Story Stopper

Part IV: Lost but not forgotten

It's always in times when I am most surrounded by people that I get lost in the fray between the two worlds. To people around me, I look as if I'm simply lost in deep thought but my Soul actually becomes disembodied from its host and floats in the great vacuum between the here and the beyond. I feel my great wings stretch the crevace and glide while others can only fall.

Deviel exists here since she chooses not to take corporeal form and often times I have met her here in between the death of wives and children. I meet her here after my body's death and my waiting for a new form to inhabit.

Once she asked me why I didn't just stay there.

"You are immortal, my Grim," she said, "what's the point of experimenting with humanity? It's almost cruel and masochistic to put yourself through that and then tell others that there's a point to letting go."

"You of all creatures under god should understand my choice, oh Promethius of the people: one cannot understand the value of life and what they have to surrender without first becoming a part of what they are."

"You are wise to think so, my eternal," she said, "but you forget that a reapers job is not to die but to live forever in the pursuit of ferrying people to the beyond. How does it make any difference in your thought pattern if you know that you will never go through the specific process in which your essential function is involved?"

In this moment, I happened to be out at a late night blues bar and I ended our conversation with a snap back to reality. She had a point and it drove me crazy to think about it. Was there really no point to corporeal life as a reaper? Was my existence simply to preform my function and not to diversify?

Human life was so filled with meaning and future but time was boring when it was no longer linear. Existence meant days with no sunset. Deviel made her peace with her non-linnear time because she devoted herself to function. Were it not for her messianic qualities, it was a miracle god did not make her the grim.

I believe that it was in the year 1 AD, however, that I understood how this cycle of death and living amongst human beings was critical to my being the grim. I never realized in 10,000 years that god put so much emphasis on the meaning of being human until the Christ child came along. In the days before him, heaven and earth were separate entities. God was loving but he was to be feared first and foremost. What was interesting to me, also, and what I had not realized in my inception was that none of my protégé were able to recorporealize as I could until 1 AD.

As they were, those reapers I had assigned the task were lost and forgotten to the world but my accomplishments in all my incarnations as a human were always there and remembered. A higher angel once told me how blessed I was for being given that gift. Of course, there were exceptions: I could not talk about the beyond to human beings, but I was able to accomplish so much from all the life I lead in multiple forms.

In this way, Deviel was wrong. I may have been lost as a reaper, never to put meaning towards any one of my many human lives but each one of my existences meant something for a future of humanity that I helped to contribute towards. In this way, I became a better Grim and told her of my learning as we both grew together.

Story Stopper

Part III: Pure Soul

In the time of non-acceptance of death, there's a window to recruit a reaper before they turn into a spirit orb that must be ferried to Heaven or hell; in times like this there's the possibility to talk to the individual before acceptance takes effect and they become that orb of light that goes to heaven or hell however the order may come down.

I use these periods as recruitment tools. A lot of souls need reaping and ferrying so it's in these moments that I have to put on my HR hat and hire new reapers.  I may be the grim but there's a lot of work to do and I have to keep the gears in the machine oiled.  That's mid level management for you in a nutshell.  My job is more enjoyable though because being a reaper, one gets to be human and angel simultaneously until the job calls and I must go back and forth.

I remember in 5,000 BCE meeting a human soul with the tenacity to be what I was who also had the love and strength to become more Devin or Deviel was to become a reaper with powers beyond my own. Some might have considered her powers unholy because they did not stem from god but rather from the power of his creation and from a supreme connection with nature. Had I reaped her, she would have gone to the deepest depths of hell along with witches, however, the beauty of her spirit was loved by god and by me and for it, she became the second reaper and the first reaper to fight for the human spirit.

One might say she was the basis for the story of promethius but she fought for a second chance to reach gods light instead of the physical and superficial gift of fire.

Contrary to popular belief, Angels are all male or at least as masculine an entity as feeble human minds can percirve. I only ascended to an angelic class because I was the first of my kind and the Grim. Souls are sexless. They give up that distinction when they become those orbs of spiritual light.

I get to hier my own team, however, and they are neither angel or demon but rather (to put it simply) ambassadors to heaven or hell on the earthly plane. These days, I only work on high profile cases.

The reason I make this distinction is because Deviel and I shared sex and love outside of my angelic duties and her duties as a reaper for milenia. In that time, I sired many children with different wives over the milenia and I know it hurt her to see me loving someone else but I came back to her when all was said and done and the wives and kids, simply died.

Love is part emotion, part practicality and part adoration and although I would tell my wives I loved them in the moment that was 100 years, over milenia, there was only Deviel. That sultry seductress who could show gods light through the light of his creation at her fingertips.

As the light fades and I wait weeks, to months, to years for a client, my reapers work busily and she shines in the eyes of both god and the devil as they fight for her retirement.

Story Stopper

Part II: For love of death

Death, like most things, is poetry.  It's romance.  There's a spell at the beginning where there's distrust, denial and smitten flirting with the idea but there is always the inevitable surrender.  Within these moments, there's such a beautiful swoon.  A loving embrace between a reaper and the client who will not admit his or her own death. Like a child, they can be held with assurance of sweet release as they regail you with all the things in their life that they'll miss or all the things in their life that they'd never get to do were they to admit death or in the actual words they mean to say, "defeat."

The client is the most fragile because what's up ahead for them is unknown to even me but what's behind is what they cling to because it represents a clear world that they can understand. I both pity them, envy them and at times hate them because of how they may feel conflicted at the beginning, but those who go to heaven will know such warmth for eternity.

As an angel and one of His first creations, I get to reap the benefits of knowing gods love but always being at an arms length because of the hierchy of heaven. Just like some sort of nightmare creature, however, I chose this route and would be remiss were I to deny that this power weren't spectacular on its own. The only problem is finding things to do with eternity.

The reaping of a soul is like sex because for a short period of time, a reaper must take the soul within him to carry it to heaven because souls have no wings as we do. Those that are dropped become lost souls and can be very nasty to reclaim so it's easier to simply carry a soul within our own and bring it to wherever it has to go.

Going to heaven is easier than going to hell. A good soul has a warmth to it and is at rest with god even before they go to dwell in his garden but an evil soul going to hell will try very hard to claw its way through you and get out. Honestly, it's worse than bad indigestion.

Being that j am the Grim, j get only large and important clients. This makes it worse on my when I try to ferry them. As I said, those going to heaven are only hard because their warmth is enough to make you weep but those going to hell must be trapped or tricked or worse: dragged.

Do not let the new testament of Jesus Christ fool you, God is still by all standards wrathful, only on a different plane of existence. I have seen good men dragged to hell for not accepting his word and evil men in heaven who played for the right team in heaven. Either way, their humanity is gone once they become a spirit and they dwell in the rapture of a beautiful dream.