by T. A. Pratt
“Shut up.”
“Never. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She didn’t feel disloyal to her late husband up here, as she’d feared. She missed the Walking Death, and always would, especially with the burden of perfect recall granted by her godhood, but he would want her to go on, and continue their good work. She couldn’t be with him, but she should be with someone, and Zufi was at least a good choice, and maybe a great one.
Lao Tsung nodded to the musicians, and they struck up Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.” The crowd let out a collective ahhhh as they turned and watched Zufi, once the Bay Witch, now the Bride of Death, emerge from the shimmering primordial sea. She wore a gown of rippling silver, some substance that glittered like jewels but flowed like water.
Zufi proceeded up the aisle in stately splendor, nodding serenely to the guests, and then stood facing Marla. She was stunning, her hair shining under a tiara of pearls. “Hello,” she said. “I am extremely nervous.”
“Want to bow out? Last chance.”
“Do not say such things,” Zufi said. “I am yours, and you are mine, and this place is ours.”
Lao Tsung cleared his throat. “Shall we?”
Marla nodded.
“Dearly beloved,” Lao Tsung said, and ran through a twist on the familiar opening spiel: we are gathered to witness and celebrate and so on. Marla barely paid any attention until he said, “I understand you’ve written your own vows?”
Marla nodded. Hers were short, and she’d memorized them. “The first time I saw Zufi, I knew she was brilliant and ferocious and strange in the best ways, and as I got to know her over the years, she impressed me more and more with her hidden depths.” She glanced at the crowd. “That was an ocean joke.” The crowd replied with a few dutiful chuckles. Ah, well. She’d never been a comedian. “Zufi is just about the strongest woman I’ve ever met, and there’s no one I’d rather spend a sizable fraction of eternity getting to know better.”
Lao Tsung nodded. “Zufi?”
The Bride looked at Marla, directly and disconcertingly as always, and for a horrible moment Marla was terrified it was all a trick somehow, and that Zufi was about to spew black sand in a torrent from her mouth.
Instead, Zufi said, “When I first met Marla she was loud and impulsive and quick to anger and difficult to be around. She was often wrong but never uncertain. Now she is loud and thoughtful and quick to anger and comforting to be around. She is occasionally wrong but no longer afraid to admit it and ask forgiveness and make amends. I have seen her change from a person driven by anger to a person driven by love and the desire to protect those who cannot protect themselves. The person she has become gives me faith that I could myself become something better, and that the world can be better with us. We will make that better world together, us two, for as much of forever as we are granted.” She looked at the crowd. “That is all. That is my vows. I am finished.”
“Then by the power invested in me by the chthonic deities,” Lao Tsung, “I now pronounce you Bride and Death.”
The magic happened. Marla knew from her own experience marrying Death that, as the mortal in this marriage, Zufi wouldn’t feel much of anything, but Marla certainly did: it was like an elephant had been sitting on her chest for so long she’d forgotten what it was like to take a deep breath. Now the elephant was gone, and everything was lighter, and easier, and right.
“This is the part when we kiss,” Zufi said. “But only a little, and then we will dance, and then later when we are alone, we will kiss more, and things. Yes?”
“Yes, my queen,” Marla said, and did as she was bid.
They had a reception in the throne room, with Zufi and Marla sitting side by side on matched thrones of ice and skulls, because Pelham had an eye for thematic pageantry. The newlyweds received their guests, shook hands, kissed cheeks, laughed, and thanked people for coming. The band moved in with them and played songs they could dance to, and everyone reveled, drinking rare (and in some cases wholly imaginary) vintages.
