No one who ever knew the man calling himself Death came to understand what he thought, why he did any particular thing, or where he had come from in the first place. This is worth stating plainly, because it is, in its own way, the truest thing this account can offer you about him: he was, by the time most surviving accounts of him were gathered, already almost entirely unknowable, even to the souls who feared him most.
The testimonies that survive do not agree with each other. Some souls who claim to have glimpsed him describe a figure of considerable, terrible bearing, ancient in the particular way only the Between's oldest residents ever become. Others describe someone smaller, quieter, almost unremarkable to look at, more unsettling for how ordinary he seemed than for anything visibly monstrous about him. Some say he spoke, on the rare occasions he was ever addressed directly, in a voice that carried genuine and unexpected gentleness. Others insist he never spoke at all, not once, in any account they ever heard secondhand. I have no way of reconciling these. I'm not certain they should be reconciled. Perhaps he was different things to different frightened witnesses, the way fear so often reshapes whatever it's looking at.
Consider what an ordinary soul actually is, in this world — a silhouette that builds itself slowly into something like a person through the accumulation of small, witnessed things: a habit noticed by someone who loves you, a story told often enough to become a fact about who you are, a face that softens in a particular, recognizable way when something good happens to it. Whoever this man was, he had none of that left by the time most of these stories were told. No one loved him closely enough to notice his habits. No one survived contact with him long enough, as a rule, to carry a story back out into the wider Between that amounted to more than a warning.
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It should be said, for the sake of completeness, that the thousands of figures already drifting through his territory by whatever point these accounts were gathered had, by the oldest surviving testimony, been there since very near the beginning of whatever the Between has ever counted as its own beginning — long before any story about this particular man began circulating at all. Souls can, in the ordinary run of things, fade from the Between entirely, the way a light fades when nothing keeps feeding it. But fading requires a particular kind of stillness — the Nothing does not tolerate idleness gladly, and any soul that goes too long without answering the pull of a Mission risks exactly this slow unraveling. The souls trapped in that black liquid had no such freedom. Missions were the only door out of that suffering the water could not fully close, the only stretch of time in which a drowning soul might, for however brief a window, feel something closer to paradise than to punishment — and so they clung to every Mission the Between offered them with a desperation that had nothing left in it resembling dignity, because the alternative to clinging was simply more of the water. Thousands remained there still, by whatever point these accounts end. Thousands more, scattered elsewhere across other corners of the Between under other cruel and forgotten hands, may or may not ever have found their own way out. This account does not know.
Where he came from, no surviving testimony agrees. Where he ended up, none agree either. I offer you the same honesty here that I've offered you everywhere else in this telling: I don't know, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise simply to give this account a tidier shape than the truth actually has.
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