The Apple Family mares were all so stubborn about not dying. That was where it had started, the stumble at the top of a flight of stairs that eventually landed him, sprawled and silly, at this final landing. His wings flicked the cool air as Death's memory drifted back to his first job ...

He’d polished the yellow-grey of his bones until they sported a strange sheen of age and waste, and he'd spent so long in front of the mirror combing the ghostly strands of his mane, he’d almost missed his appointment.

Thinking he was about to be late to his first impression as the last sight a living creature would see, he’d hurried through the darkened skies in a blur of desperation. It was only then he realized the crude nature of his day planner. Instead of landing beside a half-eaten corpse, he discovered the green filly running across the fallow fields of her father in a panic.

Granny Smith, named in anticipation of the age she would never reach, crashed to a halt at the long, bony legs of the end of all things. She stared at this fresh horror, momentarily distracted from the timber wolves coming fast pursuit.

“Well, um, I guess you haven’t been devoured, yet?” Death asked, attempting to clear his hollow throat as he spoke. This was just great, his fresh start already fouled before it could begin.

“Please, mister, I just wanted to help my family,” the green filly threw a panicked look over her shoulder, watching the monsters close in. Their fibrous limbs stretched and their jagged claws tore the ground beneath them. Saliva glinted off the wooden jaws that would soon rend her flesh. “I don’t want to die!”

Death nodded politely, and looked back down at the binder he had been given after finishing his orientation. Several notes were scribbled across the pages, denoting the name and nature of his appointments. “Well, you don’t have to worry, because it seems I’ll be visiting the rest of your family pretty soon. Starvation, disease, there’s even a suicide-”

The filly collapsed at his words, sobbing in despair. She clasped her frail body around the hooves that thundered the drum beat of the final march. She'd always been so proud of her strength and independence, but it seemed useless now. Her entire body shuddered with a realization to large for her mortal mind. The inevitability of it, and the questions of what might have stopped it. Maybe if her father had never taken this stupid patch of land as their own. Why couldn't they have just kept moving on from place to place? What had her family done to deserve this? She had held back her tears through months of hunger, and now they poured down into the cracks of Death's hooves.

Death stuttered, dropping the black-bound book from his magical grasp. “No ... please don’t ... do ... that ...”

“I don't want to die,” the filly wailed, repeating her desperate plea. "At least spare my mother. She never did nothing wrong to anyone. Please."

"I ... I'm not supposed to ..." Death looked desperately around him, at the approaching wolves and the barren ground. There had to be something to save him. "It isn't so bad, you just have to be eaten by the wolves, and then we'll go fill out some forms, a demographic survey, a satisfaction report, and a few other-"

At the mention of paperwork, the child redoubled her hysterics.

"No, it isn't that bad, come on. Don't do this to me," Death pleaded desperately, attempting to pull his fore hooves from the shivering ball of misery. He could feel her ribs through her starvation wasted little body. "I only just got this job."

"I only just got born," screamed the filly in response.

The wolves howled in jubilation as they closed in on the filly. They couldn't see the figure of finality standing above her, their keen eyes only picking up the child laying curled on the ground.

“Look, um, kid, look! I’m not supposed to do this, but those pots over there, you see them?” Death pulled one of his cracked hooves from the grasp of the filly and pointed at several metal vessels that had been left out to dry. The moonlight twinkled off them where they hung from a line, only slightly less empty than they'd been when they contained the previous evening's dinner.

Granny Smith nodded her tear streaked face, dislodging a strand of mucus from her left nostril.

“Bang those together. Really hard."

The fearful filly was frozen. Was this a trick? What purpose could the pots possibly serve now.

"Do it, now, or your family name will vanish into the houses of dust and charnel."

She ran to the pots, her herbivore mind already anticipating the teeth that would tear her open. Death stalked after her, metaphorically and literally. The skeletal alicorn took a place between the filly and the coming carnivores. As soon as he heard the metal clashing and felt the vibrations traveling through him, Death snapped his wings. He hovered, his forelimbs outstretched to either side and his hind legs dangled inches above the earth.

The air before the wolves rippled as the face of death came into view. Their animal brains struggled to take in the impossibility of its flight and the lethality of it's size. The leaders of the pack attempted to stop before touching it, and those following crashed into them. The entire pack ended jumbled before death's shadowless form.

The End of All Things lowered his jaw, releasing a screech like steel towers crumpling in Tartarus' fires, "Creatures of night and shadow, feeble tools of the greater cycle, this child is mine."

In their howls, Death heard the wolves protest. The filly had despoiled the secrets of their forest and plundered their sacred trees. Her flesh was rightfully theirs, they insisted.

Death cut off their protests with a flap of his wings, sending hurricane winds to the side. Behind him, Granny Smith curled on the ground, but she still possessed the presence of mind to keep slamming her pots together as Death growled, "this filly, this family, and all that live belong to me and no other. Return to your grove, and count it lucky I leave a scrap of shadow for you mortal worms to lurk under."

The air was filled with the scent of Pine-Sol as the wolves released their strange bladders in terror. In their flight, they fell over one another, tripping and staggering in a panicked retreat to the familiar darkness.

Death dropped back to his hooves as the sounds faded. The wolves were gone, and he was once more alone with the green filly. He felt the sudden impact of her weight pushing against him and nearly fell.

Death looked down to see the filly hugging, not in fear but in gratitude, her eyes shone brightly as she squealed, “thank you, Mr. Death.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about, nor can I see or hear you. My business is with the dead and dying."

As Granny Smith turned and ran back to her house with her precious payload, Death added, "you have made a powerful enemy in the Everfree Forest. The timber wolves will not forget the insult you paid them tonight, but whenever they return bang those pots together. The noise will summon me, and I will keep them at bay."

The door slammed behind Granny Smith, and soon the house was filled with the noises of her grateful and surprised family.

Author's Note

This chapter seems a little Mary-Sue-ish, I think, but I wanted to give Death at least one moment of glory to offset his nebbishness throughout the rest of the story.