peer at a knot that more and more seems familiar. It's throbbing, pulsating, demanding my attention. It's... it's... 
 
 **Go on. Look. ** 
 
 It's my failure. I... did all this. I created... everything. I was arrogant. Life was never supposed to be this isolated, life was never supposed to be this painful. I wronged an entire *universe*. 
 
 Death is too good for me. I need purgatory. 
 
 **Go now, leave. A new life awaits**. 
 
 I am God. This is my penance. 
 
 
 

