'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"It's very strange, if you'll forgive my saying so."

"What is very strange?" Arásy asked, looking up from her sister-in-law's letter.

The nursemaid fiddled with her apron. "Grand Duke Kilan, my lady."

"Kilan? What's he done now?" Arásy hoped her son hadn't gone off on a picnic by himself again. The last time he did that, the entire household had organised itself into search parties. They were on the verge of calling out the guards when he waltzed through the door, unharmed and unaware of how long he'd been gone.

"It's not so much what he's done as... how he is." The nursemaid looked around nervously and lowered her voice as if telling a great secret. "Ever since his fall, he's been different. Grand Duchess Varan is just fine, now she's stopped insisting she's supposed to be dead--"

Arásy winced. Kilan and Varan had, for reasons known only to themselves, decided to climb a statue. Predictably, they had fallen. Varan had hit her head, and when she came to she had raved about Death taking her away and then bringing her back. If Arásy never again had to hear her daughter beg Death to come for her, it would be too soon.

"--but Kilan has become so strange! He keeps correcting his history tutors, insisting they're getting their facts wrong--"

"All children go through a phase when they think they know all there is to know," Arásy pointed out reasonably. "Some of them even grow out of it."

"--and last night he begged me to stay with him and not let "them" take him. I asked him who was going to take him and where, and he wouldn't answer. He just said he didn't want to go with them "this time". I think you should have the doctor examine him for head injuries, and that's a fact."

"I hardly think that's necessary," Arásy replied. "He's just a child with a perfectly normal (though incomprehensible to you and I) imagination. He'll grow out of it."

~~~~

When his parents had said goodnight to him, and the nursemaid had tucked him in bed and turned off the light, Kilan sat up in his bed and pulled the quilt closer around him. The moons' eerie silver light filtered through the window and its gauzy curtains, casting jagged shadows on the walls.

In these moments, after he was left alone and before Death arrived, Kilan tried to calculate how many hours were in ten years. On the planet of Niorla, days were usually twenty-eight hours long. Nights, therefore, were fourteen hours long. There were four hundred and eight days in a year. This much he established easily; indeed, he had already known it. It was when he tried to work out how many hours of night there were in a year that he got confused. There were over eleven hundred hours in a year. Half of those hours, then, must be night. Did that mean there were over five thousand hours of night in a single year?

He had given Death ten years of his life. She took those years by bringing him to the Land of the Dead every night and returning him to life every morning. It wasn't a terrible arrangement. In fact, he quite enjoyed it when he was actually in the Land of the Dead. The worst part was the disorientation of being half in and half out of each world.

A rustle of fabric heralded Death's arrival. She stood beside his bed, a gaunt shadow in the moonlight. She held out her hand.

"Come, child."

Kilan took her hand.

~~~~

It was common among mortals, Death knew from her long experience with them, to reckon their age from some set point -- usually their birth. Death did not. She had never been born. She had come into existence when the first mortal took its first breath, and she had know immediately who she was and what her purpose was.

Since then, she had seen the birth and death of entire galaxies. She had gathered the souls of civilisations long since lost and forgotten, and been alternatively deified, vilified or both by cultures returned to the dust they came from. In all that time, among all those souls, there had been many who intrigued her by their actions.

Kilan was one of those. She had grown quite fond of the boy, in her own way, and looked forward to the day he would die and become fully hers.

But there was a problem. Until his death, she had only ten years with him. She, of all beings, knew how short ten years were. If she took those ten years by bringing him to her realm every night, they would pass and she would be left unable to see him until he died. She had a solution to this, she thought. Instead of bringing him to her realm every night, she would allow him to remain wholly in the living world until he was grown, then she would bring him here whenever she -- or he -- wanted to.

Considering what was in store for him later in life, he might see it as a welcome escape.

Some of her Reapers thought she had been a fool to make a bargain with someone so young. They were wrong. A person's age meant very little to her. A mortal might consider Kilan a child, but he was old enough to think for himself, old enough to make decisions whether adults recognised those decisions as valid or not, old enough to die. In her eyes, that made him as good as an adult.

And yet there were differences between Kilan as he was now and Kilan as he would be in ten or twenty years' time. Not merely physical differences -- what did those matter to her? He would have no physical body in her realm -- but differences in his soul. A child's soul was brighter than an adult's ever could be, but an adult's soul was more interesting with all its scars and shadows. She wanted to be near him then, to see the changes his soul went through as he aged.

There was nothing else for it. This would be the last night she saw him for at least ten years.

~~~~

"Our agreement will change somewhat, after tonight." Death did not look at him as she spoke.

Sudden panic seized Kilan. "You can't kill Varan!"

"I have no intention of killing Varan. We made a deal, and I will keep to it. I am merely changing the way I keep it. You will grow up, entirely in the Land of the Living without these trips to my realm, and when you are grown I will bring you back here again."

Kilan tried to puzzle out this explanation. "So... I won't come back here until I'm an adult?"

"Yes." Death clapped her hands as if trying to catch a servant's attention. "And now, where would you like to go?"

Kilan thought for a moment. "I think I'd like to see my great-grandmother again."

~~~~

The Land of the Dead, as its name suggested, was a realm inhabited by the souls of dead people. Not every person ever to die was here; the souls of young children went somewhere Death referred to only as "up", while the souls of the wicked went somewhere she called "down". Sometimes, Death said, after a certain length of time in the Land of the Dead the souls of adults went "up" too. This was rare, if Kilan understood correctly.

"Don't you ever get lonely here, with just dead people around?" Kilan asked Death as they sat in a boat apparently moving itself across an inky black lake.

If he had made a proclamation in an unknown language and died immediately after, Death could hardly have looked at him with more astonishment.