Marla was used to being the center of attention, but mostly at councils of war or the midst of battles: this was different, and it was pretty nice. The night passed in a blur of impressions for Marla: Marzi dancing with Ernesto, ever the flirt, even in death; Elsie trying to spike the punch bowl until Pelham chased her away; Genevieve twirling on the dance floor, her scarves flying; Marla herself dancing with her jerkass brother, who’d coped with his hatred of the magical world by getting really drunk; Zufi dancing with Marla’s mom, who laughed her head off; and, of course, dancing with her own bride, cheek to cheek, swaying to the music while everyone toasted them; Muscles Malone handing out cigars like someone had just had a baby; Rondeau holding up the phone streaming an image of Bradley’s face, both of them singing to her.
It was a long night—longer than anyone realized, with time stretched out with subjective magic—but eventually, it came to an end. The living were shadow-swept back to their homes and the dead returned to their afterlives, until no one was left from the world above except for Rondeau, her oldest friend. Zufi retired to the bedchamber so they could say their farewells alone.
She sat on the dais by the thrones, and Rondeau sat beside her. He glanced at her sidelong. “I know I have to go,” he said. “But... is this really goodbye forever?”
Marla nodded. “That world up there... it’s not my world anymore. Or, it is, but I have to take care of the whole thing now. I need to stay in the underworld from now on. I’ve been half-assing this for way too long.” She punched him on the shoulder. “But you’re you, Rondeau, so you’ll get killed a bunch, and pop down here to pick up a new body every once in a while, yeah? We’ll visit when you do.”
He looked around the throne room, still hung with black crepe paper and blue streamers. “We’ve come a long way from being a couple of homeless street kids, huh? I’m Pit Boss of Vegas and you’re a goddamn god.” He chuckled. “You always did have to show me up, huh?”
“Come here, you ass.” She wrapped him up in a hug, and for the first time the whole night, she cried a little. “Damn it. You’re not supposed to see me cry. I’m ruining my mystique.”
“Cry away. Why not? We’ve crossed a continent of sorrows together, and emerged at last on a brighter shore.”
She leaned back and frowned at him. “Rondeau, that was very nearly eloquent. What the hell?”
“I run a city now. I’m a man of consequence. I’m fancy as hell.” He squeezed her hand, kissed her cheek, and smiled at her, his own eyes shining with tears. “All right, Marla. Send me home. Have a good eternity. Goodbye.”
“Until we meet again,” she corrected.
Then she stood alone in her throne room, and thought about her past.
When she was done with that, she went into her future.
Book Three: The Marriage
One Door Closes
Marla Mason—formerly a runaway, an apprentice, a mercenary, the witch queen of Felport, an occult detective, a monster hunter, a demi-god, a wife, and other things, but for most of her lifespan, the co-regent of the underworld and a god of Death—did not live happily ever after.
She didn’t live happily ever after because she didn’t live, precisely, and because she didn’t live forever, and because happiness was never a part of her essential nature, but for many of the centuries that followed, she was happy enough, and happier than she’d ever expected to be.
She withdrew from the mortal world, as she’d known she must. She still watched the world, both in a larger sense, when tending her garden of lights, and in the personal sense, when she attended individual deaths, or peeked in on the world with her deadsight, but she did not directly intervene again. When problems arose that required direct godly intervention in the world, she sent Zufi, who was still mortal at her core, and did not deform the nature of reality with her very presence the way Marla did.
Their marriage was, overall, a good one. They spent a few decades in intermittently passionate
love, some years as awkward roommates, and the greater part of one century in frosty professional courtesy, but most of their tenure was a companionable and friendly one: knowing one another’s strengths, and knowing they could depend on them.
Marla never stopped missing her late husband. One of the many burdens of godhood was a perfect memory, so his face (his many faces) never faded from her mind, and she remembered every word they’d spoken, every laugh they’d shared, every touch, every caress. She never stopped grieving his loss, and that, too, made her a better god of Death, or so she believed. She was always conscious of the consequences of loss.
Marla attended the deaths of her dearest friends in person, because she owed it to them, though some of her dearest ones did not die, and could not come to dwell with her. Bradley had various adventures in immortality, which may be recounted elsewhere. Rondeau went through a succession of bodies, and had many misadventures of his own, and she sometimes let him stop by her study or throne room to say hello before he returned to his life. Eventually he and Bradley left to explore the briarpatch, and the worlds beyond, and did not return before the end of Marla’s tenure came.
