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“Thirteen”- the whisper followed him everywhere. The sound was quiet, but the shape of the letters was almost deafening as he passed. “They say he became a death scythe when he was just thirteen”. A funny number, that. Unlucky for some. A bad number.
For him, it was just another number. He’d grown out of it, but it seemed like it still followed no matter where he went. He’d been rather fond of it at that age, right after he’d learned that thirteen had been Death’s number in the Major Arcana. It’d seemed like a sign. Perhaps it had been.
It at least added some sort of romance to the whole thing. It seemed that his reputation preceded him, the prodigy who killed a witch and ate her soul when he was barely a teen, the one who had done it all by himself, with no meister by his side. A weapon was supposed to be nothing without a partner, but he didn’t need one. So long as Lord Death gave him his orders, he would carry them out. They were all he had, after all.
~*~
The Executioner, they called him.
It was apt, in a way. An Execution implied a carrying out of a higher-being’s judgement, a swift punishment to keep evil-doers in line. It was almost perfect for him, except… well. He wasn’t really the executioner.
He was just the weapon.
He was less the punishment and more the shiny silver guillotine on display, a warning in the shape of a man for those who strayed a little too far from the righteous path. Lord Death was, always, the hand that pulled the lever, the mouth that read the charges. He didn’t think… he just DID. There was a freedom in being used in such a way, one that he was ever grateful for. There was a peace that came with a black and white world- black, Lord Death’s cloak, his shroud. White, Lord Death’s skull, his face. There were no two colours more beautiful in their simplicity, and they soothed him as he carried out his tasks. He was the garish grey, the culmination of the black and white meeting, holy and unholy, death and virtue combined into one machine, one weapon ready to take what must be taken and deliver the overwhelming reminder of mortality in place of his Lord.
It was too much, for any one mortal to be taken by Death himself; too crushingly, unbearably divine, for one’s own sins to be purged by the manifestation of the end, the end of everything and everyone. Lord Death was an endless black sky, sinking ever downwards with a velvet weight, and humanity was merely a colony of ants who scurried uncomprehendingly underneath it all, scared of that which they could not hope to understand.
He recognised this in himself too, of course- this inability to understand the divine, his own tiny, miniscule place in the universe, barely a blip. But there was no fear left within him- an ant who had stared at the sky instead of running and to whom the sky had spoken with its thundery voice. Fear had been cut out by his own blades, replaced by Lord Death’s instructions which filled him with purpose. He could not fail his missions, not anymore. Not now that he had nothing left but that which Lord Death had spake unto him. What else was there, if not for his Lord’s will? Life was simple, with sound blocking his ears and Lord Death’s missions moving his body, turning him into a vessel existing for one purpose.
And his body had to agree. His soul had manifested itself into the perfect tool, one which could carry out that which lesser men would struggle to do. He was a Death Scythe forged in death, a single soul bound firmly in his one, unwavering goal that he would always see to completion.
A scythe was a tool for harnessing, to neaten and trim and harvest that which life had provided. A hammer was a tool to fix, to bring things together, to pound back those sharp points which poked through until they bowed in supplication. A guillotine though… there was nothing else for a guillotine but to END, to deliver a swift death for those who could not be fixed. His soul was made of harder steel, unyielding blades which had no interest in life, but in the crusade of death. A weaker man could have found himself drowning in the silver light, broken by the burden of being a true Death Scythe. Justin Law was no mere man. He was Death’s weapon, and he would use his blades whenever his Lord, his higher power, commanded it. In return, he was freed from the constraints of morality which had plagued him in his early years.
What was good? It was that which Lord Death commanded, it was the justice his Lord carefully used his tools to achieve, to preserve. What was evil? It was that which Lord Death railed against, those who were on the other end of Justin’s deadly blade. It was as unshakable as the sky itself- to go against Lord Death’s commands was to defy the very nature of the world. He was not created for futile rebellion, he was created in an executioner’s image, to give himself up to the judgement of the divine as he existed on the cusp of living and not living.
Was he living? Inasmuch as a tool had need for life, anyway. But neither was he dead- not yet had he joined his Lord in that most holy of states, not when there was work to be done. He was a blur- less body than soul, or maybe less soul than body, he was never sure, never had to be sure. His substance was unsplit between weapon and meister, boundaries undrawn, uncleaved. He would stare at his hands sometimes, as he pondered this, and he forgot whether he was looking at flesh and blood or steel and edge and really, it was all one in the same, wasn’t it? It was easy to forget, when he was drowned out by throbbing notes and pulled along by higher purpose, a guillotine’s string tensed and waiting for its fall.
The price for being whole; the inability to divide oneself between weapon, inanimate, and human, being, until there was a riotous void of a space absolved only through the ablutions he performed in his Lord’s stead.
Whole, holy.
He worked in the dark so that he could be blessed by his Lord’s light, his soft, seeping form protected by the armour of absolutes he dealt in. No trials, only the judgement that must be brought down amongst all men.
A creation of Law, like his namesake.