Hello, hello, hello, what's happenin' readers?

Muahahaha! Happy Halloween 2011! This one-shot is a suitably spooky-themed one shot, in which Death, the harvester of souls, writes about the process of death within RuneScape. This is how death happens within 'The Adventure Through RuneScape' universe. Enjoy!

Journal of Death

DEATH'S NOTES –

Death within RuneScape is quite a curious force, a force which I have the job of ruling. Death is sad, yet it is still curious, so here I am, Death, harvester of souls, noting down for myself the mechanics of a death and my place within it.

When a person dies (either through natural death related to disease or age or unnatural death, where a life is ended before the natural time) it is my duty to separate their soul from their earthly body. I am given a different book every day, which lists every person who will die on that day. On the time of death I have to go to the soul and take it from the body. I then take the soul to their re-spawning point, where a new body waits for them. There are rare occurrences when a person doesn't re-spawn; they die forever. In recent times, a dark spell has befallen the land where re-spawning doesn't happen and everybody dies forever, making this 'rare occurence' a regular one. In the occurrence when a person dies forever, I take the soul to a different place.

It hasn't got a name, but I call it the Calm Space and I will refer to it as the Calm Space in these notes. The Calm Space is simply an empty space consisting of nothing. There is nothing here; it is just an empty gap in the middle of nothing in particular.

When a person dies they are taken here, where they can realise that they are dead and calm down, since death is a shocking process for a person to go through. Then I present myself to the separated soul of the dead person, explain to them that they have died and also explain to them where they are. They are then given a choice; stay where they are or move on to the afterlife. The afterlife can differ, depending on the person. There is a good place for those who are pure and good and an evil place for the wicked and evil.

They can go straight to the afterlife, or they can dawdle in the Calm Space and go beyond whenever they feel ready. Some people are never ready to go to the afterlife and spend an eternity in the Calm Space, wandering around, either waiting for a loved one to die so they can greet them in the Calm Space, or staying in denial.

There are always exceptions in the case of death. Sometimes a person's soul will not go anywhere, and will remain imprinted in a specific place of death, doomed to haunt that place. This is usually caused by the body not being laid to rest properly (a famous example of this is the restless ghost in the Lumbridge cemetery). Another example is when a person is bitten by a vampire, or becomes a vampire due to heritage (a person's parents being vampires). A vampire is technically already dead; therefore a vampire cannot have a soul. Zombies are merely animated corpses with little to no process of thought, so they have no soul.

... and that concludes a very short one-shot for Halloween!

Until next time, toodles!