#49 Theives
There are many tales told about how the world came into being, and how it has come to this. But one everlasting theme seems to be that humanity came to be how it is because we stole from some superior being. Almost all the stories have it. Intelligence, stolen in an apple, fire kidnapped from the gods.
But never does it occur to the people who tell these legends that the gods might have a better punishment than simply sending thieves to be outcast forever.
Or perhaps, that what was stolen was not wisdom or fire, but something of infinitely more value.
That perhaps in the days before life had really taken hold of the world, a human, tall, skinny and beautiful, crept into the world of the gods and stole an enchanted scroll. And upon that scroll this traitor of all mankind scrawled the names of the gods.
And forty seconds later, they fell, their huge bodies smashing the land into countries, their bones becoming mountains and valleys.
Humanity was freed to govern itself, but at a cost. For with their dying breaths, the gods cursed that one human. Cursed him to be himself a god, but not of their kind. He was cursed to carry that scroll forever, and be forced to choose his own death date.
Some might not think this a curse. But it was, and it was slow. As time rolled past this poor creature, he watched his kind change, and soon their eyes lit with revulsion at the sight of him, as his skin rotted away and he became a monster of bones, never able to die so long as there were years in his scroll.
Every time his death day drew near, and his time began to run out, he would steal yet more years from those who exiled him not only from their homes, but eventually from their very dimension.
He created more like himself. He left small pieces of the ever-full scroll across the world and recruited more men and women. It gave him some pleasure to watch their own skin rot away as they too became monsters.
He gave them each a piece of scroll and watched the poor creatures suffer with their own mortality. Some of them could not bear to steal time from others, and burst into piles of some strange substance that wasn't sand or rust.
Time continued to pass, and that first thief still continued to take what he needed in order to keep living, unable to bring himself to let the time run out, and let himself give in.
He watched the infamous Kira saga play out, and even allowed the boy to become a god, and almost found himself laughing when the boy followed Ryuk like a lost puppy.
And then it all started to go wrong.
He wasn't sure how many hundreds of thousands of years it had been, but finally, the world was running out. The humans were vanishing, escaping to other places unknown or simply dripping dead before the gods of death could harvest them.
Slowly, they began to melt away; the desert of time grew larger day by day, until only he, the first and their king, was left.
He realised, as he threw his scroll away and felt, at last, his body begin to turn to sand, that in some ways, it's a lot harder to live than it is to die.