A Gift in Silence

This painting was a commission created for Sami S, and the following story was written by their DM.

Since the beginning of time, to live was to defy nothingness—to borrow eternity only for a small slip of time. Immortality, however, was to reject life—to borrow so much that it no longer meant a thing. 

Death was a rejection of both. Death was a gentle embrace, the end of a good story, a hand guiding you into the dark. For the Goddess Adrienne, Death was as familiar as anything else. After all, she’d been born in death—carved of it, made peace with it. 

To be a Goddess of Death was not simply a feat of power, however. It was the final sacrifice, the final path to be paved. In the end, it would be only Adrienne, for that was death: final, and lonely. 

But death was the resting place of all life. A kaleidoscope of memory and color, delivered to her doorstep with each mortal that met their end. With each soul she guided, in the pit of her lonely heart, she asked: 

“Could this one stay?” 

Was it not the greatest sin for the final god, the god who would be the death of the world itself, to long for even the tiniest fraction of life?