#8 Life
Good evening, ladies, gentlemen and sinners all, don't stand so far back, you'll catch a chill. The nights in the realm of the real and unreal are so very cold. Huddle together, if it will help.
Some of you will recognise me, I, the notebook that takes lives. Remember my fine leather bindings, my soft, slightly yellowing pages, I am very old, after all, one cannot stay young and perfect forever.
But for those among you who do not remember me, I am the object known in your universe as the Death note.
I have been many things… and in this form, you may flip through my pages and see them all. Turn the cover, and you will see that the pages are made of animal hide, a scrap of leather and leaves, and the writing upon me, mere scratches, a lost language of your ancestors.
Turn these pages and you will find eventually you come to thick, wadded paper, woven bark, inks made of melted stones. Names written with pictures of things you no longer have names for.
And sometimes scroll-pages are slipped into my binding, from days of knights and castles, of brave samurais and selfish princes.
Still further, you will come across the first signs of your own language. Letters you understand in words you almost recall.
And finally, the fine lines of a school notebook, names written in a neat script. Except for the last name. That is a scrawl, whoever wrote it has helpfully drawn a crescent moon beside it.
You see, I have had a long existence. I could hardly call it a life.
I shall tell you something now, which I have never told anyone.
I deeply resent being told that killing people is always wrong.
As it happens, I do not consider what my powers do, murder. I am merely a book, which separates the soul from the earthly vessel. What others choose to write in me is of little consequence to myself.
And in any case, observing how you human beings treat one another I believe that death is the only friend to the sick old man or starving and crying child, with my powers I take away the pain and end the suffering that life gives them.
Murder is something you as a species invented. It's not for me to interfere. I suppose with the right person, I could be used for good. Or evil. The point I am making is that I myself do not choose to cause harm.
I find it very odd that you creatures choose to use the brief interval of life you have been given being generally unpleasant to one another, but I suppose it is yours to do with as you wish.
But it seems like an awful waste of what amounts to a very short life.