#67 Portal
Rem didn't much like the male members of her species. The male shinigami seemed out outnumber the females these days, since the king had forbidden breeding. Rem hadn't yet fathomed out why; it wasn't as though the females were less vicious. On the contrary, in the case of Kinddara, none of the males would go near her for fear of her literally ripping them to pieces.
But in any case, she disliked the males. They were crude and self-important and tended to tease her for being so 'pretty'.
Oh yes, by shinigami standards, Rem was a beauty, not many could claim her pure white coloration, much less her delicately built body. Watching her wings unfold was a work of art, a complicated construction of bone and feather.
Right down to her facial features, Rem was a rare beauty. Golden eyes like sunlight and lavender hair was much admired. Why, the lovely Daril, covered in her gems and gold, would often remark how she would kill for Rem's eyes. This usually prompted laughter from the assembled shinigami.
Rem floated through it all like an iceberg. She wasn't interested in making friends with the deeply stupid 'Gamis who spent their time gambling, nor with the scheming ones who were forever talking of ways to overthrow the king or somehow get into the human world and really mess things up.
She didn't even see the attraction in the killing. She knew some Shinigami who adored their trips to the windows into the mortal realm, who wrote down names greedily and filled up their notebooks. She just saw it as a boring necessity. No regrets, no pleasure, just something she did to stave off her own destruction.
Until one day when she was walking among the portals and spied a small figure hunched over one.
Frowning slightly, she moved between the stone domes towards the little shape, recognising him as a shinigami, but she couldn't think what his name was.
"What are you looking at?" she asked calmly, towering over him.
The little creature squeaked and turned in a panic. Rem noting to herself that he was obviously a low-ranking shinigami, based only on his ragged appearance and the clumsy writing on his notebook. His skin was patchwork and bone; large, uneven stitches held him together.
Rem sighed. "I'm not going to hurt you. What are you looking at?"
The creature gulped. "Promise not to hurt her!"
Rem had blinked, stunned, but nodded calmly, peering over the little shinigami into the portal.
It showed a human girl. Rem, like all shinigami, couldn't really call herself a good judge of human attractiveness, but she supposed that from the way several humans seemed to be staring at this particular girl, she much have been pretty.
"A girl?" Rem questioned. "I have no interest in her."
The creature frowned and sighed, "No-one but me does… none of the others can see how beautiful she is… she's so kind and loving. All the humans she meets, they all fall in love with her a little bit."
Rem tilted her head and knelt to better examine this apparently extraordinary girl.
She didn't look like much, just another small human female. She had yellow hair and big blue eyes, bright red lips, but certainly Red wouldn't have picked her out of a crowd.
"She doesn't look like anything special." Rem muttered.
The smaller shinigami shuffled next to her, "I know, but she is, trust me… you should see the way things look when she really smiles… it lights up the whole world."
Rem didn't understand this, but she nodded anyway. She watched a little while long, the bouncy way the girl walked and the easy way she spoke to the people around her. She observed the little waves and jangles of her jewellery.
Rem rolled her large gold eyes and stood upright, once again towering over the low-ranking shinigami.
She turned to walk away from the portal and the lonely watcher, but something pulled her back. She glanced over her shoulder and asked. "What is your name?"
He blinked his large eyes at her, and Rem noticed for the first time that they were gold, like her own. Somewhere in the back of her mind, long-forgotten emotions began to take root.
"Gelus." He mumbled. "My Name is Gelus." He swallowed nervously and glanced back at the portal again. "You promise you won't hurt her?"
Rem found herself nodding, and saying softly, "I promise."