A Life for a Life

In a different time, there lived an immortal woman named Eva who had grown bored with life, yet not bored enough to end it. She believed a child of her own could replenish her spirit, but she could not bear one without losing her immortality. Every night she prayed that one of the other immortals in her land would die, making room for the new soul that she would usher in.

One night, the spirit of her future son visited. He promised her that he would be born, beautiful and perfect, but only if she took fate into her own hands. He gave her a name, Renato, and a vision of a location in the woods, a small cottage with a front yard of old and crooked tombstones. He also informed her that Renato had once been a woman.

The thought of such degeneracy made Eva recoil. Destroying womanhood, a gift bestowed upon all girls at birth, was a crime against nature. Any woman who chopped off her breasts or cut out her womb did not deserve the privilege of life. Eva expressed this sentiment to her unborn son. He didn’t argue, and he gave her a dagger that could kill any immortal with one stab.

“When you stab Renato,” he said, “make your wish in that moment, and you will have me.”

Eva smiled, tears in her eyes. “Thank you, my child.”

The next day Eva left home to find her target in the woods, and by sunset she found the old, crooked tombstones and small cottage. It was a strange place to live for even an immortal degenerate, Eva thought. A constant reminder of how death had used to be inevitable.

Eva snuck up to the cottage and knocked on the door, and she waited, dagger ready. Finally, Renato answered it, and she stabbed him in the chest, wishing for a biological child.

Renato fell to the floor and bled out. Eva sighed with relief. The dagger had done its job.

But then the blood reabsorbed into Renato’s wound, and he got to his feet, unharmed. Eva gaped at him in horror.

“No!” she said. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

Renato smiled. “Death’s godson cannot die.”

Eva dropped the dagger. A sharp pain in her abdomen hunched her over, and it intensified as her belly ballooned with new life. She collapsed, and she flailed and thrashed, screaming and screaming, her insides failing to accommodate the quickly growing child until it burst forth in a bloody explosion. The baby’s screams harmonized with her own like a choir of life and death. Renato took the baby into his arms and hushed it with care, watching its mother breathe her last breath.

“A life for a life,” Renato said. “That is the law of balance.”