The flesh was weak, so the poems went. The flesh was weak, but the soul was strong, and what bound this particular soul to its body was adamantine, a tie as binding as life, and as strange, and as uncanny.
If the air around the Revenant was a black hole, his smile was pleasant enough when the reaper came nearer. He felt its presence like a cold wind at his back, plucking at his clothes experimentally, ruffling his hair, the sense of death itself wanting to claim something it could not have.
"Hello," he said. He showed even white teeth in a pleasant smile. There was blood spattered on his upped lip. His fingernails were pink with torn flesh, and the backs of his hands were gray and smeared with ash. His boots were best not spoken of. "We haven't met, have we?" A joke. He knew what he was looking at in his marrow, just the same way the reaper knew. To him there was nothing lamblike about the dead men, nothing worth mourning, nothing disquieting about their bloody deaths. But he was not quiet. His presence radiated with a rage that rippled across death, across life, across the air itself.