The Reaper's Heart

The end of the reaper’s scythe dragged through ash as he wandered through a world he was once a part of.

He didn’t remember his life, not anymore. He was able to recall shadows, breaths of memories that floated through his mind like flakes of snow that he could never hope to catch. His heart no longer beat, and emotion was as foreign to him as the countless souls he led from one existence to the next. His sole duty wasn’t to know the souls he reaped, it was simply to guide them, guide them to an existence that he himself had rejected.

That was what had gotten him here, cloaked and burdened with a scythe. He had refused to move on. Being here, in the state of a reaper, was a sort of purgatory for the souls that didn’t want to leave the world they had come to know so well. He had accepted this state of being and tried so hard to hold onto what had anchored him to this world, but… so much time had passed now, his consciousness had become as reliable as smoke and as driven as a cadaver.

This world he wandered and reaped through once thrived with life that was heavily dependent on technology. Mankind had achieved the feats of making cars fly, communicating through thought waves, and more. No one had anticipated the atmospheric collapse that would destroy the sky and bring the thousands and thousands of satellites and orbiting debris crashing back to the surface. Mankind had survived, but the majority of the population had been wiped out, either by the catastrophe itself or by the years of post-apocalyptic suffering that followed as the sky healed. Any living persons remaining adapted to the new conditions of this world and collectively became something different than mankind had ever been before, ruling and domineering each other through cruel and arcane ways.

The reaper had lived and died in this world long before it had ended and evolved into what it was now. It didn’t matter to him what the world was. All that moved his footsteps forward was the next soul due for reaping.

The next soul he was to reap was young. She was a girl whose life was about to fall just short of nine years long. He wouldn’t see it, but she was about to succumb to the smoke that had stolen her breath and poisoned her lungs from the fire that had buried the ground in this ash he walked through now.

Younger souls were often difficult to reap, mainly because of how frightened and in need of comfort they were. They rarely resisted the reaper’s guiding hand for those same reasons though, not like older souls did. Younger souls tended to accept their passing faster than older souls. They had less time to become attached to the world they were born into, it seemed.

From what he knew of this soul - his knowledge of her in his mind solely because he was assigned to reap her - she had been a resilient one, being born into a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. This world had become a difficult one to survive on in almost every way; so many of the souls he reaped seemed broken in spirit, relieved for the chance to move on. This one, however, seemed to resent that she hadn’t gotten the chance to make much of a difference in this world, now that she was dying.

When he found her, her soul had already parted from her body. She was sitting beside it, knees clutched to her chest, eyes wide with shock. They only grew wider once the reaper came into her line of sight.

As he approached her, he moved with slow, methodical motions, removing his hood from his head. Reapers only did this for young souls as a way to avoid adding to their youthful fear. When he reached her, he lowered himself down to one knee, setting his scythe to the side before extending a single, patient hand towards her. He didn’t have a voice as a reaper; no words were ever needed to explain why he was there, a reaper’s purpose was part of a soul’s inherent knowledge. He was prepared to give her as much time as she needed to accept his affable, tangible, yet symbolic hand.

Most souls shied away from reapers when they first appeared; they would scream, cry, try to speak, do anything they could do to express their denial, despair, or sometimes, their relief for what was happening to them. The reapers simply waited in silence for as long as necessary, rarely taken off guard by a soul’s reaction. This soul, however, responded differently to him.

As he knelt in front of her with his extended hand, she didn’t shy away or make a sound. For countless moments, she only stared at him, stared at his face. He didn’t know what his face looked like; it had been so long since he had become a reaper. For all he knew, it had become something horrifically inhuman. As she stared at him though, it wasn’t terror he was seeing in her wide eyes, it was surprise, surprise and… recognition.

That didn’t seem possible. He had existed in this world and had died long before this soul had even become a conscientious spark of anything. For maybe the first time since he had initially become a reaper, he visually exhibited his thoughts, tilting his head in genuine question of her reaction to him.

