Death is My Frenemy Rewritten (Book 3 of the Rewritten Death Chronicles)

Chapter 25: Faith in Us

LONG STORY SHORT, I HAD COVID. #NOT #ZE #VIBE

THEN I GOT BETTER AND I STARTED THIS CHAPTER, AKA THE HARDEST CHAPTER I'VE  PERHAPS EVER WRITTEN LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO. (Bear with me on this chapter it's a little convoluted lol.)

So please give this chapter a vote and leave lots of feedback to show your love for my return!!! :)

            I'd learned a lot about myself since entering the Unknown.

First, nothing is as it seems. That one goes without saying. I never anticipated these memories feeling so real that they sometimes made me lose my sense of reality.

Second, it was impossible to be happy for any length of time. Not here. Not in this twisted place with the constantly pressure of time, the unrelenting fear of, well, everything, and let's not forget the lingering threat of Caito and those damn Forsaken. Thank God, they hadn't been a major problem lately.

Third, I realized how relentlessly strong I was.

Seeing Death dying in the mausoleum had been the hardest thing I'd ever experienced. Dying sucked and all, and I definitely hadn't processed that entirely, but I was able to Uno-Reverse-Card that right away. Death was a different story. Bringing him back was no easy task. The only thing that kept me going was reminding myself that the Three believed in me, that I had some higher purpose to keep going. I had to keep going, I had to be strong and keep pushing forward.

My fourth lesson was how wrong I was about the third one.

The truth was, I wasn't always strong, and I only became my strongest to survive. Isn't that how it works, anyway? Strength is survival. It's the innate courage that weighs down your bones and keeps you standing when everything in you just wants to collapse. It's the resiliency that crawls across your skin and clings like a shield as you face a difficult choice you were unprepared for.

No, I wasn't always strong. How could I be? I wasn't perfect, I had emotions, fears––a whole lot of fears, and my heart was still more vulnerable than I wanted it to be. Like right now, how quickly my walls had dropped, and my heart had cracked wide open. All the pain I'd kept in leaking through my chest. Not this. Anything but this.

Anything but the first memory I'd encountered in the Unknown. Anything but a dream that what was once real in my world. Just as I remembered him, but somehow not the same, I stared at my Death in shock, waiting for everything to shatter again. For him to be gone once and for all and to face my worst fear of all. Losing him forever.

I was still registering how I'd even gotten here in the first place. I'd been fighting Victorian Death, and then Death's corpse had appeared and kissed me. He'd kissed me, and now I was here, in what, a new memory?

No, something about this felt different than a memory. The colors in Death's modernized gym looked drained, and it was so cold. Moving felt like shifting through water and my breath clung to the air like frost.

"Too loose or tight the tether," the Three Crawlers' voices feathered my ears, "both souls lost, forever."

I looked down at my myself, my eyes widening as I noticed the slight aura glowing off of my frame. No, the memory had not changed. My soul had traveled here, and my body was elsewhere. Was I unconscious? My body must have still been in the last memory at the castle, where Ace still was.

Shit. Ace.

Shit, my freaking body! It was with crazy demon-blood-addict Victorian Death. If I woke up and my arm was getting gnawed off by V.D I'd be so pissed.