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She could admit when she'd had a bad idea.

Pestilence sighed and stood up, putting the paintbrush down on her easel and examining the picture she'd been painting with a flat, unsatisfied eye. Her empty room was dim as always, silent except for her own movements and activity. The canvas in front of her was covered in a swaying green, the long grass from the first place she could remember. Rocks so black they were purple jutted out of the landscape, and the sky was a stormy gray.

She'd planned to paint four girls in a half-circle, to match the four generations... But she couldn't picture herself as an old woman, and had been forced to consider the matter. Unlike the first of the Elementals, she hadn't been made through an arcane force of spirit taking will and form, but in the dark of a laboratory. Her armor creaked as she inclined her head and studied herself as a child.

That had during the end of a medieval period of time, and the beginning of an industrial boom; as a little girl, once she could walk, she'd been given a sword and armor to train with. The cabal of scientists who gene-forged her for the wars ahead needed her, she'd realized after so many mock-sword fights and sessions of infection.

It was hard for her to remember all of her childhood- much of her mind was still too human, not built to last as long as it had. The War model had been designed to kill wizards and eat magic; she was built to control battlefields and take territory. Durability over refinement. Her body was almost as brutally simple as she was.

She remembered being young and eager, burning with fever and bloodlust. She also remembered being weird and lonely, the only people she saw her masters and their support staff. There'd been a maid with wooden hands who had been kind, and once, a short War Elemental with one eye and a sword twice as big as she was. She'd had one eye, like all their kind, and Pestilence had been allowed to have Tea with her before she completed her own mission.

Pestilence smiled softly, her tired eyes warming up a little. She turned and considered herself as she'd been a few decades ago, in her 170's. A young adult. The world had boomed in the wake of technology's burn, and resources had been consumed faster than a feudal system could garnish them. War had followed not soon after, and her life had truly begun.

The war had never ended, not really. She'd come a long way from the miles of trenches and killing fields, but it had been out there she'd finally realized what she was. Her touch rotted through metal, through stone, through flesh; armor bubbled in her wake, and her sword left red mud everywhere she went. One cut was enough to spring an infection that would drop even the strongest enemies.

Her aura was her greatest weapon; she had three lungs, two that powered the third, and her body was a temple of disease. She'd acquired simple ailments from confused villagers brought to her, seized from their homes, and exotic ailments that had been neutralized and left on ice, all within herself. Her aura was when she altered them and unleashed them against her foes. It took time, and while she was immune to her own rot, she suffered the effects during the incubation. But...

She'd been sent out to pacify bandits, and they'd come out in force. The forest had been filled with their arrows and their hollering. She could hear it now, almost two centuries later, and her sharp metal fingers lingered on her sword's hilt. They'd killed her guard, and then they'd encircled her. She'd exhaled the whole time she'd fought, her new grey armor slick with her oil-blood, one arm limp and dead from the arrows in it.

Her eyes hadn't been half-lidded; she hadn't felt tired and weary then, her heart had gurgled like a drain from purpose, the joy of a tool in use of it's craft boiling in her veins. The bandits had kept coming into her glade, smiling at her even while she clashed her blade against theirs and forced them away from her. She finally closed her mouth, taking a normal breath before grinning disjointed back at them. It looked like a scream.

"Don't be afraid, girl."

"Why would I be? You're already dead." She replied, watching with sick joy as they began to bleed from their noses and their eyes, their ears and their mouths. They'd been infected once they'd come close enough, and now, a greatly-accelerated form of Bloodspill was thundering through their veins. Most of them were sinking to their knees, coughing wetly as their innards tore themselves into a mist- and she inhaled this time, the red ghosts in the woods suffusing her with a green glow. Her skeleton shone through her body, and her skull grinned under her face.

She raised her sword and charged the ones still alive-

And then, it had never ended.

States Came together and disbanded, men climbed to power and fell to their deaths. Through it all, she fought. The third generation- the Conquest- came to be. She fought beside some and killed others. It all ran together, after awhile. Victory, and defeat. War and Peace. Being awake and dreamig, asleep for years. She'd come to terms with her slow degeneration- when she couldn't remember a name, she improvised, and she held herself together with stubborn will.

But where did that leave her? Adrift in a time she didn't belong, doomed to grow senile? The worst part about circular thoughts was that they also never ended. As she considered the empty part of the picture, she had a new thought, a distinctly unpleasant one. It made her grimace.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. She was still lonely and lost. Ironically, the only person she thought to speak to about these matters couldn't speak at all. Pestilence picked up the picture and crumpled it in her gauntlets, putting it in the waste bin next to her bed. She folded the easel and slid it under her mattress, before sitting down and tapping her knees with her fingers.

There were, officially, no such things as Death Elementals. No agency or group had ever succeeded in creating one.

If any of her new compatriots would understand being lost, it would be a generation one. That was, if the silent Death chose to accept her invitation.