I cried a lot, especially in the ending. Also really liked the concept of the witch doing all this for the sake of other/future people. And, wow, this part:
“There is beauty in the world and there is a horror,” she said, “and I would not a miss a second of the beauty and I will not close my eyes to the horror.”
There are lots of stories where a magic user meets a representation of death. In some of the ones I’m aware of, death is presented very much as a thing to be welcomed. In others, resisting death is presented as being selfish (or, at least, deeply partial). One of the reasons that I wrote the story is because I wanted to see a version of the meeting-Death trope that presented a different way of thinking about death (a way of thinking that will be familiar to most readers of this forum but that I hadn’t previously seen in the context of this trope).
I cried a lot, especially in the ending. Also really liked the concept of the witch doing all this for the sake of other/future people. And, wow, this part:
Bravo!
Thanks!
There are lots of stories where a magic user meets a representation of death. In some of the ones I’m aware of, death is presented very much as a thing to be welcomed. In others, resisting death is presented as being selfish (or, at least, deeply partial). One of the reasons that I wrote the story is because I wanted to see a version of the meeting-Death trope that presented a different way of thinking about death (a way of thinking that will be familiar to most readers of this forum but that I hadn’t previously seen in the context of this trope).
Yes, I did notice you’re subverting the trope here, it was very well done :)