"You have to promise me. Promise not to kill me until I've made this world into a perfect utopia."

It's been three long years since those words were spoken. Three years for me to contemplate my betrayal.

Oh, I didn't particularly mean to do it. At least, not at first. I didn't wake up suddenly and decide that today, I felt like being rather more evil than usual. It's simple enough to make a promise and then forget you ever said anything. Occasionally, it pops to the front of your mind, and there might be a brief flash of guilt (if you're one of the few that still has a conscience), but for the most part it's much too easy. Perhaps that's why.

Then again, perhaps not. After all, I can't lie to myself. I might be able to rationalize, to fool myself for awhile, but not forever. Not even for three years.

You see, I made a promise. I even kept it for awhile. But I didn't keep it long enough. Or maybe I did. It makes no difference to me.

Let me explain. No. To explain would require mindless exposition and hours of skipping from one topic to the next. I have no wish to engage in such trivial matters. I am easily bored.

I'm pretty sure I did it on purpose. Actually, I'm absolutely sure it was on purpose. It was fun for awhile to pretend that I didn't, that it was just an accident caused by something commonly known as "fate" or "destiny". For the longest time, I wasn't actually pretending, either. But, like I said before, I am easily bored. Even the petty games of power played by so many failed to be amusing after awhile. And so I dismissed the promise I made on that day without a second thought. Even apples cannot hold my interest forever.

Promises are funny things when you think about it. They require such great depths of trust, or so it appears on the surface. Perhaps it's actually a lack of trust in human ability that causes us to make these oaths to one another. After all, why is it necessary to say "Promise" or "I swear"? Shouldn't it be enough to merely speak and know that it will be so?

It should be, but it isn't. And it is then my great fortune not to be human.

What exactly am I, then, if not human?

I am a Shinigami. A god of death. And I am easily bored.

Even among my own kind, I'm an outcast. The others are content to sit and play endlessly repetitive games for all of eternity, only occasionally doing what a death god is actually supposed to do.

Mindless. Boring. Trivial. Idiotic, in my opinion.

It's much more fun to watch the human world. They lead such pathetic lives with such a sense of all-powerful importance. Or most of them do, anyway. There are a few, very few, that actually understand how to play the game of power, how to be clever enough to manipulate events to their own purposes. They are the most fun to watch, but why watch when you can take a more personal hand in stirring up the pot?

Of course, I had no way of knowing what would happen when I dropped my Death Note into the human world. It could have easily fallen into the hands of a slow, stupid person with no idea of the power contained within an innocuous notebook. It's fortunate for me that it found its way into the considerably more than capable hands of Yagami Light.

Light, who actually managed to keep my boredom at bay with a combination of impossibly clever schemes, raw ambition, and apples.

Yes. I can't forget the apples. But even apples cannot hold a Shinigami to his promise if he doesn't want to be kept there.

And it's for that reason that I broke my promise. If you think about it, he really should have known better. After all, you can hardly expect a death god to be trustworthy. Light didn't trust me, but he did think that holding the power of the Death Note in his hands somehow gave him power over me.

Ah, Light. If only you knew. But it was for your own good, though you may not believe me. I am easily bored…and I think, so are you.

And what better way to alleviate boredom than to turn the source of my amusement to my own purposes? After all, taking a personal hand in stirring the pot doesn't have to be anything as drastic as dropping a spare Death Note into the human world. It can be as simple as writing a name like, say, Yagami Light into your own Death Note. What's so exciting about that?

I am easily bored. Breaking my promise was simply a way to amuse myself for awhile longer. Nothing much has changed in the death god world, save for one thing.

Yagami Light sits beside me now, watching the human world. He didn't agree with me at first, but we're more alike than even he realized. He is also easily bored. Couple that with his natural ambition and cleverness, and the potential for causing chaos has been effectively doubled. Why create a perfect utopia when you're still only human? Light is smart enough to see my point. As a Shinigami, he wields a power immensely superior to anything he might have been able to do as a part of the human world. Utopia is such a small goal now, if it's even one at all. After all, the larger aim has always been to find a better source of amusement.

I don't mind breaking promises. After all, I am easily bored.

But I do miss the apples.