[ WP ] What if Death found a reason to live ?

It is, under the right circumstances and with strong willpower, rather easy to detach oneself from something to which one is not already connected. This I learnt through the pesky subjectivity of personal experience, spread out over … goodness, how long has it been now? Fifty thousand years? A hundred? Not even the humans know for certain, and so much of my concept of time relies upon them that I can not possibly say how long it's been for certain. 
 
 The point is that I had once been comfortably separate from the souls I took to whichever great thereafter they sought but now am feeling that maybe this is no longer true. 
 
 I met a girl. Not – not like that, please do n't presume anything lewd about this meeting. Beyond the fact that I am a mere vehicle ridden by souls so freshly ripped from their bodies that they still have that sickly living scent, no more human than the slabs of rock the litter the earth, she is a child in the most literal sense, which is to say she can not be any older than five human years. 
 
 Perhaps met is not the best word to use, come to think of it. 
 
 I know a girl. Yes, better. We have in fact met several times now, me hovering over her worse than her father, her staring back at me with more life in her eyes than I've seen, collectively, across my entire existence. Now, allow me the opportunity to express something I usually leave unstated: I am not infallible. Quite the opposite, actually; people best me all the time. They feel my hands wrap around their throats and they push me away as if I were no stronger than an infant, and they breathe their life back in through their nostrils. 
 
 Usually, I only meet such people twice. Or if I'm to meet them several times, it happens over a short period, often as quick an evening. This girl, though, I met half on half a dozen occasions, beginning with the moment of her birth and ending today, which I say because I have made a decision and intend to follow it through. 
 
 There is a similarity between the girl and myself: we both know nothing of what it means to live. By extension, I have found another thing we have in common: both of us would like very much to discover life. 
 
 More people than her father stand around her this time. Alarms ring through the room, sharp and shrill, and people are shouting commands at each other because my success is almost always their failure, and such thoughts scare them into anger. The little girl's eyelids are closed but I do n't need to look beyond them to see the life beating in her with the impossible determination of an flame in a hurricane. I want to know how it feels to be desperate. What it means to fear me. Why the girl wants so badly to live with death curled up in her body, rotting her from the inside out. 
 
 I said early that it is easy to detach from something to which one does not belong; so too can I say that it was simple for me to separate myself from my responsibilities. I shut my eyes, I closed my mind, and I jumped from my podium – literal podium, though I suppose some arguments can be in favour of it being figurative – and that was that. 
 
 In a world where you stand alone as a present force of the supernatural, it is easy to feel invincible. After all, no mortal is a match for me, which is not something that I state from a position of arrogance but rather as an objective fact. 
 
 The girl is not mortal. 
 
 I see that now as she rises above the earth on a pedestal of light, white wings stretched from her back, glistening even through the night. An angel, a devil, I am not sure which she is yet; only that she must have a very good reason for usurping my throne. Perhaps she has some power over me; perhaps I have become her thrall, manipulated into a position of indifference from which I will make no attempt at restoring my title. 
 
 Perhaps a lot of things. Perhaps nothing. I do not intend to think on it for much longer; the world is still young, still full of life, and I feel it in my veins. 
 
 We will meet again when my time comes. 

