0: The Reaper in White

Prologue: Vikar calls upon a powerful entity, unbeknownst to him, after the death of his son.

Death is a snowflake coming to rest in an outstretched palm. We stand in awe as it approaches, watching how it dances upon the icy drafts like it means to flirt with gravity for an eternity. Amidst the multitude of feathery crystals, we never lose sight of our snowflake; the largest, frostiest, most glorious snowflake to have ever left the cloud. Our eyes become charmed by the hypnotic precipitation, our breath holds. How perfectly did nature make the ice crystal with its flawless symmetry and ornate fringe. There can never be another speck birthed within the frigid heavens that could emulate the brilliance of our chosen mote of snow.
Death can sense the peak of emotion in your heart. Death has designed your fate to play out as if you were tucked within the sweetest of dreams. Your body overflows with warmth and harmonious music because Death takes you around your shoulder and sings nostalgic melodies. You smile because Death is a jester and you are King. Away with the stars! Away with the universe! There is now only you and your ice crystal. As it contacts the pallid skin of your palm and transforms into a diamond droplet of the most tranquil water in all of the vast oceans and meandering streams on this lush and fertile planet, you melt away to a place where even nothingness does not exist.
I have felt how the warmth of life fades away into winter’s whistling breeze. My essence aches to forget how his delicate fingers loosened from my grasp, like parched petals cracked from a withering rose. I held my son in my arms until the falling snow no longer melted against his pale slate skin. His body as still as a forgotten memory. My son was dead, and the tides of the sea of fate meant to bury him beneath the ocean floor. The cold powder blanketed him like a swaddled infant as tears rained from my burning eyes and splashed miniscule craters within the layers of his soft white mask. I could not control the trembling in my bones, nor the howls that ripped deep from my throat. No earthly force could have uprooted me from that torturous release of primal anguish. As the winds of end-year encircled me and my son, like a cyclone of spirits ready to devour his soul, my violent fury erupted forth such a visceral crescendo that Death, in whatever festering realm he dwells, would have become haunted by his merciless act of ill-reaped innocence.
At once I witnessed the cyclone of wind, like a swift flurry of Death’s ichorous cloak, deconstruct and scatter through the ancient tamarack trunks as wisps of snow trailed and twisted behind each sporadic gust. The sea of fate consumes all.