Tell me a story from the perspective of the Grim Reaper if he was a malevolent entity who encountered Nyarlathotep.

The first thing he did was die incorrectly.

I had come to a village where the wells had turned warm. For seven nights, the water had tasted of milk; on the eighth, it had begun to whisper the names of children not yet conceived. The villagers blamed a stranger.

They hanged him at dawn.

I waited beneath the gallows.

Do not mistake my presence for duty. There are deaths I attend because I must, and deaths I attend because I enjoy the company. A hanging in a frightened village offers small pleasures: the condemned man’s sudden faith, the executioner’s trembling hands, the widow already measuring another man for her bed.

The stranger wore a black suit without a speck of road dust on it. His face was pleasant and forgettable.

When the trap opened, his neck broke.

Then it broke again.

And again.

The sound traveled down into the earth, each crack farther away than the last, until something beneath the village answered.

His eyes found mine.

“You’re late,” he said.

No living person had ever seen me so clearly.

I stepped forward, dragging my blade through the mud. Grass blackened along its furrow.

“You have mistaken me for someone who can be summoned.”

“No,” he said. “But I did wonder whether you could be entertained.”

The rope unwound from his throat.

I do not mean it loosened. Its fibers separated, twisted backward into flax, and blossomed. The gallows put forth leaves. The man who had built it screamed as splinters emerged beneath his fingernails.

The stranger dropped lightly to the ground.

“Nyarlathotep,” he said, extending a hand.

I did not take it.

Behind him, the villagers were still watching the rope. They had not seen him descend. For them, his body remained overhead, turning slightly in the morning breeze.

I looked from the dangling corpse to the man before me.

He seemed pleased that I had noticed.

I have been called cruel by creatures who eat their young and tender by creatures who would have done the same had winter lasted another week.

Both judgments are wrong.

Cruelty requires an understanding of what might have been spared.

I have that understanding. I simply do not spare.

I told him this as we walked through the village.

He listened with the indulgence of a master listening to an apprentice describe his first knife.

At one cottage, I stopped beside a woman nursing an infant. She could not see us. The child could.

I laid one finger against its soft, unfinished skull.

Its mother looked down and smiled at something it had done.

“There,” I said. “Consider what I can take.”

Nyarlathotep leaned over the cradle.

“Consider what you leave.”

He touched the woman’s cheek.

For a moment, I saw her whole life: the child buried beneath apple roots; her marriage thinning into silence; the little shirt she would keep folded in a box. Then her own death, forty years hence.

Beyond it, nothing I was permitted to see.

“A conclusion,” he said. “You let her reach one.”

I withdrew my hand.

The infant began to cry.

There are kingdoms beneath the world where my name is carved on gates. There are battlefields whose soil recognizes my tread. I have emptied royal houses slowly, beginning with the healthiest child.

Yet in that village I found myself trying to impress a stranger.

I showed him the cooper, whom I had allowed to survive three sons.

The priest, who had mistaken the scratching in his chest for a test of faith.

The girl at the bakery, whose lover would return from war one afternoon after she had been lowered into the ground.

Nyarlathotep knew them all.

He knew the names the cooper’s sons might have given their children. He knew what the priest thought about while praying. He knew where the girl’s lover had left the lower half of his body.

“You are diligent,” he said.

I raised my scythe.

The village became still.

Smoke ceased rising. A dropped cup hung above a threshold. Beneath the butcher’s table, a fly waited forever one wingbeat from meat.

Everything subject to death had stopped.

Nyarlathotep continued walking.

I struck him through the back.

My blade entered his suit and emerged from the open mouth of the priest.

I pulled it free. Somewhere far away, an ocean fell silent.

He turned.

“Again?”

I struck at his throat.

For an instant, I stood inside something enormous and alive. Stars clung to its walls like luminous eggs. A pressure moved toward me through the dark, and I understood that if it reached me, I would learn what my blade had touched.

Then I was back beside the gallows.

Nyarlathotep adjusted his collar.

My hands were shaking.

He watched them with interest.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“A modest alteration to your work.”

He took my scythe. I had not offered it; nevertheless, I remembered placing it in his hand.

He ran one finger along the edge.

I heard the dying across the world.

Usually they arrive singly, however numerous they are: each a small, private surrender. Now I heard them together. Men beneath collapsed mines. An old woman sitting upright in bed. A deer cooling in the snow.

Their cries stopped.

Their hearts did not.

I reached for the old woman. I knew her. I had been standing behind her chair for six days.

There was no way in.

“What have you done?”

Nyarlathotep returned my scythe.

It was still sharp. I could feel that. Sharp enough to open anything.

“You may continue,” he said.

Then he climbed the gallows steps and put the rope around his neck.

Time resumed.

The trap fell.

The villagers cheered.

That was long ago.

The wells have dried. The village has burned twice. Beneath its foundations, the villagers turn in their narrow places, wearing away the earth with what remains of their hands.

I still visit.

At first I went to hear them plead. Later, I went to practice.

I have tried every stroke.

I have severed heads, divided hearts, drawn the blade with perfect tenderness across threads I once could cut without looking. Nothing parts completely now.

Sometimes he is there, watching from the road.

He never speaks. He need not.

Tonight I sit beside the woman from the cottage. She holds the little shirt against her chest. The box rotted centuries ago.

She cannot see me, but she has learned to recognize the sound of my blade being lifted.

“Please,” she says.

I tell her I will try again.