The Melee
The wages of sin is death
Romans 6:23
After a long enough time spent in limbo, belonging neither to this world nor the next, the spirits of the departed become magnets. Reapers flock to these liminal spirits from across the ether like a ghastly funeral procession. It’s their duty, after all, to guide these lost souls across the threshold to the underworlds beyond.
So when a large group of these souls appears all at once, as they did in Sunnyside Cemetery, it’s usually just a matter of having enough Reapers around to move them to their final resting place.
This was not a usual matter.
Reapers arrived at a cemetery in bedlam. Those inside the gates were deranged banshees — screaming in anguish, swinging their scythes and blades with abandon. They fought (uncharacteristically) over which souls each could claim. Some Reapers, those made wise with time and gifted with a preternatural sense of the eldritch, could sense a malevolent presence in Sunnyside Cemetery; a psychic energy feeding on the rage of the dead and affecting the normally cool temperament of the Reapers gathered there. But they were bound by their duty to the souls all the same.
All became embroiled in the chaos. Two Reapers would duel, and a third would cut them both down in two frenzied strikes. A Reaper would lead a soul to the gates of the cemetery, only to be slashed through with a spectral scythe. Factions formed. Roving Reapers hunted down those unlucky enough to be left alone. They were like bands of twisted angels; dispensing death without mercy.
During the days, Reapers clung to the shadows under the ancient, knotted trees, licking their wounds and biding their time. But when the sun fell below the cemetery’s hill, the gravestones cast shadows of their own — a patchwork of darkness laid upon the overgrown grass. Reapers used the shade to cover their movements, and inevitably their paths collided. Sunset marked the start of the nightly melee. It was then that the miasma of death set in, a yellowish fog that seemed to rise out of the ground itself.
From outside Sunnyside Cemetery’s gates, little could be seen through the haze. But the violence within continued unabated. And unless someone could put an end to it soon, there wouldn’t be an end at all. For the wages of sin is death — and death always comes to collect interest.