Hamil died with Marla at his bedside; Jason died cursing her name; Nicolette died only when Felport itself did, and Marla was there, too, on that dark day, remembering how to weep again after a very long time. Eventually Pelham grew weary of service, though he never would have said so, and she granted him rest, in an afterlife he perceived as real, that allowed him to explore all the places in the world he’d never had the chance to see in life.
During her reign Marla saw her reach extend beyond Earth: there had been humans on space stations for a while, but it wasn’t long before she attended a death on the moon, and on Mars, and when humans settled in the asteroids and then among the stars, Marla was there with them, and soon Earth was not the only world she oversaw. She’d wondered, when the first human was born off-planet, if that world would conjure its own underworld, and its own god of death, but it seemed all the children of Earth were hers, wherever they roamed, and so Marla saw more of the universe than she’d ever imagined possible.
She feared for her children, and she was proud of them, and she loved them, from the King of the Withdrawn dreaming his computer dreams in a pod on Earth, to the poorest helium miner on the moon, to the captain of the starship White Raven. She loved them, even as they tried and tried and tried to transcend death with magic and science, always returning eventually to her embrace, and her comforts.
There was no end to death, because there was no end to change, but Marla saw definitions of life expand, and she was fascinated but not surprised when a psychopomp brought her the first soul that had been born in a quantum computer’s processes instead of in flesh. She looked in on that soul’s afterlife, and found it beautiful, and strange.
Her reign was eventful, and while there were threats and dangers, she was not devoured by monsters from other worlds, or captured by a sorcerer (not for long, anyway), or otherwise destroyed. She began to wonder if she would last for as long as there was any life to oversee: last until the last star burned out.
But a day came, sitting on her throne of obsidian beside Zufi, who sat on her own throne of coral, when Marla’s bride said, “I grow weary.”
Marla nodded. “I fell asleep, yesterday. Actually asleep. Just a short nap, and no dreams that I remember, but... yes.”
“Our time is not ours for much longer, is it?”
“Yeah. Even death may die. Nothing lasts forever.”
“The tides do not stop.”
“Well, they did that one time, for a little while, before we fixed that thing with the moon.”
Zufi chuckled. “I speak metaphorically.”
“Oh, right. You know that’s dangerous. The universe sometimes takes us literally. I think we’re on our way out, though. Natural causes. An easier ending than I ever expected.”
“I will go the primordial sea, to find an afterlife of my own. But you....”
“I get the answer to the last great mystery: where do the gods go when they die?” She sighed. “Except I bet I won’t be around to realize I know the answer. I’ve got a bad feeling it’s oblivion. From out of the primordial soup we come, and back into the primordial soup we go. I think I’m going to melt and become raw material for the next god of Death.”
“That does not seem fair.”
“Ha. You rule the underworld, Zufi. You know fair doesn’t have much to do with anything.”
They couldn’t settle their affairs, because life and death went on regardless, but they kept up with their work as best they could in the waning days. One afternoon Zufi curled up on the ground in an ornamental garden, and shimmered, and vanished, and where she’d been, a pond appeared, a perfect circle ten feet across, with a border of crushed seashells. Marla fell to her knees beside the pool and wept. Her tears made ripples in the water.
Then Marla took up her sword, went to the bottom of the primordial sea, and sat cross-legged on the edge of the wellspring of chaos. She could feel that pool pulling at her, wanting to dissolve her, but she’d always been a creature of formidable will, and ruling hell for centuries had not diminished her resolve. It was possible, she knew, for two fully divine gods of Death to co-exist simultaneously, though not for long without damaging the substance of the world. Her late husband’s predecessor had refused to leave, until the Walking Death forced him.