She stared at him for several moments longer, before finally moving. Silently, she removed the necklace she wore around her neck - an item that was merely an echo of the actual item that still resided with the body the soul had departed from - and with shaking fingers, she reached forward, grasped his wrist, and placed the necklace into the palm of his outstretched hand.

His gaze stayed on her as he felt the necklace rest in his hand, and very carefully, he pulled his hand back and looked at it. It meant nothing to him, at first. It was a heart-shaped necklace, a locket, he realized. Something like curiosity stirred faintly inside of him and he glanced back at the young girl. She only nodded once in encouragement.

He turned his focus back to the locket, and with gentle, hesitant fingers, he unlatched its tiny clasp and pulled it open.

Enclosed inside the locket was one small picture. Its edges had grown brown with age and its colors were faint, but the two people featured within it were clear: a man and a woman embraced together, the woman laughing as the man had his smiling lips pressed against her cheek, as if he had surprised her with a kiss just before the picture was taken.

It took the reaper an entire breath before he realized that the picture wasn’t unfamiliar to him. The thought scared him, and he recoiled. He fell backwards until he was sitting in the ashes, his knees pulling up to his chest until he was in a similar position to how the young girl had been when he had found her. His hands shook and his eyes remained locked on the locket, as if he had been captured by it. The woman in the picture, he… he had seen her before. More than that, he had known her. He had spoken to her, touched her, kissed her, loved her. The man in the picture holding to her with so much adoration and passion had been him, was him.

His entire face became plastered with the shock he felt, like the electrifying remains of a lightning bolt reverberating through his being, and his mind spun into motion in a way he had never thought it would again. He remembered why he had refused to move on from this existence. He couldn’t recall his life, but his love for her… He remembered how it had felt to feel so devoted to another person to the point it was impossible to imagine life without them, to the point you would do anything for them, to the point you would promise them everything you possibly had to give until your last dying breath.

Within the locket, on the opposite side of the picture, there were small words engraved into the casing, a promise: “No matter where our souls depart, I will follow you there, my love.”

The reaper gasped as something intense came over him, something like panicked despair. This woman, he had left her behind in this world when death had come for him far too soon, he had left her with nothing but the memory of his love and this very promise. It seemed she had immortalized those very things into this heart-shaped locket. She would have passed on sometime later, and… he had missed it, missed it because he lost himself to the mindless existence of a reaper.

With tears in his eyes, he raised his gaze back to the young girl, who was quietly watching him. How had she come to possess this locket? Had it been passed down to her as some sort of heirloom? Had it been given to her as a mysterious artifact from the old world? Had she managed to stumble across it somewhere, lost and forgotten? How had the locket even survived the end of the world?

So many questions, and yet… all he could think was that her soul, the soul of the woman who possessed his love, had chosen to move on, and was somewhere in the next existence. Did she still remember him? Had she searched for him? Was she still waiting for him, even after all this time? As he thought of her, his whole being that had been stilled and numb since he had died began to descend into a trembling fit of sobbing. Had she moved on from him? Was his promise to her irreparably broken? Was this despair all that he would feel for the rest of eternity? He felt his mind growing dark…

And then there were arms around him. The young girl had closed the space between them and wrapped him up in a tight embrace. Feeling the security she offered him pulled him back from the edge of madness and he forced himself to focus on nothing but her pure generosity. This girl had just died, and she was showing him care, him, the being that was meant to lead her away from this world that had been her home.

He grasped onto her, and she helped him back to his feet. She stepped back and, holding his gaze as securely as she had held his crying form, she extended her own hand to him, similarly to how he had extended his to her when he had first found her. He stared, at first, but with a hesitant hand, he accepted her gesture. From there, she led him away, towards the next existence.

As he walked with the young girl, leaving his scythe behind in the ashes and keeping the locket clutched safely in his other hand, he finally understood something. It wasn’t this world that had anything left to give him, this world that had moved on without him, it was the souls he had come to cherish, souls that continued to live even after they passed on from here. Was it too late for him to pass on too? Was it even possible for him to still find her, the woman he loved? A part of him, deep within his heart that hadn’t beat since he left her behind so long ago, knew that it was…

Because love, it seemed, was somehow able to transcend death itself.