The Vigilant Reaper

In my eleventh life, in the year 1986, the second cataclysm loomed over the horizon. I was on the brink of my usual death, slipping away in a warm dope haze, when she interrupted my passage into the unknown. She was just a seven-year-old girl, while I had weathered sixty-eight cycles of life and death. Her straight black hair cascaded down her back in a long braid, a stark contrast to my wispy white locks—or what remained of them after the chemotherapy. I was clad in a sterile hospital gown, a symbol of my humility in the face of mortality, whereas she wore a vibrant red school uniform with a felt cap. She entered my room without knocking, as if she knew I was expecting her. She walked past the flowers and cards that adorned my bedside table, ignoring the nurses who tried to stop her. She climbed onto my bed and sat beside me, her feet dangling off the edge. She leaned in, peering into my aging eyes with a curious intensity. She scrutinized the heart monitor attached to my chest, recognized where I had silenced its alarm with a piece of tape, and felt for my pulse with her small fingers. With a hint of an American accent in her English, she calmly stated, "I almost missed you, Shloka." But the language was no barrier; she could have conveyed her message in any tongue. As she scratched at the back of her left leg, where knee-high socks had begun to itch from the rain outside, she continued, "I have a message to relay, from the future to the past. As you're conveniently in the process of dying, I need you to pass it along to the Phoenix Club, as it has been passed down to me." I tried to speak, but my words emerged as incoherent gibberish. My mouth was dry and my throat was sore from the tubes that had been inserted. "The world is ending," she declared, without any trace of fear or sadness in her voice. "This message has traversed time, from child to adult, child to adult, transmitted through generations from centuries ahead. The end is inevitable, and we can do nothing to halt it. It is now your responsibility." I found that Mandarin was the only language I could form coherently, and my solitary word was "why?" Not why the world would end, or why it mattered, but she understood my unspoken query. Leaning closer, she whispered in my ear, "The world endures its recurrent apocalypse, as it must. However, with each iteration, the end hastens." And so, that was the beginning of our finale.