This piece of work is the beginning of Death's Children, a short historical story. Obviously, it relies heavily on the theme of death along with morality and religion...I'm enjoying the process of adapting my writing voice to fit the genre. I never cease to find it interesting how much it can shift ; even with a single character! Again, any feedback would be appreciated as this is my first draft (and possibly my last if I can't dredge up the motivation to edit). Like I've been expanding my reading from primarily romantasy, I've attempted to do the same in my work and try a new sort of story. It's very much been written on the spur of the moment, so who knows what I'll think of it in a few months! Anyways, I blabber. Here's part of the beginning... 

Death - 1665

Unlike the last time Death had found it in himself to enter the repugnant streets of London, music not of the fiddle and pipe filled the streets, but rather the screams and cries of the dying. 

Dying, admittedly, was a loose - and lazy - term to use. As soon as a babe's swollen head escaped the prison of their ma's womb, they were dying. The clock beginning to tick. Skin inching ever so slowly to greet the bones beneath. If mortals had been sewn with more threads of intelligence, they may have realised the womb was no prison at all, but a haven. Yes - a haven from the horrors of the world. 

After all, there were far worse things plaguing life than death. Quite literally. The streets may have been gagged with the rot and waste that herbs failed to shroud, but they positively reeked of lamblike terror. A factor, perhaps, why historians sacrificed this year to the Beast - or at least Death believed so. A Beast armed not with claws, but bacteria. Disease. Disease that killed not with bloody gashes, but silent soldiers named buboes. 

The silver-freckled night above sparkled like a myriad of jewels, wholly oblivious to the suffering of those below. Its beauty almost an insult when surrounded to the blackened teeth by filth and squalor. Common symptoms for death, he’d noted an age ago. An age when the earth drank her fill of the world’s blood. Perhaps that age would reign once more, and this first fallen soul would be the coronation to a long, bloody rule. 

As if in response, a scream that could have torn tendons - or had, for all he knew -  snapped like the whip of a flagellant across the slim cobbled street. Death stopped short. Waited. Not even a rustle of some crumpled flyer echoed. 

So he continued, midnight robes dragging behind him in the mud. Identical to those in the papers, which depicted him and his brothers as skeletal figures with scythes in one hand and souls in another. Only half true. It had been a kindness, almost, to reveal their true forms to the living during the days of what they’d aptly named the Black Death. Indeed, those days had been the definition of a cyclical structure - collect souls, detect another, and on and on - all of them spokes of some grinding, ancient and heavy wheel of death. Relentless - infinite. But being able to put a face, albeit a skull, to this shadow that haunted them awake and asleep, to him, who ripped away so many lives of those they loved…

A small blessing. There was nothing else they could have given to that withering field of souls, stretching toward every horizon. Their deaths were neither slow nor kind. The agony, the pain as they went… 

Death shuddered to remember it. Shuddered. Even after all these centuries, even after witnessing the darkest parts humanity had to offer behind stygian, velvet curtains. The swollen, puffy, purpled mounds of skin, mouths permanently etched in a scream…

And he'd recall the rest of the details soon enough. This soul he’d come to claim was no doubt the first of an entire mountain's worth. Dozens. 

It never failed to surprise Death how fundamentally different each soul was. All mortals walking and talking oxymorons of the next. Yes, they were all cut from Life's luminous cloth, but the threads would unpick and entwine, fray and embrace once more, over and over again to create something mortal languages had no words for. None that would do it justice, at least.