5 Minutes Freewriting - Jewel Thieves

We have been called "jewel thieves" in the past. We still are.

But, what is a jewel thief? You see, if you take those two words separately, you can ask two separate questions - what is a jewel, and what is a thief?

The definition of thief in modern society is a person who takes something he does not own from someone who owns it, without his or her permission.

The definition of jewel is a precious stone that people find subjectively important, both because of its beauty and because of the hard labor involved in creating it.

But if you combined those two definitions, you can almost say that a jewel thief is someone who takes something really beautiful and precious from someone else without his or her permission.

In a way, we can call ourselves that. After all, we do take things from people, things they pay little attention to, things they often don't even know exist, things they, one way or another, own.

You see, being a reaper is quite hard sometimes. Taking the soul of someone who is about to die, who is circled by "loved ones" who cry and shout and curse the Gods for this misfortune, is pretty annoying and frustrating.

But there's something beautiful in the process of death. The fear that one feels when faced with the ultimate and inevitable sentence, and then the acceptance in their eyes when they realize that death is nothing more than a natural process that leads to something else. All that is a quick, but beautiful process.

However, as usual, there are those who cannot control themselves, those who need more and more of that feeling, that power of taking a human life, those who cannot control themselves as much as us. They are reapers too, but they are young and inexperienced, incapable to control themselves and think before acting.

They go around, causing death and destruction, for the sheer pleasure of taking souls, for the power they feel. And as always, when a certain amount of people do something wrong in a collective, the whole collective is being punished.

In our case, we were simply given a nickname by those who don't understand what a reaper is, and what a reaper does. The majority of us don't kill for the pleasure of it, but because that's our job. Those who do it because they like it are soon to be punished, once we do find them.

Until then, we're all gonna be jewel thieves, entities that steal that precious little soul that humans have, souls that, to be honest, weren't theirs to begin with. But who has time to think about that? We have a job to do, and philosophy often just gets in the way.