Rocky Road, a mottled gray stallion with a dark brown mane and the oddest rose colored eyes one had ever seen, was just minding his own business one day at work.  He tended never to speak to anyone and was known for having a brutal temper once you got him going, so everyone just tried to stay out of his way.  He did a lot of the grunt-work as a tunneler, boring through mountains with often little more than a pickaxe and sledge.  The earth pony chose his position in the tunnel, liking the fact that mountainsides and rocks and dirt didn't talk to him, ridicule him, or try to cheat him out of something.  It was assumed that someday he'd have the word "Misanthrope" inscribed on his tombstone, just between husband and father.

Rocky's family meant more to him than the entire world as far as he was concerned, and he went back to them every day with plenty of food and money to keep them healthy and happy.  He didn't need many luxuries, and he certainly didn't need many friends, but every time he thought he could finally settle down and be happy something would come up.  Some kind of drama, some stupid conversation that struck a chord, or just some jackass that wouldn't leave him alone, and he just couldn't control himself.  He'd lash out, yell, make a big scene and then stomp off in a huff if somepony ever got on his bad side (which they tended to do with even trivial things), so rumors would always spread around in his wake.  People thought that he abused his children, used to fight in the wars and had Spear Shock, or was just an all-around jerk of a guy; not a single rumor of his heart of gold ever surfaced.  Had he ever really talked about himself or made some friends, venomous lies such as those wouldn't have been in the backs of everyone's minds, and they certainly wouldn't have been used against him as they were.

One day, while he was at work pushing a new train tunnel through the mountains adjacent to Canterlot, the royal guards showed up at the job site looking for him.  He was hauled away in iron, taken under suspicion of his family's murder.  What he had to learn on the long chariot-ride into Canterlot's jail was that his wife and daughter had been killed in cold blood with a crude, improvised blade.  Nopony would vouch for him, especially since the time frame that was given suggested the murders happened just several minutes before the train that Rocky Road took to work stopped at his stop.  Everyone, though they didn't all want to admit it, thought that he simply killed his wife and child and then went right to work like everything was normal.  He didn't, of course, but his confusion and distraught nature at being suspected of such a horrendous act was mistaken for anger, and in the biased minds of his peers Rocky Road's fate was sealed.

His trial wasn't a fair one, either, seeing as how the Equestrian justice system has never been exactly... just.  Cases such as Rocky's slipped through the cracks more often than anyone liked to admit, but Celestia's headsmare was just as happy to execute an innocent pony as she was a guilty pony.  The black-cloaked criminal never asked any questions about who came up to her block, she just brought the axe down whenever the Princess needed her to.  This was to be Rocky Road's fate; execution by decapitation for the murder of his wife and daughter, all because he preferred a little bit of solitude.  The two months that he spent in prison awaiting that date were the longest that he'd ever gone without speaking to anyone, and his intense vow of silence kept even the most hardened prisoners away from him.  It seemed that everyone in Equestria had heard the rumors; that he was insane, that his temper drove him to kill, and that he held absolutely no remorse for his wife and child.  He had nothing left to live for anyway, so he simply sat and waited for death to come, wanting nothing more in the world than to have the hatred and the sorrow finally taken away.  Rocky Road refused any kind of a final meal, though one was certainly offered, and he very nearly pushed his way past the guards that escorted him to the executioner's block.  

Rocky kneeled before the big stone block, looking out on the faces of Canterlot, as well as those of the Princesses standing immediately to his right, all of whom showed up to watch him die.  The headsmare stood next to him, silent as night, just holding her axe and waiting for the order.

"Rocky Road."  Princess Celestia began, "We have brought you here today, before sovereigns and Empire, to face your death as punishment for the murder of two innocents, one of whom was barely able to read."  The Princess paused and the crowd murmured amongst themselves.  Rocky Road could hear curses being placed on his name, though the details of them all started to blend together under the drone of the crowd.  Celestia hushed all of them, excluding the ravens perched up on the wall.  The large black birds loved execution time, because the bodies of those deemed particularly wicked were always thrown into the river, and therefore to them.  "As Princess of the sun and a representative of all that is good and just in this nation, it pains me to have to deem you unfit for living, and yet I stand here today forced to do so.  Do you have any final words or wishes that you wish to leave us with?"

