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In The Twilight Of Death

by Monochromatic

Chapter 1


Author's Notes:

I was discussing RariTwi AUs with Earthsong, and she reminded me how much I love Reaper!AU SO HEY HERE WE ARE WITH A SMALL DRABBLE THING AS WARMUP FOR OTHER WRITING.

This is all set in the universe of Death's Stolen Diamonds, which you can read more about there. You don't need it to read this.

Also the 'verse is pony, but I wrote this in humanverse BECAUSE I DO WHAT I WANT, MOSTLY.


twi·light

    the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun's rays from the atmosphere.a period or state of obscurity, ambiguity, or gradual decline.


The universe, as Twilight Sparkle had always known it, consisted of three realms.

The Higher Realm, where the Goddess of Life resided alongside her creations and her three emissaries of life. The Middle Realm, where the Goddess’s mortal creations roamed and lived their lives as they elected to live them. And, finally, the Lower Realm, where the Goddess of Death snatched the Goddess of Life’s creations and took them to her land, from where they would never again leave.

For as long as she remembered, she had always been Lady Celestia’s faithful student and servant. She was, after all, created for the sole purpose of serving Her Grace, just as Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie were.

“It’s just one day, Twi.”

And, for the first time, the Emissary of Magic had been allowed to visit the Middle Realm all on her own.

She had chosen a small village by the name of Heart’s Haven, which she had studied extensively from the castle high above the heavens. Founded at the tail-end of the Middle Realm’s second millennia, Heart’s Haven was the province’s poorest village. Most of the residents were all farmers desperate to make a living, and not many of them lived long before they arrived to reap their souls.

She teleported down to the village near the end of the afternoon, just when day and night converged to form her namesake. No sooner had her feet touched the ground, a scroll and quill appeared beside her. People walked past her—and through her—drawing a sigh of relief from her lips.

She knew that mortals couldn’t ever see her, but it didn’t stop her from, well, being afraid to some extent.

She cleared her throat and crossed her arms behind her back.

“Observations!” she exclaimed, and so the quill began to magically and independently write on the scroll. “First…”

She looked around and fixed her gaze on a nearby woman and child. Their garbs were modest, and it was with a pained hea—well, no, she didn’t have a literal heart; she was an angel, after all—a pained soul that she noticed their clothes were also torn.

Twilight herself wore a simple white dress which allowed her wings mobility, and that was honestly the only thing she cared about it. If she had to sit down and think about it, the only truly notable thing about it was the sun-shaped pattern at the bottom meant to represent Lady Celestia.

A blood-curdling scream in the distance caught her attention, reaping away her train of thought and giving to life another. Rather than freezing in spot, her first instinct was to summon her Life Bringer—a golden glowing long ceremonial staff meant to…

Actually, it was more decorative than anything, but Rainbow had once told her they had them just to counter the Reapers' scythes. Apparently, it was so they looked cool? Twilight didn’t really understand why being ‘cool’ was better than being useful, but Rainbow was her senior and doubtless knew better.

Going back to the scream.

A blood-curdling scream rippled through the wind, catching the attention of Twilight and the mortals. Staff gripped in hand, she rushed away, straight towards the source of the scream while her quill continued to furiously annotate the thoughts in her head.

Her search led her all the way to the village’s main plaza, where a crowd of curious and saddened onlookers observed as a tearful young girl desperately clutched the clothes of an elderly woman sprawled on the ground.

“Grandmama! Grandmama!”

Twilight watched, muted by shock.

She knew of death. She knew death existed as a concept. She had never known it herself, since she was an Emissary of Life, but she had studied it extensively, and yet… and yet practice was much harder to take in than theory.

Emissaries didn’t innately know what killed a mortal; only Her Grace had that ability. A faraway cursory inspection didn’t reveal any blood or obvious wounds, but Twilight did notice she looked, well, deathly thin, to be literally correct. Her skin seemed to stick to her bones, and again the angel was reminded of Heart’s Haven’s place in one of the realm’s poorer provinces.

In times of contemplation, she sometimes wondered what it would be like to be mortal, to roam freely through the middle realm.

The sight before her—the crying, pained child and the limp woman—quickly did away with those lingering thoughts.

“He-Help!” the girl called, wiping her tears away and turning to the frozen crowd. “Please! Help Grandmama!”

And help did indeed arrive.

