The End of an Eternity

...done great work...served a long time...decided to go a different way...thank you for your dedication...effective immediately...fired.

Fired.

Fired.

Fired.

I stared down at the amber beer, long since grown warm from my hands clenched around it. The din of the bar faded in and out as the conversation played again and again in my mind.

Fired. Sacked. Laid off.

How humans came up with such light words for such a heavy thing I will never understand. For all my time of watching them and learning from them, their ability to make even the direst thing nothing more than a simple word, a short phrase. Hurt was just a collection of sounds to them. Despair was just a word.

Dread stabbed through my stomach and I glanced over my shoulder as I thought I recognized my boss's voice. But it was just a young woman greeting the gaggle of her friends that stood by the music player. They had been responsible for the last eight songs and seemed to be working on their ninth. I didn't mind the music; I wasn't really listening to it. Somehow, the energetic pounding calmed my racing thoughts and loosened muscles that had been tensed to the point of strained for so long.

What had I done wrong?

It hadn't really been a shock. How could it have? For the past three hundred years, the jobs have gotten fewer and fewer. In the past fifty, they had all but stopped. My brothers and sisters had already been caught in the snare I now found myself trapped in as the humans learned more and more ways to fight us. Until we had no chance. Until we were no longer necessary.

But I had never thought I wouldn't be needed.

Sickness had been the first to leave, fading more and more into obscurity with each advancement in medicine. He fought valiantly, always adapting, trying to stay ahead. But humanity is nothing if not determined and unrelenting.

Desire was next, followed closely by War. The two seemed to go everywhere together, side by side, marching through the countries and nations and hearts of humanity. They had been rooted out long ago when the humans learned that they could hold hands instead of swords.

Then went the triplets: Anger, Sadness, and Fear. Like War, they follow Desire like puppies, always nearby and ready to throw themselves into the fray. After Desire left, they came to me. We had always been close, always worked together, but even with my help, there was only so long they could last. Sometimes, Anger will get a small job, a few heated words or a skirmish if he's lucky. Fear disappeared back into the wild, to the primal terrors of the wildlife. Sadness followed me for longer than the other two, standing with the onlookers as I worked, watching me with her deep eyes. She left a decade ago, when my own jobs became too few for her help.

It had only been a year since Pride quit, but she'd been finished long before that. She was the oldest, the strongest, and she had been the best. Humans try to describe her as loud and cocky and obnoxious. But, in truth, she was quiet, hiding behind the noise of our siblings and nieces and nephews. She was a subtle cancer that, in ages gone and past, had ruled the world and commanded the masses. She had struggled for hundreds of years to maintain her slipping hold as the humans grew to value our cousins' gentleness more than my sister's promise of fame and power.

Last I heard, Pain was still out there, gathering his catch from the few moments after a fall, after a crash, after an accident. The few moments before the humans injected themselves with serums and potions that drove him away. He was still there, but even he wouldn't be able to hold out much longer. The humans refused to stop advancing, refused to be satisfied. Couldn't they see they had already taken everything? Yet they still wanted more.

I used to believe we were eternal, unconquerable, permanent. Humans were smart and powerful, yes, but surely even they couldn't defeat Mother Nature's strongest children. Surely even they couldn't conquer me.

"Now, who would leave such a beautiful lady as yourself all alone?"

I slowly looked up at the tall, blond man sliding onto the bar stool next to mine. He held a cocktail in his hand and three more in his breath.

"I'm not in the mood for this," I muttered, looking back down and taking a sip of the lukewarm beer. "Leave."

The man snorted and stood. For a moment, I believed that he would walk away, succumb to me like all of the humans before him. But no one had been afraid of me for a long time, I simply wasn't a reality. I was something you read about in history books, in fairy tales and the stories passed down from great-great-great-grandparents who had been around when my siblings and I ruled the Earth. Like my siblings, I had lost my power, lost my importance, lost my job.

"Don't be like that," he slurred, wrapping his arm around my stiff shoulders. There was enough alcohol hanging around him to make me dizzy in a single breath.

"I don't ask twice," I warned in a voice that used to make leopards lose their spots.

But this man was emboldened by the drink poisoning his blood. He cocked his head as the group of girls by the music player picked a new song that sent a pounding beat through the bar. "Care to dance, pretty?"

My grip on my beer was getting dangerously tight. "No."

"Don't be like that." He gave my shoulders a squeeze. "You sure you don't want to dance with me? You'll never get another chance like this one."

For the love of my mother's green earth, I certainly hope not. "I am certain that I will not dance with you."

I pictured my siblings standing at my side, glaring and cracking knuckles and making gestures that stopped being an insult long before this man was even born. The imagined weight of their presence was all that kept my shoulders and head tall and strong.

"Certain." The smile in his voice was more sickening than the smell as he drawled out the word. "Baby, haven't you ever heard that nothing in life is certain but death and taxes?"
The image of Anger swung a fist that knocked the man halfway across the room. He crashed into three tables and spilled a dozen drinks. The other patrons yelled in drunken surprise and anger as his unconscious body hit the ground.
I blinked, and he was back in front of me, grin sly and triumphant. I He was still here and I was still alone.

Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes. Nothing but death.

I wanted to laugh, wanted to scream, wanted to cry. I wanted that saying to be true again. I wanted to be certain, to be unavoidable, to be inevitable. But now, I was less than an uncertainty. I was an impossibility.

I looked hard at the man. A day ago, I could have simply wished it and he would kneel over right here. His soul, his essence, he would be mine. I would have been punished for taking someone not designated for me, but he would never grin this way at another person. Maybe the triplets could have even gotten a job out of it. Even someone like this must have someone to feel angry or sad or afraid. But it wasn't a day ago. I could wish it all I wanted, but that wouldn't stop him.

He was human. His people had conquered the forces of Nature.

His people had conquered me.