#-025

Prompt: "The Death Sentence is a literal sentence, spoken by a cult of executioners, that kills the person who hears it. You are the first known person to survive this fate."

An eerie silence reigned over the stadium as the last calls of the Death Curse echoed into non existence. The well dressed men who stood in a wide ring around me began to share uncomfortable looks with one another, still managing to stick me in place with their icy gaze, even when it was now laced with confusion and fear.

I swallowed nervously, then glanced quickly behind me half expecting to find my own corpse lying in the dirt... There was nothing, in an instant I began to pat myself down- I could feel it. I wasn't dead, the chant of death had failed, and I had no idea why. Considering the looks on the executioners faces, they had no idea either. The silence was broken by one man, who stepped forward from his place in the ring and spoke with a gravely tone that boasted his ancient age.

"Your evil is not wanted among the heavens, but neither is it wanted upon the earth. The gods refuse to take you it would seem, but we refuse to keep you." He gestured at me violently as he spoke, and kept approaching until his shadow was baring over me like a great bear, I shifted uncomfortably under his presense but tried to hide it beneath my pride.

"If the Gods refuse to take me then I cannot die, you know how it is." My voice was deceptively calm as I spoke and he seemed to either not notice, or ignore my fear.

"You cannot be allowed to roam freely though, your evil is a curse that will haunt the world forever... If we do not act. You will be imprisoned and forgotten. It is the only fate for those the Gods refuse to take." I forgot to breath as the executioner spoke, my eyes widened in fear as I thought of the endless darkness that awaited. It wasn't since the ancient times, before the death chant, that the evil of the world had been locked in stone.

The race of Aites were naturally immortal but our race was small... We envied the ability of other creatures to die and eventually discovered the only way for our kind to know the embrace of darkness, to appeal to the Gods and plead them to allow us to join them where we could be free of our earthly weight. Before the chant we had buried our evil beneath the world in tombs of stone, steel, and dark magic. To bring back the ancient ways, to be denied by the Gods...