Collecting Love

Chapter 1

They live in the clouds.

They are said to be beautiful, so that you don't feel afraid when they take you. Probably they scare you anyway. No one really knows what they are, why they do this. I don't know where the stories come from. The myths say that when your time has been spent, they come to collect you. No one knows why. No one who has seen them is here to be asked about them.

No one has seen them because they only come down to take a life.

When they come for you, you can't fight back. They take your life with them where they go, into the clouds. But is it the clouds? As everything else about them, no one knows. They are a thing to fear in my village. To some, just a myth. But my grandpa says that, myth or no, they'll come for you one day, just like they come for everyone else. And I've never yet in my seventeen years seen grandpa be wrong before.

My grandpa also says that the moon is their sun, and at night they are the stars we see in the sky. I don't know how he knows this, but somehow I know this is true, even if I don't know why. They are said to be as beautiful as the stars and as enchanting as the stars, to lure you to death, they say. But I don't believe they are evil. If they were evil there must be somewhere terrible waiting in the afterlife, and I don't believe that.

They come like snow, slowly. Up high they look like they fall straight from heaven. And they are people, but they are not. They are like ghosts. But this is wrong; they are not ghosts. They are the Collectors. They collect ghosts when it's time for them to move on.

They never collect anyone without a reason. They are not evil, they are not the ones who determine where you go when you go. They only take you there. They are your escorts. No matter what makes you go, they are always there to take you away, they know when you are about to go. Some say they decide when it's time.

If you fall ill and find no cure, they are there when you are taken by the fever and they watch the last beads of sweat roll down your back.

If you are murdered with a knife, they are there when the red droplets of blood splatter against the ground and starts flowing unhindered from your wound, and they are there when there is no blood left to flow.

If you fall into a lake and drown, they are there when the last breath of air escapes your lungs and they watch them fill with water, they watch you struggling to reach the surface and they watch you gasp in vain for oxygen, pulling in liquid instead.

If you are consumed by flames, they watch you burn.

I'm watching my village burn alongside them.

I don't know their reason for coming to my village. But I know they have a reason. They decide when it's time to go and they escort you to the place you need to be.

Many believe they are evil, that they are the ones who squeeze the breath out of your lungs. My grandpa and I believe that they only come to collect you.

I stand watching my fellow villagers from my safe place up on the hill run for their lives, trying to extinguish the flames in vain, hearing their frantic cries, their pleas. It's a reflex, I suppose. When the time comes you don't want it to be the end, even if it might not be. Maybe dying isn't the end. If it was, they wouldn't need to take you there.

I know it will soon be my turn. This place next to the tree on the hill over the valley in which my village was built will not conceal me forever, but it will be my final resting place. I have spent many childhood days climbing in this tree and resting in the soft grass below. Watching my village burn to the ground I see or rather hear something, something my grandpa never knew about the Collectors.

They are standing there, in front of their victims, or passengers, I think. I cannot see how they look from here, I see only their dark silhouettes, a slight shimmering in the air. I see the auras of my people leaving the bodies and following the Collectors away into oblivion. It is not me they wish to be seen by, it is the one they take. So I don't see them. Yet. Not until its my turn, when i will see them as clear as day, because they will want me to. But I hear them.

They whisper to the ones they come for, in the seconds before the deaths. At first I think they must be trying to frighten them, but they are whispering and singing, trying to reassure. Their whispering voices promise good things beyond, promise this is not the end, but the beginning.

Their song sweeps me into a daze, wraps around me like a warm blanket or a mothers arms. It's like a lullaby. I feel like a small child again, cuddled up by the fire with my grandpa on a cold night. It makes me feel completely safe.

I am so enchanted, so entranced that I don't wake from this until he lands in front of me.

Seeing him stand there makes me come to my senses. I remember that they are taking my village, burning it to the ground while I watch the light in the eyes of my friends, of my grandpa, die out, slowly, fading until the stare is dull and all that's left is an empty stare.

Now I can take it in. Take him in. Though it is nearly impossible. Because when I look at him and he fixes me with his otherworldly stare I know that I am lost. Lost in his eyes. I will never be able to tear away my gaze while his eyes are

He is perfect. He is almost more beautiful than the sun. He is an angel. I can not tell you how his hair is, the colour of his eyes, if he is boyish or grown. I can only say that his features are angelic and shifting- he is never the same. His look is ever-changing, one second he is a blond boy, a blue-eyed innocent child. The other he is the opposite, a grown man with the start of a beard and a muscled chest, tousled hair and kind eyes. I somehow do not find this disorienting. He is beautiful, and his eyes make me warm inside. The feeling that spreads in my body filling me up from my head to my toes, the way he looks at me, it is the same as the whispery song. I am safe, so impossibly safe standing here with him, secure as though in my mothers arms as I was all those years ago. Before she died. Before they took her. Like he's going to take me.

I can only hope he can take me to her.

He watches me and I wait for him to sing, bracing myself to be led into the bright orange and yellow flames that are consuming everything I love. Bracing myself to feel happy about it. Part of me is afraid, feels the need to survive for some reason. But I can't. If they take us, they take us all. That is the way it is. That is the way it has been for centuries.

He opens his mouth and sings.

His song is the loveliest of them all, and he isn't singing for me to feel safe, to let death come without fear. His lovely, breathy voice and sweet tones are singing for me to stay, telling me to be calm. Then he flies off into the night and they are all gone, just like that.

I stand in the sudden complete silence.

The fire has gone as quickly as it came. No need for the flames when the lives have been spent.

The people are gone now, I know this. My grandfather has gone. Their shells are lying about the ruins of my village, cast off like rubbish. But I know that they are no more than shells. The people I knew have gone to where they need to be.

Gone. All gone. All somewhere they need to be.

All but me.

Why?

I do not know how long I've stood there watching the smouldering ruin when a bird in a nearby tree starts to sing, telling me that dawn is breaking. The start of a new day. And with it a new thought has begun to blossom in my head.

I begin to walk on what used to be the path into what used to be my home.

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-Natalie