Death, War, Famine, Pestilence and Ronnie were the five Horsemen of the Apocralypse (apocryphal apocalypse, that is). But Ronnie Soak the fifth Horseman left before they were famous.
Just like Old Man Trouble, the Soul Cake Duck and Santa Claus, Death is an anthropomorphic personification. And Personifications become very person-like, over the years. They acquire personality. And the problem with being self-aware and humanoid is that shape often determines nature, and all-powerful personifications suddenly get lonely, need company, or get uncomfortable with the nasty jobs they always get stuck with, like standing by to clean up after people have finished killing each other.
And this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of the now.
Timers line the walls. Not hour-glasses, although they have the same shape. Not egg-timers, such as you might buy as a souvenir attached to a small board with the name of the holiday resort of your choice jauntily inscribed on it by someone with the same sense of style as a jelly doughnut.
It's not even sand in there. It's seconds, endlessly turning the maybe into the was.
And every lifetimer has a name on it.
And the room is full of the soft hissing of people living.
Picture the scene . . .
And now add the sharp clicking of bone on stone, getting closer.
Death realised that being personified gives one human needs and desires - and hangups. And so Death grew to ask questions like 'Why?', and worse, 'Why Not?' One day, Death adopted a daughter. She was just... there, in the middle of one of those nasty little wars on the Sto Plain. Just another starving orphan. And so he lifted her onto the back of the Pale Horse (Binky) and took her home, to the bizarre grey world that is Death's domain.
In the warm, horsey gloom of the stable, Death's pale horse looked up from its oats and gave a little whinny of greeting. The horse's name was Binky. He was a real horse. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.
Unfortunately, little girls eventually grow up. And in time, this daughter married and had a baby girl, Susan Sto Helit. The daughter of a duke, she was also Death's granddaughter. There are inheritances that have nothing to do with biology. Genetics is in some sense just acquired. And so Susan grew into someone who could walk through walls, move outside the bounds of time and space, AND DO THE VOICE. The voice that goes through people's skulls without needing to use the ears. After being Educated (a terrible fate), Susan became a governess, and later a teacher. The terror of every bogey-man, monster, giant spider or Grade One Prohibitory Bear, she is most opposed to the Auditors - the enemies of all life, they are also the unliving. But even the unliving can be smashed into non-existence with a poker, if you go about it in the right way...
Death (and family)