Twilight was face to face with the Grim Reaper himself, and she had never been so scared before, not even when she fought the Storm King. However, she was also surprised when he called her by what Goldie named her some time ago. The colt placed himself between him and her, but she wasn’t sure that it would help a lot.

“Y-you know me?” she asked.

“I was told about you, and I expected you,” Thanatos answered. “Well, admittedly, you arrived here much sooner than I expected. I don’t know when you would have come, but I thought that you would have waited to reach your magical maturity to come here at least. Without that staff you got from the Storm King, you would have died. It’s a really powerful artifact that you got there. It may even become more powerful than my staff if given enough magic. You got really lucky, Princess.”

“Well, I… I had to get the staff to help Ma… Death Speaker… He would have died of old age if I had waited to reach my maturity,” Twilight said.

She was keeping her guard up, but so far, Thanatos didn’t seem willing to attack her. Maybe she will be able to get away without a fight.

“You should have let him die. That staff was destined to you, not to him,” the older lich said.

Twilight looked at him in shock. “What? It was for me?”

“Weren’t you feeling its call? This staff wanted you to have it. With it, you would have reached your full potential. But instead, you gave it to some stranger you naively trusted. Yes, he taught you a lot and allowed you to grow faster, but giving the staff to him was just pure foolishness. Be glad that he decided to spare you for some reason. In his place, I would have gotten rid of a potential rival. And now, you won’t be able to follow your destiny.”

“What destiny?” Goldie asked.

“This is not for me to tell. It wants to personally tell you,” Thanatos said.

“”It”?” both Twilight and Goldie questioned.

“However, it may not be over yet. You can recover the staff, with the help of this one that you have.” At that, Thanatos tilted his head. “How about we see how good you are?” Suddenly, he fired something from his horn, and the next instant, Goldie was enveloped in purple spectral chains.

“Hey!”

“By yourself.” Then, Thanatos began to self-levitate, floating higher and higher above the throne. “So fight me. Show me everything that you have learned until now.”

Twilight was starting to step back, descending the stairs. “Uh… Can I refuse?”

“No.”

Here goes leaving without a fight…

The scythe floated into Thanatos’ hooves, and he readied it.

Then, he charged toward her.

Screw what was said earlier. Being face to face with the Grim Reaper had been scary, but this? The Grim Reaper charging at you, scythe ready to reap your soul out of your body? Scariest thing ever!

With an “Eep!” she used the Staff of Sacanas to teleport, avoiding the attack just in time.

“Yes. Teleporting. Thanks to that, you were able to avoid the firewall. This is not something you should have been able to use before a while. Make sure to never get this staff out of your hooves,” Thanatos said as he turned to face where Twilight appeared, among the skeletons. Twilight's manticore then arrived to attack Thanatos, but he easily beheaded it.

The filly then used her staff to animate a group of skeletons around her.

“And animating so many skeletons at once… You would have been forced to wait to reach maturity to be able to do that. Too bad for you…”

Thanatos animated a group of skeletons around him, a little smaller than Twilight’s.

“I can do the same, and I don’t need a staff boosting me to do that, so I fear that this won’t help you. Also, there is something that I can do that you probably can’t do yet.”

“Uh… What is it?”

“Micromanaging your undead in the heat of the moment.”

“Oh…”

“Oh, I have no doubt that you can micromanage your undead… while calmly hidden in your lair. But once you find yourself in the frontline, it immediately becomes much harder to manage while defending yourself. You will have to adapt your mind to be able to multitask. Now, how about a little demonstration?”

Suddenly, Thanatos teleported just in front of Twilight and began to attack her forcing her to defend herself with shields while she countered with beams that the older lich blocked with his own shields, or simply by avoiding them. She tried to smash him on the head with her staff, but he parried with his weapon.

While the two fought, Thanatos’ undead were following mental instructions, allowing them to fight with more intelligence than usual. They used teamwork, targeted weaknesses, and used every advantage they had, allowing them to destroy Twilight’s undead very easily despite being slightly in numerical inferiority. Twilight tried to help them by giving her own instructions, but as soon as she lost focus on Thanatos, she almost found herself beheaded.

Because of that, Thanatos’ undead soon began to attack her, quickly surrounding her.