Someone in the crowd screeched out, "He doesn't deserve any!  Cut out his tongue before he poisons our ears!"  This jeering was quickly put to a stop by the icy glare of Princess Luna.  She took her executions very seriously and absolutely refused to have a peanut gallery form.  She had allowed that once several thousand years ago, and the mess from the resulting riots cost a pretty penny to clean up.

"I do have a request."  Rocky Road mumbled, looking down at his hooves and at the large, carved granite block, stained mahogany after eons of use.

"Speak it, child."  Celestia moved to stand next to the captive, wearing her sorrow readily on her sleeve so that all could see her compassion.  The genuineness behind it, however, was somewhat questionable.

"I want you to hold the axe."

The crowd gasped in unison, and Celestia had to stand and process for a moment exactly what he had asked for.  Even the ravens seemed to fall silent, and only the sound of the babbling river into which Rocky's body would be thrown post mortem could be heard.

"I beg your pardon?"  Celestia, somewhat intrigued by that bizarre request, probed for answers, delaying Rocky's execution by just enough to annoy her younger sister.

"I said I want you to hold the axe.  My whole life I've been taunted and ridiculed, feared for no reason, and looked down on by... them."  Rocky tilted his chin outward to signal the crowd as he spoke.  His tone was one of dry hatred, simply lacking any kind of emotion that one would use for anything other than harm.  "I didn't kill my wife and daughter, but you've all decided that I have just because you don't like me.  Disgusting as that is, I haven't got anything to live for without them, so go ahead and kill me already.  It just has to be you holding the axe, Celestia.  It'd make me smile to know that you of all ponies were the one to cut off my head."

"And who are you to demand that royalty bloody their hooves with your execution?"  Luna, angered already by the disrespect she received from Celestia, wanted to put Rocky back in his place.

"It's alright, sister.  It's not unheard of that a leader must perform a little wetwork every now and then."  Celestia, having actually participated in a few high profile executions before, was willing to carry that burden.  She firmly believed that he was guilty of murder, and was fully ready to show that she was the arm or justice in Canterlot and beyond, so she took the axe from the headsmare and levitated it by her side.  The headsmare flashed Luna a disappointed look through her hood, but the Princess of the night just sighed and grumbled to herself.  The execution had already been ruined as far as she was concerned, so this would at least expedite the end.

The headsmare placed her hoof on the center of Rocky's back, pushing him down so that his head sat squarely over the block and his neck was outstretched.  Celestia took the axe in her hooves, favoring the old fashioned method over magic, and knelt down beside the block to say a few final words.  "I, Princess Celestia, will now personally carry out your sentence as per your request.  May you and your family find peace in the lasting slumber of death."  With that, the white Princess lifted the heavy black axe above her head with both of her front hooves, bringing down her full weight behind a sharpened mass of iron.  To the crowd, the whole thing was over in a flash; Celestia's pure white coat was spattered with blood, and the "murderer's" head rolled off the block and into the flowing waters of the river beneath the dais.  To Rocky Road, however, that final few seconds seemed to last an eternity.  He heard the axe cut through the air as it fell to meet his neck, and he could even feel the blade split his flesh and spine apart.  Everything had happened in slow motion, yet the shock of the injury didn't relay any pain to his already dying mind, yet he still felt every single inch of his neck slowly go numb as the axe carved its way through it.

The strangest thing was the sensation of falling as his head separated from his body and plopped into the water.  His brain stayed alive for around ten seconds after the decapitation, letting him see, hear, taste, and feel the cleansing stream as it washed his head away, though none of his senses were exactly sharp enough to provide reliable information.  For that last ten seconds Rocky Road could have sworn that he was still in his mother's womb, picking up only traces of sound and touch and taste from the world outside.  

As all things do, however, Rocky Road had to die sometime, and in doing so he felt as though he were born again.  That's not to say that he literally was, but his head seemed to be reattached to his body and he seemed to still be at the block.  He wasn't in chains anymore, and nopony was there, but it was clearly the Canterlot castle courtyard; midday and everything.  

"I really am sorry about what happened.  They love you, you know."  Rocky Road heard a single voice, though it sounded like it came from every direction at once.  He glanced around and noticed the only pony figure still around: the headsmare.  She was still wearing her black cloak and hood, veiling her face so that nopony could see any of her features for the rest of her days, and holding the large iron axe with her hooves.

