Hello.
Yes, I've found you.
I should be angry, shouldn't I? You've avoided me for so very long. But I'm not. I'm merely... impressed.
So I am going to give you a reward. I am going to give you a glimpse into the future.
Shall we be off?
There we go.
Let's stop here. Yes. Look around. See the strife? The war has torn this place to the ground. The Tripartite's grip reaches far.
See this house? A woman lives here. She doesn't know it yet, but she's a widow. A mother of two. A babe in arms and a young girl, not yet old enough to write.
She's never going to know that she's a widow, which I guess you might call a mercy.
Look. A young telegram boy is running up. He carries the news. He's got a sick mother at home.
There comes the bomb. There goes the alarm.
There goes the boy. There goes the mother and her children.
Do you think me cruel? I am not. It is you humans who do this to each other. I am a mercy to the peasants, and I am a faceless horror to the rich.
Let us be off again.
The battlefield. Man says that I was born here. Stuff and nonsense. But typical. So very typical. I was born in the nature. I came to be when the first life writhed from the earth, when blood was spilled in the struggle for dominance.
But man will do what man will do.
That man there? The one screaming his lungs out as he flees through the barbed wire. Do you think him a coward? He has too much to live for, you see. He was to be married. Now? He never will. Unless he somehow gets married with a bullet hole in his head.
Off we go again.
Here we are. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The enemy, as you would call them. The women and children and old ones. All of them with their own lives, their worries. They were not responsible for their leadership's choices.
They are about to die.
Off we go again. A few years into the future. The dictators are long dead, war is over and there is supposed to be peace.
Let us visit this nearby school. Ooh, a music room. Let us visit it. I do so love music.
Why are all the students kneeling on the floor, you ask? I would draw your attention to the big man in front with a gun. These students are about to die.
Why is the man doing this? I surely don't know. You humans have fought and waged wars and killed each other since your beginning. The why has never interested me.
Listen.
This music room has heard melodies, sweet and dissonant and piercing and loud and soft. It has heard them all. Now it is silent. But I suppose that, in a way, silence is a melody in itself. It instills madness. It instills fear.
And yet I can tell you one thing. There has been no violent death in the world that was utterly silent. There is always sound. A scream of pain, a gasp of surprise, a sigh of relief. Which is how I can tell you- the melody is about to change.
Screaming forms a choir, a cacophony of screaming and weeping and pleading. Those who have accepted their fate whisper prayers to whoever and whatever they believe in.
Those who refuse to die run, screaming. Others plead.
It is in vain.
Gunshots form the percussion. The thud of bodies hitting the ground? Bass drum.
And then silence again.
Do you think me unjust, that I take the lives of these young ones but leave their murderer alive?
Who do you think I am? A human? I have no conscience. I have no mercy, no pity. I am. And I always will be.
I am not human, that I would break the laws of nature for a few scant lives. I call to the young and the old, the good and the wicked. When your time has come, it has come.
I am Death. And I have come for you.