So she used her butterfly wings to fly, only to be followed by the undead that could fly, like the pegasi or the griffins, and undead like unicorns could simply fire at her from a distance. Still, it was more manageable, and she was able to destroy a few undead before Thanatos acted.

From his horn came a magical wave that went in every direction, quickly reaching Twilight and traversing her. As soon as the wave passed her, her butterfly wings disappeared.

“Wha-AAAAHHHH!!!”

As Twilight dropped right in the middle of the undead, Thanatos chuckled.

“The Dispel spell. Here is my advice: learn it as soon as you can. It will make your life much easier.”

Twilight surrounded herself with a shield to keep the undead away, then charged magic into her staff before she smashed it on the ground, sending a powerful magical shockwave that blew apart all of the undead surrounding her, including Thanatos himself, his bones scattering in a large area and his cloak of darkness disappearing.

A few seconds of silence followed before the black crystal in Thanatos’ necklace glowed. Then, his bones began to float and to reform his body. In a few seconds, he was back to normal, his cloak of darkness reappearing. He then picked up his necklace and put it back around his neck.

“Not bad. You got me there. But as you certainly know, as long as my phylactery remains intact, I will never die. Even if my bones are destroyed beyond use, I can just use new ones from the undead in this room, and as you can see, I won’t run out anytime soon. You should actually move your soul into a receptacle of its own as soon as you can. Your phylactery being your own body is a terrible disadvantage. If your skull is destroyed, it’s over. The Staff of Sacanas could be a very good phylactery for you.”

“I don’t know how to move my soul out of my body.”

“Yes, this is something that you have to learn first to become a lich, but since you became one in a very unusual way, then you will have to study it. If it can help, it’s very close to what you do when you move a piece of your soul into one of your undead. Now, let’s turn up the difficulty of this fight.”

The next instant, many bones began to levitate around Thanatos, and all of them pointed toward Twilight who wanted to gulp.

“Yes, you can do that. You never thought of it, did you?”

Twilight was sure that she would be blushing.

Thanatos then sent the bones toward Twilight, first one by one, then two by two, then more and more and more.

At first, Twilight used her staff to block them, then she used shields, but when more bones began coming, she started to run to avoid them. She used a spell to boost her own speed, then fired beams at Thanatos only for him to use bones as shields. Wanting to frown, Twilight looked around at the many skeletons and decided to try to copy her adversary. So she levitated bones that she sent toward him, forcing him to put more work into defending himself.

Until his own cloak of darkness grew tentacle-like tendrils that began to knock away the bones.

“What?!”

“This cloak isn’t just for decoration. It is my armor that I can control at will,” Thanatos explained. “Being liches, we have a close affinity to Darkness, which Death is part of its domain. It is a magic that is usually very difficult to learn. The only other practitioners I know are Luna thanks to her connection to the Night, the Pony of Shadow because he is literally made of darkness, and Sombra thanks to his Dark Magic. I guess that Celestia could use it, but she is more of a Light user. Maybe Starswirl could, but I never saw him use it.”

Done talking, Thanatos sent the tendrils to attack Twilight who quickly ran behind a pillar. The tendrils followed her, only to hit nothing once they reached behind the pillar.

Just as Thanatos understood that Twilight was gone from behind the pillar, the filly came out from behind another pillar, behind Thanatos, and fired a beam at him before returning behind the pillar. The beam hit Thanatos on the back of his skull, blowing a hole in it through the darkness of the cloak but not quite destroying it.

He chuckled. She was teleporting behind the pillars to surprise him. Smart.

“You are using the environment to your advantage. Good, good. But let’s see what you will do against THAT.”

Suddenly, darkness appeared and encompassed a large area around Thanatos. When Twilight saw that once she came out from behind another pillar, she was surprised, but she still fired a beam into the darkness, not sure if she hit anything.

Then, the darkness disappeared, revealing three Thanatos, looking exactly like each other.

“Try to find the real me,” the three said at the same time.

Twilight groaned.

The three fired at her, and she quickly ran behind the pillar to teleport to another pillar, far enough so Thanatos wouldn’t hear the pop! of when she reappeared. She then animated all the skeletons around the pillar before she sent them to attack the three Thanatos. She repeated it as she teleported from pillar to pillar, sending hundreds of undead at the older lich and his doubles.

