The sword of the mouth shall smite them to dust.
I have slept in the darkness—
They sat on his bed, the god and his blurred shadow—him with a pen in his hand, her with nostalgia in her eyes. Ryuk hovered above them, cackling at some unheard joke. The Shinigami had always thought she was a demon, with her bright skin and her colorful hair, caught between one guise and another, her eyes filled with an ocean.
She was the one to break the silence, to hear her own admission that the world she came from still existed, that it would exist without her. The fear that it would leave her behind. "In the place I come from, there was man called Machiavelli. You remind me of him."
He looked over at her, his face a mask, his mind churning behind its still surface. She continued in spite of his eyes; perhaps she continued because of them, because she loved the fact that he saw what she could be behind the alien features, behind the halting words and quickly fading accent.
"He said that it is better to be feared than loved, if one cannot have both." And she saw him, standing on that pedestal, above his people, all of them staring up at him with adoration in terror, the emotions wrapped so tightly together that none could tell the difference. Tears in his people's eyes, God have mercy, Kyrie Eleison. The words were too familiar. "A man shrinks more from betraying a man he fears than a man he loves. When I read that I thought of you, and how you have never loved anything in your life, and how you never will. At the time I didn't understand—I thought that it made you weak."
She paused, realizing she had his full attention. Behind his glass eyes, his entire mind was centered on her words, the secret they revealed causing his fingers to twitch. Because they both knew that it was no human that she was describing.
"You don't need people to love you, you don't need anything to love you. And so you love nothing in return; it is easier that way. The relationship between God and his people is uncomplicated by human emotion. You're removing yourself from humanity; you're just as removed from this world as I am. Soon you'll be exactly like me, an outsider looking in—the only true absolute ruler that could ever exist, god of justice and death."
Then and only then would he hear the church bells, clanging softly in the distance, mourning for the human he once had been. Only then would he see through the stained glass window, and learn to weep with her for the future he had lost.
But it would be a long time before such a day ever came, so he turned back to his Notebook and she turned back to her musings, each thinking of the haunting future that lay ahead, just beyond the horizon.