When Death came to claim my heart, it found me waiting.

I’d spent my last days preparing the sigils, claw-scratched runes across slate tiles, the walls scoured clean with my last cataclysmic exhalation. My lair lay sacrosanct, pentagrams within salt circles within binding latticework of the finest arcane prescription.

And Death looked at me from the heart of my designs, and chuckled.

“None of this will hold me,” said Death. Their voice was cool like a mountain stream, as deep and welcoming as the dark beneath.

“I know,” said I.

“Then why waste the little time you had left?”

“To delay you. So you could ask for my consent.”

Death paused then, tested its talons against the rude bindings my last breaths had wrought. They held, but barely.

“You consented by being born, child.”

I expected more from Death, and I told them so.

“Consent cannot be implicit; it must be freely given. Or else you are merely a brigand, a thief of life.”

“If I asked, how often would I be denied? You beg immortality.” Death shook their head, heavy with scales and bone. “If not now, when? When will enough life have slipped through your claws that you will relent?”

“I don’t know.” My shoulders rose and fell. “But it matters that you ask.”

“Fine. Are you ready?”

Slowly, I exhaled.

“Yes.”