Everyone knows the Grim Reaper, the personification of Death. You are the supernatural personification of the other certainty in life: Taxes
Gods are not born of belief. That is a fallacy. Gods are shaped by belief, altered by it, even strengthened by it, but it does not make them. Belief creates, but what it creates is not gods but… personifications, perhaps.
Death is the first and the oldest of us. When people learned to fear death, to see not only a cessation of life but a destruction of being, Death came into existence.
Death, my gentle brother, is an answer to the deepest longing of the human heart. “I am afraid. I do not want to die alone.” That thought was felt before it could be spoken, before speech was conceived. Humans longed for a comforting presence, when they died, not chill oblivion. Death offers it, and leads them on.
I, too, predate speech – Speech, or Language, is a flitting, fickle creature, born of the desire to communicate, mercurial and yet constant, like the air itself. But I am not like her. I have had many names, but what I am does not change.
Fairness, perhaps, was my first name. Long before sounds became words, the thought of fairness existed. It is not fair. It should be fair. I came into being the first time a hungry member of a troop was fed by one who had hunted well, the first time a weaker hunter was robbed by a strong one.