She felt it at first. Like a frigid breeze brushing past her skin, past her wings, snuffing the life of day and allowing the night to take over.

She saw it, afterward. Twilight turned her gaze to the elderly woman, and her eyes widened at the indigo aura now surrounding the mortal. Death she’d read and been told about, but reapings?

Reapings, she knew nothing about.

The one forbidden topic Her Grace had always refused to properly explain.

And, much like everything else that Twilight did not know, the scent of the unknown was more intoxicating than she’d expected.

She took a trance-like step forward, and when she did, the indigo aura flashed and now contained lavender streaks, both colors tangled together in a deathly dance. It compelled her.

No.

No, that wasn’t the right term.

It felt familiar.

It felt familiar, and she didn’t understand why.

However, before she could properly examine the sensation, another gush of wind rushed past her, chilling her to the bone, yet judging by the lack of reactions from the mortal, it seemed she was the only one who felt it.

The aura around the body began to pulse again, faster and faster until finally, it ended when She appeared.

It was a haunting image, truth be told. The weeping child, the motionless grandmother, and the reaper looming behind them. She had seen drawings of them before, vague depictions she’d cobbled together based on what little she’d been told, but to see one in the flesh was as shocking as everything else.

Or, maybe it was the large elegant scythe floating above her.

The Reaper wore a large black cloak, her face hidden under the shadow cast by her hood. Nothing about her betrayed who she was; not that Twilight would even be able to tell. All she knew about Lady Luna’s reapers were that, unlike the Emissaries, they had once trodded the land as mortals. They too had once belonged to Lady Celestia before Lady Luna took them away and made them hers.

The Reaper lifted her right arm, the sleeve riding down her arm and revealing her hand. Surprisingly, it was not as skeletal as Twilight had imagined it would be. It looked like the healthy delicate hand of a young woman.

It surprised her, but perhaps not as much as what the Reaper did with her hand.

She gestured upwards, as if pulling some sort of invisible string and, as the woman exhaled her last breath, Twilight watched a wisp of ochre smoke emerge from the body. It floated up in a haze, all the way up to the Reaper’s hand where it then took the shape of a large ghostly teardrop.

The Soul of the Dead, now nestled in the Reaper’s embrace, from where it could never return.

“Grandmama! Pl-Please, wake up!” the child helplessly called, and yet the Reaper did not comply.

Just as Lady Celestia was forbidden from interfering with the death of her creations, so were Lady Luna’s reapers forbidden from doing so. Pinkie Pie had told Twilight once, in private and under sworn oath to never repeat it, that there had only ever been one case of a reaper sparing a mortal’s soul—a long, long time ago.

Twilight’s reveries were cut short when the Reaper herself finally stepped back, apparently with the intention to leave. However, rather than leave, she looked up right towards the spot where Twilight stood.

The Reaper lifted her free hand towards the sky, and so did her scythe’s grip materialize in her hand. She gripped it tightly, and after looking at Twilight for another moment, turned around and walked away.

She walked away, and going against all the warning she’d ever been given, Twilight followed her into the darkened town streets. She wasn’t sure how long she walked, a few minutes perhaps, but the trail eventually led her into a somber alley.

A pulse of magic rushed through her veins, and her scepter began to shine with enough light to illuminate her way. Reassured, she continued on her path, scanning the area for Death’s Jury. Instead, resting on the wall, her heart pounded at finding Death’s Executioner.

The elegant scythe was propped up against the wall, displayed for all wandering eyes to see. Eyes that did indeed wander as Twilight took in the single most deadly weapon in the three Realms. She’d read somewhere, in one of those confidential scrolls she’d shamefully glanced at when Her Grace could not see, that the handle of the Reapers' scythes were made from the wood of the first oak tree to ever grow in the Middle Realm.

The blade, as white as snow and as sharp as ice, was an even more infamous matter altogether. The scroll she’d read suggested they were made from simple steel, magicked to have white and bony appearance. Rainbow Dash, however, was convinced of the more grisly theory that each Reaper’s blade was made from their very own bones left behind when they died.

Whatever it was, whatever was true or not, Twilight could not deny the pull she felt towards the weapon. Much like the reaping before, it called her, and when she stepped forward, so did her hand rise into the air.

The temptation to touch it… To glean from such a weapon knowledge that Lady Celestia would never dare teach her…

“Well, hello there.”

A voice stops her actions. A gentle, lulling, deathly voice.

“Twilight Sparkle, is it not?”

