Funeral cortege.

[Reaper - Scarlet]

This great evil, where does it come from?
How would it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who is doing this?
Who is killing us?

Robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might of known.
Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?

Is this darkness in you too?
Have you passed through this night?

I'm Scarlet. That is the name of my choosing. My real name I do not know, it is long forgotten with many memories more I once must have held. My age is somewhat around my mid-twenties, five or six perhaps. Years passed by without me much noticing and my head is shrouded by mists that I cannot break through. Terrible youth, supressed emotions, post-traumatic stress or whatever a therapist would say about it. But when you found your answers, those you never asked or were looking for, then you do not need the assumptions others make of your life and you do not need listening their words making a mockery of your suffering, drilling ever deeper into what you do not want knowing. It is of no concern. Not to me. Not to others. Not to those I'm killing.
I'm living this life now already for what feels time eternal. Every day and every night, time is clouded in fogging when you travel the stars. Day becomes night and night becomes day, where you are that moment determines what is what. I'm feeling that it is decided at random, or fate's dice, made just for me by some great architect. Thoughts that come and go, with never an answer given. I'm on my hunt and my hunt alone is my craving.

For a thousand souls die every day, human blood, human flesh, the stuff of which the earth is made.
Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace among the stars.
And whatever happens, you will not be missed.

Even the process of creation is but the precursor to destruction and decay.
The bastion of today is tomorrow's ruin, the maiden of the morning is the crone of the night.
And hope of a moment is but the foundation of regret.

I first died some years ago but I'm neither knowing how nor when. I stopped fighting the mists, just living with them made life easier. Easier to bear, easier carrying myself through the sloth that each day is. I'm not questioning my past. I feel alive, I bleed, I sleep, though I do not eat. There is no hunger but the hunger for death. This relentless, merciless hunger. It is my first thought after waking up, my first thought even after I just sated it. Death, sweet death, my only desire. Not my death but that of others. I'm enjoying the pain inflicted to others, I know I should not but you should hear their screams the way I do. It is not mere pleasure I'm getting from it, it is this all-consuming feeling, that moment's thrill shortly before they realise that they are breathing their last breath. When their eyes turn bland and they are accepting what lies ahead.
I died many times more and always wake up. I wake up again, on the hallowed grounds, the sacred vaults that is the Temple. And I'm again going out on my hunt. I understand now who I'm and what I'm supposed doing in this world. I know my purpose. I'm severing the ties. I'm collecting the souls. I'm guiding them to their next life.

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Names I were given many. Over the years counting them became impossible. There just were too many of them. Life is unforgiving, happiness and the good times never stick around with you for long. You see them ahead and you better brace yourself because life does find a way shattering your world in an eye's blink. I was on my way becoming that shattering. The embodiment of it. That shadow, always lurking in the dark, watching, prying, preying, waiting to strike when you are at your highest. Or right on the spot for karma's sake teaching a lesson.

I'm always waking up here. The Temple, this sacrilege, this sanctuary. This sacred and unholy place. Every time again, for so long that I forgot it's beginning. I'm docking my fighter, it gets hooked and carried down, an endless fall through the darkness, where minutes pass without a light, where the humming by the rails washes away all my thoughts and clears my mind. Until my fighter is fixed to the entrance, my entrance only, none is entering the same way down as the other.
What comes in sight is not more than a circular hallway. It goes around a glass cylinder in its centre. A cylinder that reaches through the ceiling and the floor, filled with the blood of those we harvested. It is always in motion and when you give it a moment of silence I'm still hearing their screams, their crying souls, the last of life's remnants sucked away from the blood that is all what is left from them. It must lead somewhere but I'm not interested in that. I come here for one reason, delivering what I harvested in exchange for Credits on my score. They buy me time, they buy me another life, they buy me peace.
Opposite my entrance is a bar. My visits there are few and between. I'm selecting another life on the screen, no sound, no signal confirms my purchase and still I know another one on my score. One of the souls I and others brought in will suffer no more, come the day I die again.
I'm a collector, a harvester. I'm killing the wicked, the evil and everyone else too.

The endless dark of the universe is yours, yet it is a shifting uncertain thing which changes as you consider it.
You have only to look upon the universe and change it by the very act of observation.

Yield nothing.
The void respects only strength.