#reaperlore

Maybe it's cruel, for an entire lifetime to be wiped clean, every memory, every learned personality trait, every relationship, every hardship overcame now reduced to nothing— but it all gets replaced in one fell swoop by the collective history of every Reaper before them.

Because Death is merciful and despite stealing their lives, she gives her reapers a peaceful rest in return. It's more than they could have afforded in their days as human.

Reaper remembers the one before him, the one with the slack jaw and high-pitched squealing laughter that rang through the air. He had been rather casual about the job and Reaper isn't sure if he actually ever saw him working...mostly he was boasting about how many people he's brought to Death— He had remarked that the building of the West sent a record amount of bodies to the grave, making him the most successful reaper to date.

Reaper beat that record when the Taiping Rebellion ended. And then again with World War I...and eventually II. He's reaped more people than there were living people when he was born. And now there are more people than he could have ever imagined...and more deaths per minute than he can keep up with.

But it's a job.

It's better than being in that heat. Clay under his fingernails, sifting through pounds of wet silt, searching for gold— hell, it was more depressing to do that in the middle of the Gold Rush than seeing people on the last day of their lives, hours lost to the repetition, to the gnawing obsession for the tiniest nugget. It could change your life and yet hundreds of them sat in the soil, bending and breaking their backs by the riverside, searching for the glory that never came.

—He doesn't remember this, but he still finds himself smiling every time he sees a gold chain on the latest corpse, his own gold canine glinting in the sun.

The recently dead often ask him why he wasn't a skull-faced apparition with a long cloak and Reaper could only shrug and hold out a suddenly skeletal hand, silently delighting in how they jumped. If you really pressed him about it, he might say that Death isn't as frightening as everyone thinks. It's often more peaceful than life. It's certainly less painful. So why bother with all the theatrics?

They also ask if the scythe is real (it is) and how he can be anywhere in the world (there are portals everywhere if you know where to look); they end up asking more questions about him than about where they were going. It makes him wonder if he should go around with the skull face and chattering teeth, just so they'd stop asking him pointless questions.

But what if he doesn't want to be seen as scary? Even if he won't voice it, he rather likes being that last face someone sees before he leads them to an entirely different existence.

He hopes the calm expression helps. He hopes the occasional joke he tells lands. He hopes when he tells the little ones that it's okay that their parents are still on the other side, that they'll believe him. He hopes the older ones listen when he says they've lived a full life and it's alright to let go.

There's something inherently good about being a comfort, he thinks.