Author's Note: I confess, this is a guilty pleasure one for me. If you've read my work, you maybe can tell I have a fascination with Death as a character in the HP universe. To me, he's the ultimate gray character, because he will always be Dark (that's just who he is), but he also laments over what he has to do because he views life as beautiful.

I also wanted to vary my acrostic poem, but FFN kills the formatting, so I have to do the first letter of each line rather than any letter in the line. Stupid formatting.

Poetic Form: Acrostic

Cloak — Wand — Stone

Of all the things he'd done, it was by far the cruelest;

Mortals would always cling to the notion of forever, but he knows the truth:

Every life ends in death.

.

For centuries, the mortal plight has been riddled with an

Insatiable need, because their years, whether fifty or a hundred, are

Never enough. The beating heart always knows what comes next.

Death is forever lurking around the corner.

.

Maybe one day he'll know it, too, that dark stain on the horizon. After all,

Every living thing must one day come to an end.