Marla had no intention of holding on here forever—she’d learned the value of dying gracefully, after all—but she did want to get a look at her successor. If it was a monster, like the old skull-headed New Death had been, with an eye toward retribution and suffering and inflicting misery... well, her sword could kill gods, and it would again.
So she sat, and in time, a figure emerged from the pool. They looked like a woman at first, and then shimmered, and looked like a man, and then shimmered again, and looked like neither, or both, or something in between, or outside. Such binaries had been largely irrelevant on Earth for a long time, so it made sense the new god would be as protean and fluid as their subjects.
The new god looked at Marla for a moment, eyes dark, and then looked upward. “So much....” they murmured. “So much life.”
“Are you crazy and/or evil?” Marla said.
“I don’t think so,” they said. “Would I be able to tell?”
“Good point. Tell me what you sense up there. What are the living creatures feeling?”
They cocked their head. “Many things.”
“Which feelings do you like?”
They smiled, and it was brilliant. The new god was literally full of light. “The joy. The hope. The thrill of the new. The comfort of the familiar and beloved.”
“What are you going to do?”
The new god lowered their head, seeming to take the question seriously, then looked at Marla with calm regard. “My best?”
“Good enough.” Marla said, and offered her sword, hilt first, and was surprised when it transformed into a long-stemmed flower. She hadn’t willed that alteration, and it would have never occurred to her to make her most powerful weapon into something that lived and grew. The new god inhaled the scent of the pale white blossom and smiled again. “Will you stay long?” they said. “I could use some advice.”
“There’s a soul named Pelham,” she said. “He knows just about everything I know, and he’s a lot nicer than me.”
“I will look for him.” They gazed around again. “I see you did good work here, Marla Mason. I will try to make you proud.”
“You can’t make a nothingness in the void proud, kid, but I appreciate the sentiment.” Exhaustion pulled at Marla like a riptide, dragging everything essential in her away. The edges of her vast vision began to turn gray. She sat down again, and let her feet dangle in the primordial pool. The sand around her was white instead of gray, now, and there were trees, and sunlight, even here. The new god’s vision was already superseding her own. How dark her world had been, now that sh
e looked back on it. But lighter than it was when she started.
She lay down on the sand, remembering another beach, long ago, where she’d died, back when she was mortal: her husband Death had been there on the other side, waiting for her with balloons, welcoming her to the afterlife. She’d been upset at the time, but really, had that been such a bad way to go? Leaving a life where she was loved, and her work mattered, to enter an afterlife where she was also loved, and her work mattered even more?
She’d been the luckiest woman on Earth, for certain values of the word.
With her eyes closed, her cheek pressed against the sand, and the new god of Death murmuring reassurances over her, Marla Mason died for the last time.
And then she opened her eyes, in the place gods go after they die.
She sat up. Running water (or some liquid, anyway, it was better not to assume) burbled nearby, and there were things that might have been trees, or perhaps crystal formations, all around her. On the far side of the silver river rose a city, all jewel-tones and impossible angles and spires and domes.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she said. “Gods get their own afterlife. That’s some serious VIP shit right there.”
Someone cleared their throat behind her, and she turned her head.
“Took you long enough,” her husband said, and kissed her for the first time in centuries.
Acknowledgments
This is the last Marla Mason novel, so I have a lot of people to thank. First to Cameron Dawson Panee, one of my oldest friends, one of Marla’s biggest fans, and the first reader on some of the very earliest Marla Mason stories. (This is a character I was scribbling about in a disorganized way as far back as 1998, after all.)
Thanks to Horrorfind, the tiny (alas, now defunct) magazine that published “Encounter on a Back Street” back in 2003, the first piece that ever appeared about Marla, though it doesn’t fit in the canon anymore: it’s about a sorcerer who’s confronted by the angel of death, who demands the woman turn over an enchanted blade that turns out to be the angel’s scythe. (That piece of flash fiction formed the seed for a whole novel called Dead Reign. I’m very efficient.) Thanks to all the other editors who bought stories about Marla Mason over the years too.