Twilight spun around and came face to face with the Reaper herself, smiling at her from beneath her hood. The soul still floated next to her, a gentle light merely observing the events.

“I don’t suppose you remember my name, do you?” the Reaper asked, and Twilight remained silent.

She wracked her brains, desperately trying to remember fragments and passages of hushed conversations once held with the other Emissaries. She knew the Reapers' name, she did, but faced with pressure, they now eluded her.

“It’s Rarity,” the Reaper continued, and her scythe materialized behind her, allowing Twilight to step back and against the wall. “You told me it was a very lovely name, you know? The first time we met.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “...The first time we met?” she asked. “We’ve never met.”

Rarity smiled. “Haven’t we?”

The Soul pulsed, drawing all eyes to it.

Rarity hummed. “I’m not toying with her, Moonshine, darling. We’re simply having a harmless little conversation, nothing more.” Her eyes flickered towards Twilight. “Though she seems afraid of me.”

They were having a conversation, Twilight realized. She wanted to ask, wanted to listen in, but strong though her curiosity was, she did not dare speak a word.

The Soul pulsed again, and Rarity laughed.

“You think she’s intrigued by me, do you? Well, who isn’t it?” A smile swept across her face. “Death is Life’s greatest, loveliest mystery, isn’t it?”

And with that, the Reaper took off her hood, freeing her indigo hair and revealing the black blindfold that covered her eyes. Blindfolded for the Goddess of Death firmly believed that in order for death to be just, it had to also be blind.

“Why don’t you go ahead, Moonshine?” Rarity asked, a deft gesture of her hand transforming the Soul into a smokey haze. “Your husband has been impatient for your arrival.”

She snapped her fingers, and when the soul disappeared and three had been reduced to two, Rarity stepped forward while Twilight, pressed against the wall, could not step back.

“So quiet,” Rarity chided in a whisper, still smiling. “So unlike how life usually begins and how it usually ends.” She dipped her head to the side. “Screaming.”

A chill ran down Twilight’s back, though whether it was from the icy breeze or Rarity’s words, she couldn’t rightly tell.

“I didn’t scream when I died,” Rarity noted. “It was as peaceful as I could hope, considering the circumstances.”

“How…?”

The words tumbled out of Twilight’s mouth unbidden, her curiosity having finally bested her fear and apprehension. A question to draw an explanation for something she would never experience.

“How did you...”

“How did I die?”

Rarity did not step back, but neither did she step forward. She licked her lips, eyes narrowing, and she raised her hand again, admiring her bony hand.

“I was beautiful,” she reminisced, admiring the structure of her hand. “For all the terrible things I feel towards dear Lady Celestia, I do thank her for my beauty. Oh, Twilight, I walked the Middle Realm like a Goddess myself! Even though I was starved, even though I lived in a world of barbary, I still had my beauty.” She paused. “And others preyed on it.”

“Preyed on it…?”

“You see,” Rarity continued, as casually as she were discussing the weather, “mortals have a peculiar trait. A trait our dear Lady Celestia gave them. When they see something beautiful, they desire it. And when they desire it, they take it whether she wants to or not.” She paused, lost in thought for a moment. “But even if they used me, they still fed me. They still fed my baby sister. My beauty and my gifts shall we call them, in exchange for food and shelter.”

She paused again.

“And then…” She drifted off, an edge in her voice. “And then, my sister grew up, and bless her, she was beautiful too. She was young and beautiful and suddenly they desired her, too.” She looked at Twilight. “Couldn’t have that happen, could we now?” Another step forward, so close Twilight could feel the crushing presence of the Reaper. “I helped her escape. She begged me to come with her, but I knew I had to stay behind until they could no longer find her. I remember the night she left. I sat in the kitchen, waiting for morn' to arrive and them to wake.”

“And then…?” Twilight asked when Rarity stopped.

“And then, I decided I would make a choice. I decided, for once, that I would offer my beauty to someone I wanted. So, I poured myself a glass of wine, enough teaspoons of cyanide, and I invited death to be my lover.”

Twilight’s hand flew to her mouth. “You… You…”

Just the idea of it… Of one of Lady Celestia’s creations rejecting her…

“You really don’t remember me, do you?” Rarity asked, pulling Twilight from her thoughts. “Do you remember anything at all?”

“We-We’ve never met,” Twilight explained, clutching her scepter and holding it against her chest.

