The fever had harassed me for days.
My breath was shallow, each inhalation catching like a thread pulled too tight.
Pneumonia, they told me.
Inflammation—fluid—a slow drowning within my own body.

On the worst night, my lungs seized like locked doors.
Air fled from me, and I couldn’t draw it back.

The Angel of Death appeared in my bedroom, hovering peacefully, aglow with divine light.
She whispered to me—
“Death is a natural part of life“.

Every fiber of my being contracted against this evil utterance.
From the depths of my soul, the ugliest, foulest superstitious vapors made themselves known—I closed my eyes and concentrated on pleading with every possible god, angel, saint and demon for forgiveness, for my ingratitude, begging for one more breath—and another after that.

And my breath returned.

Shame washed over me; whenever I’ve heard others speak of how God saved them, it struck me as the most absurd arrogance—the belief that the entire fabric of Nature was torn apart & reassembled to win the favor of an ape on a planet teeming with billions of other apes—an ape that will perish anyway.

Yet I was no better. I had begged just the same.
Had I not believed, in that moment, that my life was the most precious jewel in the universe?

When I opened my eyes, the Angel was still there.

“You begged,” she said. “You pleaded. Tell me, then—what does it mean to survive?”

My throat burned. I didn’t appreciate this insolent Socratic interrogation. Undoubtedly, she knew the farcical nature of my instinct for survival—how it guided me as brightly as the summer Sun, even though that Sun would bleed out in a few decades and scatter its black dust into the void.

Nonetheless, I answered, terse and defiant:
“It means to endure.”

The Angel tilted her head. “For how long?“

I could feel my blood rising. I had wanted mercy and compassion, not a cross-examination.
“As long as I can,” I said.

“And then?”

Memories surfaced unbidden; once, my father lifted me onto his shoulders as if I weighed nothing. But now they trembled when he reached for his cup. I remember the way he winced, almost imperceptibly, when he rose from his chair. The way the silver in his hair had spread like frost creeping over autumn fields.
His strength shall pass down to me like a torch in darkness.

“My descendants will carry my blood“, I told her.

The Angel smiled.
“Are your hands your father’s, or his father’s before him? Whose blood pulses in your veins?“

More insolence. Of course I knew—the life in me was not my own. I was a flicker of something older, deeper, endless. The cells in my body did not belong to me. They sought only to divide, to scatter, to surrender themselves to the infinite storm of creation and dissolution. A ceaseless tide, churning through the ages.

Was I supposed to be impressed?

The thought repulsed me. To vanish—nameless, faceless, lost in the torrent—I could not accept it. My flesh might be carried forward in others, diluted, forgotten, but my hands, my will, my mind—these could shape the world. My name could become a force.

“I will build. I will discover. I will bend the future to my will. I will leave behind something undeniable, something that changes everything.”

The Angel’s voice was quiet.

“Like the first to tame fire?” she asked. “The first to bury their dead? The first to craft symbols? They shaped you more than any king, more than any prophet. And tell me—where are their voices?“

“Then I will be a man of Culture,” I said, my voice hardening. “With the right words, I will be etched into the minds of billions, as the Prophet’s voice still lingers in the desert air. The wise and noble will swell with admiration for countless generations.“

The Angel tilted her head.

“For three hundred million years, trilobites ruled the seas. They outlasted mountains. And now they sleep in stone, their names unwritten, their reign forgotten.“

Something inside me recoiled. “That’s different. They left no words, no record—”

“And what of those who did?” the Angel asked.
“The poets, the sages, the philosophers? Their words remain, but warped, stolen, wielded like blades against their own meaning. What holy text has not been a banner for bloodshed, a shield for tyrants, a grave for truth? Even the Prophet’s voice lingers only in echoes of echoes, scattered across tongues that never knew him, sung by those who would never heed him.“

She paused, as if listening to something far away.

“The first apes set foot on the earth a few moments ago. Your kind has seen but an eyeblink of time. You build monuments and call them eternal—on a planet that forgets continents. You draw your name on water and think it stone.“

A pulse of anger flickered through me. “But even if my words twist, even if my name is lost, something of me will remain. Some fragment, some——”

I stopped.

The fever-sweat chilled on my skin.
My lungs felt heavy again.

The Angel smiled.

And disappeared.

After a few weeks, my lungs were almost fully recovered.