78 - Awake

Grim had done what he’d intended. He took Maia’s pain so she would be strong enough to have a successful birth. He’d released her from her bargain, knowing she’d be more willing to follow through with the BC if she felt she had a choice in the matter. He still needed her to continue the challenge, and if that meant making sure she was more willing and better prepared, well, he’d done his best to tell her what she needed to know.

But Maia was too curious, and there were some questions Grim didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to tell her he had once lived in the deepest pit of the underworld where the vilest of undead beings were still imprisoned.  He didn't want to tell her he had far less power over the undead pit creatures than she believed. He didn’t want to tell her that he was not originally an undead at all, or that the Iblisan, Kadru, who had ordered Maia’s recent abduction, was the same individual who had torn his living soul from his body so long ago. And he certainly didn’t want to explain to her that—misguided fool though he had been—he had completely deserved his punishment for what he’d done.  For that, and for what he had yet to do...

But transporting Maia to and from the underworld had drained the Reaper’s powers greatly. And when she went into labor with the child of Kadru’s undead mummy minion Zhemerkhet, he took on all the pain of the childbirth as well as the death she would’ve succumbed to during it had he not intervened. The strain of keeping Maia alive rendered him unconscious, and Grim crumpled to the ground.

While the Reaper slept, time moved on.

But from that day forward, all the ghosts of the newly dead haunted the overworld in ever greater numbers, having no one to reap them and guide their souls into the underworld.

And while Grim lay oblivious, the undying creatures from the underworld’s deepest pit sought escape from their prison.  More and more of these soulless zombies managed to find their way through the thinner veils that separated the overworld from the underworld—the most fragile veils being located in the town of Moonlight Falls.

But eventually, the echo of a voice found its way into the Reaper’s dark and dreamless sleep and tugged at his consciousness. It sounded as though someone was calling out to him from far away.

Maia?! 

And the Grim Reaper awoke.

He scrambled to his feet, only to feel himself abruptly hurtled towards the overworld as though he’d been catapulted by a giant rubber-band, and then snapped into a living body he was quite familiar with, although he had not possessed it for millennia.

 “Samael?!”

It was Grim’s own true name, a name that had not been spoken by anyone for eons, one that he had long since forgotten, but was now carried to his ear on the breath of his beloved.

For a brief moment Samael gazed at Maia, the woman he had loved so many lifetimes ago; the woman he had never stopped loving in all the ages since. And now the power of Maia’s wish and the magic that sought to reunite them had returned him to the overworld. At last, she remembered him and had somehow set him free!

Samael quivered with barely suppressed emotion as he reached out his arm to tenderly stroke Maia’s cheek.

But suddenly, it seemed to him that the earth itself turned inside out, its molten heart burning away his physical body as his consciousness was forced to flee from his corporeal form.

Samael found himself back in the underworld, in the skeletal body of the Grim Reaper once again.

Grim threw back his head and screamed in despair at his loss, his cries of anguish echoing throughout the hollow caverns of the underworld.

But he understood all too well the reason for his sudden return. After all, how could he return to the realm of the living as Maia’s soulmate when he no longer possessed his own soul??  

Without a soul of his own, he was unable to stay in the overworld with Maia as her soulmate and fulfill the wish she had made. And when his consciousness had been returned to the form of the Reaper, the fairies of the well had been obligated to give Maia the nearest probable substitute they could, based on the parameters of her wish—a man who didn’t necessarily look like Samael, but with whom she shared a romantic bond and deep connection in the past.

And so, they brought her Reid, a man who, unlike Grim, had a soul.

They brought her Reid, the only man in existence who had nearly as deep of a romantic connection to Maia as Samael himself had.

They brought her Reid, the same man whose discovery of Samael and Maia’s love in the distant past had ultimately led to their age-old separation and torment.

The agony of having his soulmate stolen away from him all over again before he could even touch her as Samael was almost more than he could bear. He had to tell Maia everything, he had to help her understand, and he still had to find and reclaim his own torn-out soul. Only then could they end the curse that had been laid upon them; only then would they be free to be together again. And when the opportunity to see Maia again presented itself, he would have to act with nothing but the limited power he had left in his still depleted body, no matter the cost.  But Samael was the Grim Reaper, and in order to even leave the underworld to get near Maia—somebody close to her would have to die...