“You spoke so much, Twilight,” Rarity continued, and the Angel gasped when she traced her glacial fingers on her warm cheek. “You spoke, and spoke, and spoke. You asked me so many questions, even as our dear Lady begged for your life.”

“Wh-What are you talking about?” Twilight asked, frozen into place by Rarity’s touch. It felt like all the life was being drained from her, and for a moment she wondered if it was. “When have we met?!”

Rarity smiled gently.

“When I reaped you, of course.”

Twilight stared at her. She stared at her for what seemed eternity, until Rarity stepped away with a broad grin.

“When I held your mortal soul in my grasp.”

“No…” The word came out her mouth like a whisper. “No! That’s—! That’s impossible, I—! I’ve lived in the Higher Realm since Lady Celestia created me. I’ve never met yo—”

“The other Emissaries,” Rarity cut-off, her scythe now held firmly in her hand. “They can’t look at a reaping. Pinkie Pie told me once. It hurts them. And yet, there you were, Twilight Sparkle. Watching like a riveted child. It’s easier to observe something we’ve already experienced, I’ve found.”

Twilight felt her knees buckle, and her hand clutch the fabric over her chest.

I… I died…?

“She’s coming," Rarity whispered. “Any moment now.”

No sooner had she finished, a familiar cloud of white smoke appeared and Twilight saw Rainbow Dash step out. The Emissary of Loyalty looked frazzled, her scepter immediately aimed towards the Reaper.

“Rainbow Dash,” said Rarity, not moving an inch. “What a pleasure.”

Twilight!” she called, sounding as furious as Lady Celestia probably was. “I can’t believe this! How many times have we told you to stay away from her?!”

“Her?” Rarity asked, looking towards the Emissary. She placed a hand on her chest. “Rainbow, you wound me. You speak of me as though I were a monster.”

“Don’t start this again, Rarity,” Rainbow snapped, lowering her staff and gritting her teeth. “You know you’re not supposed to…” She drifted off, glancing at Twilight.

“Pardon me, this creature was the one trailing after death,” Rarity said, turning to Twilight. Two thin fingers lifted the Emissary’s chin. “A dangerous affair, indeed.”

“Stop that!” Rainbow boomed, and the bottom of her staff slammed against the ground. “Step away from her! Do you really want Lady Celestia on our case? Or Lady Luna? Don’t you have other things to be doing?!”

“I do, I do,” said Rarity at last, finally stepping away. “I only wanted to say hello. This is the first time we’ve ever met, after all, isn’t it, Twilight?”

Twilight’s eyes widened. What was she…

“Yes,” she said, firmly.

“Yes,” Rarity repeated. Her scythe began to glow, and a haze of black smoke rose from the ground to surround her. “I’ll be on my way now, then! A shame this lovely conversation has been cut short. But…” Her cloak shielded her face again. “Why don’t we meet again one day, dear Twilight? Perhaps when it is time for a dear child to reunite with Grandmama, hm?”

Reaping away Twilight’s chance to reply, the Reaper vanished before her very eyes, leaving in her wake nothing but a very shaken emissary. Rainbow rushed to her, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

“Twilight?! You okay? What did she tell you?! Did she tell you anything?!” she asked in a frenzy.

“When I reaped you.”

“When I held your mortal soul in my grasp.”

“N-No,” Twilight whispered, and she wondered if the sensation of a beating heart in her chest was actually a memory rather than an imagining. “She didn’t tell me anything…”

Rainbow ran a hand through her hair, relieved. “Goddesses… Fine. That’s good. I was terrified for a minute there.” She sighed and placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Listen to me, Twi. No one can know about this. I can’t… I can’t tell you what’s the deal with her yet, but stay away from her, okay?”

“All right,” Twilight lied.

Wordlessly, she followed Rainbow Dash out into the streets. Mortals still walked about, all eerily quiet and observant of the tearful woman walking down the street, carrying in her arms a weeping child desperately calling for her grandmama.

“Why don’t we meet again one day, dear Twilight? Perhaps when it is time for a dear child to reunite with Grandmama, hm?”

“Twilight?”

Twilight looked away from the woman and found Rainbow Dash staring at her.

“Come on, we need to get going. I know it’s your day in the Middle Realm, but…”

“I understand,” Twilight tonelessly said. “We can leave now.”

She would be back, after all. Sooner or later, in the twilight of death, she would meet Rarity again.


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