He touched my sweaty brow, visions spooling across my mind like a Vulcan mindmeld.
"This is where the tefillin come from… I wanted to show you…"
Before the time of the angels, when God was truly alone, a gardener of a gestating world, Death came into being.
Samael, as he came to be known. was bones before God invented flesh, bare white with a perpetual grin. His Father looked out one thorny morning through Eden's vines upon the falling snow. He noted the blankness and thought, in His wisdom, "It is good. I shall create in My image one who walks with winter and brings about the harvest of souls." And so, out of frost and slices of star, God fashioned Death, the master of souls.
Death was a creation of night, eye hollows holding captive the abyss from which the Lord had arose. God loved his son Death for his terribleness, but pitied him for his soft heart. For Death, in his innocence, thirsted for life, not knowing he was the end of it.
