1804

I remember my first encounter with what I thought was Death. At the time, it had only been an appropriate accommodation in regards to how I lived my life. It had been barely a thought, a worry in my mind. Death was, and always had been the furthest thing away from my thoughts. The first time that I did encounter this thing called Death it terrified me, because I always classified it as a continuation of life, not a person. It had just been an ordinary night; an ordinarily sinful night and now that I think about it the encounter with Death had, quite in fact been eerily fitting. It had been one of those nights where in the lowest pit of my stomach I just knew that something was wrong, or something was going to go wrong. Death's breath blew down the back of my neck, it flirted with the dying leaves on the trees and it whistled through the cracks of my home.

Now, I was not the type of girl who let the wind scare her to pieces, but there had just been something about this night, like I was standing in the middle of Death Valley… Big Daddy Reaper was ready to pull me into his waiting clutches, ready to drag me into the dark hole that his opened arms created. Wide open, and ready for my soul.

His claws scraped at my bared arms, my cheeks and my vulnerable throat.

Death was teasing me. Taunting me, inviting me in, he begged for me to join him. Clara, Claaaaraaaa he seemed to whisper in my ear, sending a chill right down to the deepest depths of my bones. A chill so cold that it's like hell had frozen over. His icy fingers toyed with the leaves, beckoning me closer and closer until; finally, he would be able to wrap those boney digits right around my throat, choking the life from my lungs.

It felt like he already had.

There was no air in my lungs, in fact, for the past twenty minutes I had been struggling with the action of breathing. It seemed, as if, the cold air around me had filtered through my nose and mouth and straight into my lungs, forcing them to turn into ice. Fear erupted though my nerves like fireworks, my eyesight going in and out of focus. My brain was going into overdrive, mistaking pain for pleasure, cold for warmth and reason for insanity. Surely there wasn't anything really wrong, right? Being alone in a house with two young children was setting my teeth on edge, with not a neighbor for miles and a storm on the way, I'm sure my hair was just out of place. Was I really justified in worrying so much, very little ever happened in my town and what was the big deal with a little before the storm action?

Those next few steps towards and into my house were agonizingly long, and painful. The ice in my lungs was migrating north towards my brain, which slowly constrained the mobility of my limbs. My hands had to literally pull me along but my willpower was only so strong. Immediately after the door shut, all sounds became muted to the point where what I could hear was muffled. I didn't hear my siblings turning in their beds; I didn't hear the creaking of the house. I didn't even hear the trees and their activities outside. My back turned rigid at every passing shadow, every corner appeared to have a set of eyes watching me but still I pressed on to the upper loft of my home. A loft only big enough for one room but somehow it had been split into two, my own and my siblings' room. The heavy wooden door eased open at the brushing of my finger tips and I quickly glanced at the unmoving form of my brother in the first bed, the varied colour of the blankets around his head going unnoticed at first glance, the figure looming over the second figure in bed however, did not.

First, my sister's blue eyes stared emptily at me, but the last thing I saw was those hideously wild hazel eyes. They were the eyes of an Animal.

The eyes of a monster.

No, Death was definitely not a person.