After a while, she stopped to look at what was going on, hearing no sound of her undead being destroyed, and she saw that her undead were hitting… nothing. The attacks were going right through the three Thanatos.

The real Thanatos then came out of her own shadow and used her surprise to put his scythe around her neck.

“You lose.”

Twilight didn’t dare move, waiting for Thanatos to behead her. However, after a few seconds, Thanatos removed his scythe, leaving her head in its place.

“I won’t kill you. It was just a fight to see each others’ abilities, nothing more. And I must say, you fought well. You managed to get a few good hits on me. Of course, if I had had my staff, the fight would have been instantly over. Still, you must really make your father proud.”

Twilight so wanted to raise an eyebrow right now as she looked at Thanatos in incomprehension. “My father? He doesn’t even know where I am.”

Thanatos chuckled. “Not this father.”

“What?”

He didn’t say more as he began to walk toward his throne, Twilight hesitantly following him.

Once beside his throne, Thanatos removed the spectral chains from around Goldie, and immediately, the colt wrapped Twilight in a hug.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t hurt.”

Thanatos stared at them for a moment before he looked away.

“As soon as it was discovered that my talent was necromancy, I was ostracized by the other ponies. From when I was your age, I had to learn to survive alone. Nopony would ever get close to me. Not even my own parents. This story is pretty much the story of every single necromancer in the world. The loneliness… makes us bitter, and one thing leading to another, we want to get back at the world for abandoning us. Ironically, as I surrounded myself with death, I grew to fear dying alone, so I worked hard to defeat Death, turning myself into a lich. However, before I would try to conquer Equestria like many others tried and failed before me, I worked on getting more power for myself. Thanks to a ritual that I made thanks to countless years of studying and planning, I was able to call Death itself.”

Twilight and Goldie gasped.

“Death? Death as in…”

“Yes. The force of nature itself. Ponies called me the God of Death, but if there was ever a real God of Death, then it would be it: Death itself. And I was able to talk to it thanks to that ritual.

Death… is a neutral force. It doesn’t interfere with the world, except to do its duty. It wasn’t angry at me for cheating it however. It was more… sad. Sad that I wouldn’t accept its embrace. That I would allow myself to remain stuck here in this cold facsimile of a life instead of joining the warmth that was promised to all souls passing on. But I didn’t care about what it was saying. Instead, I used the ritual to take part of its power and put it into an artifact that I made myself: my staff. Others call it the Staff of Thanatos. However, I call it the Staff of Death.”

Twilight looked at Thanatos in awe. “So the staff has the power of Death itself in it?”

“No wonder it’s so powerful,” Goldie said.

“But wait… It was calling me… Why…? What do I have to do with Death?” the filly questioned.

Thanatos chuckled. “You have a lot to do with Death. So, after I got the Staff of Death, I started my attempts to conquer Equestria, getting really close. The sisters had to work together to defeat me, and even then, they had to fight to their limits just to force me to retreat to do another attempt a few months later. And so I became the most feared lich of all time, killing countless ponies and other creatures to grow my army again and again.

However, I never managed to win, and I got very frustrated. Eventually, I found myself wanting to talk to Death again, to hear its gentle voice. And so I used the staff to talk to it again, without having to do a ritual this time. And we talked, and we talked, and we talked… Time passed, I attempted less and less to conquer Equestria, talking to Death instead. Eventually, I just stopped coming out of my lair to spend all my time talking to Death. It still tried to convince him to let it embrace me, but I remained stuck in my fear, and so it talked to me about what Death was. Why I didn’t have to fear it. Why it is part of the world. Why it is part of Harmony. From there, it talked about Harmony, about the other forces, about the world, the universe… But despite everything, I remained scared of dying alone. I wasn’t scared of dying. Just… of being alone. So I continued to spend time with Death, even when it ran out of things to say. Thanks to Death, I was never alone.

Then, Death told me of a plan it had. It would use its power to change the fate of a foal and… make it its. It needed to do that. It needed… an avatar. It needed… a child.”

Thanatos then looked at Twilight right in the eyes.

“You are this child. You are its daughter. You are the daughter of Death.”

Author's Note

Title drop.