Cold.

Cold, against the bare skin of my forearm. Cold, against fingertips left uncovered by my gloves. Cold, against my back, chilling the bones through the sodden cotton of my dark robes.

My eyes gaze upwards to the grey skies, scudded over with scruffy white clouds that drift stubbornly in those skies, refusing to go away. I imagine if they look down to see me, I would look like some fallen angel, lying spread-eagled on the ground with dark wings of black cloaks crumpled carelessly beneath me in the stunning white snow.

Cold. So very cold.

I take a deep breath, feeling the ache as the cold air rushes into my lungs. Every breath before this had hurt just as much, even more; it makes no difference whether I am in hot tropical Florina Beach, or just lying here in the snowy grounds of El Nath.

It is unimaginable how much one can loathe living. He’s mad.

I shove the ghosts of whispers and the memories of pitying smiles away, shifting my head a little instead to look down my outstretched hand at my wrist. Even though it hurt my frozen cheeks to smile, smile I did at the stunning red that flowed from my mutilated wrists, crimson ribbons the last manacles for this earthbound angel.

Red, red that weeps and seeps into the pure, white, cold snow.

It no longer hurts, even though there is no reason for the pain to stop. I close my eyes, recalling the sharp pain that had barrelled up my arm to my temples as cold steel sank past yielding flesh and tough tendon to touch white bone. The blade had been sharp, sharper than I had hoped it would be when I stole it right from under the nose of the weapons’ store shopkeeper. It was my one last desperate act of defiance, when I, of all people, have more than enough mesos to buy a simple dagger.

Cold, all along my bare forearms, numbing my weak flesh and chilling my feeble soul. My limbs cannot stir now; the strength ebbing away from the muscles as the red ebbs from my wrists. Good.

How ironic, I think now, for an ice mage to die in the icy wilderness of El Nath. But I love ironies, for what is life without them?

Or death, for that matter, in whatever twisted form that it exists as in this world.

There is a shadow that seems to veil the already grey skies. I welcome it, along with the freezing cold that creeps ever so stealthily now to the very core of my body, the familiar numbing feeling that gives comfort and takes away pain. My heart struggles against that cold, fighting to continue pumping blood through the veins of its unwilling master. Eventually, the cold is too much for it and it gives up as its master did.

It stops.

All stop.

Pain gone, feeling gone, cold gone, thought gone; darkness, the complete and undemanding embrace of nothing comes around to envelope me.

Happily, I let myself indulge in the illusion that this release is forever.

The illusion shatters abruptly! An irresistible force squeezes painfully at my still heart, making it seize and relax, and contract again, compelling the frozen blood in my veins into sluggish movement. The sharp cold returns with vengeance, as all feeling slams back into every fibre of my being.

Life! Damned Life, compelling and invasive, its hateful authority enforced by magic gone wrong, drags my reluctant soul out of the depths of death and shakes me out by the scruff of the neck like a fussy mother cat punishing her naughty kitten gone astray.

With one last tremor shuddering through my body, my eyes snap open to see the damn grey skies again. Alive.

‘Master. The rest of them are awaiting your arrival at the Guild hall. We have yet to plan our next wave of attack on the enemy.’ A bland voice speaks. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow shift and resolve into a bowed figure dressed in the colours of my Guild, standing a respectful distance away from myself.

I close my eyes for a moment, and then sigh. Slowly, I get to my feet, waving away the proffered help, leaning heavily on my staff to counter the gravity dragging at every inch of myself.

I do not need to check my wrists to know that there will no sign of the violence I committed upon myself, just as I do not need to look at my Junior Master to know how he averts his eyes from me to hide that look in them.

Oh, I know what he thinks, what they all think; it runs rife in the corridors of the Guild hall, hushed careless whispers about their Guild Master driven mad with grief when his wife left him to run away with the Master of our rival Guild, that poor thing, because I would too if my crazy husband kept going on and on about how Warlock Wizet’s spell of immortality ruined humankind forever.

Who the hell thinks that everyone should die? Then that darting look at the passer-by, and the uneasy smile when they see that it is their Guild Master who eavesdrops.

What do they know? These sad, contented people, satisfied to live in a world with no death and everlasting life. A world where murderers get away free because their victims, no matter how violently killed, walk away unharmed from the scene; a world where traitors that get hanged claw desperately at the hemp around their throats until it tears and dumps them nauseous, breathless but still alive!, on their feet to walk away free.

A world where warriors are cut down daily on the battlefield, only to rise again and continue fighting this futile war with no possible victor to end it!

In this world of deathlessness, where come the grief and the loss that makes happiness and life so precious? Where comes the rest for the torn and the weary at the end of the long trudge through life, the chance to give up instead of being forced to face day after day of war, hunger and strife, the chance to choose not to give up and the triumph for knowing that you voluntarily did so…?

Oh, but who cares about the eccentricities of a mere Guild Master? Which mortal does not want immortality? He can go and try to kill himself every day for all we care, as long as he leads us well in this war that gives us meaning and a way to pass our boring eternal lives. What can he do anyway, really die on us?

Ha. What a joke this all is.

A/N: I do not, and never will, support the notion of suicide.

This is just an exploration of how death will be like, if Maplestory was ever realised. Immortality of sorts mightn’t be as wonderful as some of us imagine to be, I think.

And yep, my Maplestory shortfics now have a fancy series name, zomgwthbbq!
Here’s the index of all of them.
Hooray for one usefulness of Prolif3.