You meet Death, as everyone does, on the last day of your life. It greets you at a crossroads, and that isn't a metaphor; you're at the junction of Mot Road and Suchart Street when it appears before you, looking exactly as you might imagine Death personified would look—hooded, faceless, bearing a scythe of smoke and endings, ominous and yet not threatening. Death is simply there. More there than anything else, in fact, making everything else feel ephemeral and unreal. Yourself included.

TIME TO GO, it says, or whatever the equivalent is for a meaning impressed on reality and filtered in such a way so that your mortal mind can comprehend.

You grit your teeth and ground yourself against the summons already hooking into you, peeling your Self from your body with the delicacy of a web painstakingly unravelled, and you look Death right in its non-face. "No," you tell it, with such firmness that, for a moment, your "No" is more like NO — not words, but immutable fact.

Death is, for a moment, taken aback. (Quite an achievement. Death has never been surprised before, having seen, quite literally, all.)

NO?

"No. There is still much I have to do, and I refuse to die until things are better, and that is a—" THREAT.

The last word reverberates, beyond language or air or vibrations or anything on the physical plane, and Death--

Death wavers.

Death has never wavered. Not in all of existence.

You smile grimly, unhitch Death's demands from your mortal coil, and turn away from it.

And it lets you go.

And the world trembles, preemptive shivers.

No one is ready for what is to come.
​
But you are.