Movement Seven — VI. The End of Death

His reign, whatever it was, whatever it lasted, did not end in any way the surviving accounts agree on either.

Some souls who claim to have watched his territory from a careful distance say he simply stopped being seen one day, the way a soul sometimes simply stops being seen, with no fanfare and no explanation offered to anyone still watching. Others insist something changed in the water itself before he vanished — that it grew stiller, colder, for a long stretch of time no one could measure with any confidence, before eventually returning to whatever passed for its ordinary cruelty. A very small handful of accounts, treated by most who repeat them as little more than campfire elaboration, claim he simply walked out one day the way he'd once walked young souls into the water — calm, unhurried, and did not come back.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I don't know which of these is true, if any of them are. I don't know whether he faded, the way so many souls eventually fade. I don't know whether some older, stranger power finally decided his reign had gone on long enough. I don't know whether he is, even now, standing somewhere in the gray distance of this world, watching, the way he was always said to watch. This account has no reliable claim on any of it, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than dress up a guess as something more certain than it is.