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Roman breathed a laugh. ‘Really? The way you’ve been singing her praises, I thought you considered her some sort of angelic being, too pure and good for this world.’

‘Heh. Maybe. Life certainly wasn’t fair to her, which earned her a lot of sympathy points from me. But she was still a flawed human being, like the rest of us.’

Roman stopped for a moment as another question occurred to him, but he thought better of asking it.

Voreese took notice of the abrupt silence, however. ‘Now you’re wondering why I released her, aren’t you?’

He gave the reaper a look and just sort of nodded.

She sighed. ‘To make a very long story short... she went mad.’

Roman said nothing.

‘Thankfully, she didn’t hurt anyone. It wasn’t really that type of insanity. But that also made it a much more difficult decision. For a long time, I thought it would be okay to just let things continue as they were. Madness is a somewhat subjective perception, anyway, right? And if she wasn’t hurting anybody, then what was the harm in just letting her be?’

‘Damn... so why’d you finally decide to do it?’

‘Because I just... couldn’t take it, anymore. For my own sanity, I felt like I had to.’

He nodded glumly. ‘I can only imagine how difficult that must’ve been.’

‘She just wasn’t even there, anymore. The young woman I’d come to know and care for--she was gone. Replaced with constant, incoherent ramblings. I kept thinking that maybe she could come back from it. Or that maybe I was at fault, somehow. Like she’d ascended to a new level of intelligence that my meager mind could no longer comprehend. But no. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that those things were just wishful thinking and that keeping her as my servant was not an act of compassion. And I guess I also worried that, as she continued to grow in strength, she really would become a danger to everyone around her.’

Roman frowned. More questions bubbled up in his mind regarding other servants she’d had over the years, but as he mulled it over, he wasn’t even sure he wanted such answers.

After all, he was on that exact same path, himself. Would hearing about his predecessors in this endeavor help him to avoid a similar fate?

He wanted to say yes. Of course he wanted that.

But in the recesses of his mind, he felt differently. And strongly.

This undead life was borrowed time. He’d known that ever since Voreese made that offer to him.