"I... have never thought of that," she said at last. "You're mistaken, though, if you think dead souls are the only inhabitants of my realm. There are also my Reapers -- my assistants, I suppose you could call them -- and sometimes my children visit."

"You have children?" Kilan stopped leaning over the boat's side in a vain attempt to see his reflection. He sat up straight, eyes wide. The idea that Death, of all beings, had children was utterly shocking. "What are they like? Can I meet them?"

"Every mortal meets at least one of my children in their lifetime, but I don't think you would like to meet them," Death said with a strange smile. "Your family is well-acquainted with my daughter Insanity. Many of your uncle's subjects known my son Famine better than they would wish. My son Pestilence is sojourning on a planet in the Plaabiw system, and my daughter War and her children are kept very busy across the entire universe. And those are merely my oldest children."

Kilan accepted this without truly thinking about it. After an unpleasant near-miss with an acid waterfall, he had learnt this was the best way to cope with anything he heard in the Land of the Dead.

"What about your husband?" he asked. "Does he rule here when you're off..." 'Killing people' sounded too harsh, no matter how accurate it was, so he finished with, "...doing your job?"

Death laughed as if he'd said something highly amusing. "Husband, Kilan? I have many husbands, but none of them rule. Some of my husbands are also Reapers, though most of the Reapers are just souls I decided to promote for good behaviour. Most of my husbands are souls I collected and liked enough to marry."

"What an odd sort of marriage!" Kilan observed.

Death shrugged. "Mortals may think so, if they wish; their thoughts on the matter mean nothing to me." She reached over the side and trailed her hand in the water as she continued, "But none of my husbands rule with me. I have not yet met the man I love enough to give him such an honour."

In the gloom ahead of them, a rocky shore loomed into view.

"Here we are," Death said, sitting up. "Your great-grandmother insisted I create this island so she could turn it into a replica of her childhood home."

~~~~

Kilan had spoken several times with his great-grandmother since his first trip to the Land of the Dead. Empress Ranoryin had become his favourite dead relative -- indeed, his favourite relative across the board.

"Well, young rascal," the former Empress boomed as soon as she saw him. In life she had personally commanded her armies, and had never gotten out of the habit of bellowing orders over the noise of a battlefield. "Here you are again! And you even brought that plague of mankind with you."

Ranoryin gave Death a none-too-friendly look. Death took a step back. Had she been mortal, the look on her face might have been described as "afraid for her life".

"This creature," Ranoryin continued in the same strident tones, turning to Kilan with an air of pretending Death was not there, "had the audacity to drag me down to this depressing cave system she calls a kingdom before I was ready! And she hadn't even the decency to take me in a battle. No, she had to creep up upon me in childbirth. She even dared to suggest she would take my son! I soon put a stop to that nonsense, you can be sure."

"You did not," Death objected. "I said your son was in danger of dying, but would not die. Your screaming at me had nothing to do with his survival."

Ranoryin snorted. "You keep telling yourself that. Now, Kilan, tell me what's happening in your world. Has that stupid grandson of mine torn down the empire I put so much effort into building up?"

For reasons Kilan could not quite grasp, Ranoryin was not fond of her grandson Vretiel, the current Emperor. She seemed to think he was going to destroy the empire. Kilan didn't know enough about his uncle to say one way or the other.

"He hasn't yet," Kilan said, for want of anything more specific, "but I've something to tell you."

He told her of Death's announcement. Ranoryin listened, her head tilted to the side. From time to time she gave Death a piercing, scrutinising look.

"Well," she said when he finished, "if I won't see you for some years, why don't you tell me everything you want to do in those years? When we meet again, you can tell me if you actually did any of them."

~~~~

Morning arrived in the Land of the Living. Death returned Kilan to his bedroom. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. She stood beside him for a moment, her hand resting on his head and her fingers tangled in his hair, before pulling away.

Ranoryin was waiting for her when she returned to her own realm. Death halted and regarded her warily.

Fear of death, and thus of Death, was something intrinsically part of all mortals. Those who claimed they did not fear her were secretly the ones most afraid. And yet, there were some rare few who acknowledged their fear of her, and then defied her with every chance they got.

Ranoryin was one of those. She had seen her father murder her mother and brother, she had almost died of poison, she had looked Death in the face frequently through her life. But she hadn't tried to run. She had fought battles, survived famines, watched helplessly as plagues ravaged her lands, and then she laughed in Death's face and said, "Not today! You haven't won yet!"

Whether that made her brave or foolish by the standards of her people, Death neither knew nor cared. It made her someone Death respected; that was all that mattered.

Her forceful personality occasionally made her someone Death feared, as well. Especially when she had a look on her face that would make an invading army turn and run for their lives.

"Do you take me for a fool?" Ranoryin asked, folding her arms and tapping her foot on the floor. "I know perfectly well what your plans are for my descendant."

"Then you know more than I do." Death leaned back in her throne. "He is interesting. The world is sorely lacking in things that are interesting."

Ranoryin glared even more fiercely. "Listen, you creeping snake." Death made an offended noise that she utterly ignored. "If you so much as lay a finger on him without his consent, if you ever, for any reason, hurt him--"

"What, pray tell, can you do to me?" Death regarded the former Empress as if she were a child throwing a tantrum.

"I can stand here and sing opera for a century." The faint smile vanished from Death's face. Smirking triumphantly, Ranoryin continued, "The operas of Kurigolmor are especially irritating, don't you agree? All those melodramatic, "woe-is-me" songs, the outrageous plot twists, the incredibly out-of-tune orchestra... You know, I think I could recruit an entire opera company to help me. We could put on special performances right here."

"Damn you, Empress," Death growled. "Very well! I won't do anything you won't approve of!"

"Good."

Ranoryin smiled sweetly and wandered off, humming the overture of one of said operas.