"Who are you?"  Rocky was frightened by the figure, though he felt an overwhelming sense of calm come from his surroundings.  He knew he was dead, he just didn't know what exactly was happening.  As far as he knew, nothing could ever go wrong for him again.

The headsmare took off her hood, revealing a face that Rocky hadn't ever seen before in his life.  She was a beautiful mare, white maned but with a coat as black as night, and bright ruby red eyes that put the pinkish tint in his own to shame.  She wore a soft smile, despite her intimidating appearance, and slowly approached the stallion as her outfit faded away into a fine dust that tracked along her contours.  "Oh, just take a few seconds to think about it and I'm sure you'll figure it out.  Everyone always does."

"Death?"

The black mare rolled her eyes and unfurled her beautiful oversized wings, flapping them a few times to un-mat the feathers after confining them to a cloak for so long.  "Please, my friends call me Maggie.  Not everything has to be about work, you know?"

"Alright then...  Maggie.  I guess it's a pleasure to meet you."

"Mhmm, but you wish it was under different circumstances, right?"

"Heh...  I bet you hear that a lot, huh?"

"Seventeen billion, four hundred and fifty six million, five hundred eighty two thousand, three hundred and seventy nine times, including this one of course.

"I had no idea I was so unoriginal..."

"Well, to be fair, fifty two of them were you in a past life."

"That so?"

"Mhmm, technically nothing about you is original."

"Well that makes me feel better...  So why are we here?"

"Oh that's such a long story..."

"No, I mean you and me, here, right now.  Not... the big picture.  Plenty of time for that later, right?"

"Well you're only half wrong about that.  We're here right now because you're not done yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, before I can take you away, you'll want to tie up all of your loose ends.  Most folks do so by dying, but since you died instead of someone else, you've got a bit of a special case."

"Special, huh?  I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

"Well it's just a simple offer.  Here, allow me."  Maggie walked in closer to Rocky Road, opening her wings up so that the black of her feathers engulfed his vision, then she revealed that the location had changed once they folded closed again.  Rocky found himself standing in the absurdly small living room of someone's home, with a young mare and two children who were sick in bed.

"What's this?"

"You see him?"

"I do..."  Rocky looked around the home, feeling strange about standing someone's house, but they didn't seem to mind that he and Maggie were there.

"Well they don't see us.  We're dead, remember?  Well...  You are."  Maggie interrupted Rocky during a small experiment of how far he could reach his ghost foreleg through the various members of the family.

"Of course I remember, it was the strangest sensation of my life.  Why?"

"Because he's the one that should be dead instead of you.  He's the one who killed your family."

Rocky was speechless, and he turned his head as slowly as he could toward the stallion.  He found his target kissing the forehead of one of his sick children after secretly passing a bag of coins to his wife.  "...Him?"

"Yes, him.  He saw that you left and thought that you lived alone.  He broke into your home and planned on stealing as many of your things as he could, but your daughter startled him.  He accidentally swung the axe that, had he not been fired would have continued building his 'fortune,' and mortally wounded her, naturally she screamed.  This brought your wife downstairs, and she didn't even hesitate to go... what's the saying... 'momma bear?' on this man.  Well... he panicked and killed her too, and when you got stuck with the blame he just held his tongue.  He was at your execution, you know.  He never stopped crying since he set foot in the courtyard."

"Why did you bring me here?"  Rocky never met eyes with Maggie; he kept them closed tight and his face pointed to the ground.  He tried a little trick that he learned in a court ordered anger management class; counting to ten.  It didn't work, but it did put a tense pause into everything that he said, his rage slowly building to the point of bursting.  Every fiber of his being screamed to use whatever ghost powers he could to kill the stallion standing in front of him, but every shred of compassion he had screamed at him not to harm the father standing in front of him.  His mind was at war with itself.  "Why are you doing this to me?"

"Well, as I said, I brought you here to make you an offer.  You want your life back?  Take it."  Maggie, still holding the headsmare's axe, sat down on the bed next to one of the sick children, looking down longingly at her quiet, pained face.  

"How?"

Maggie smirked and rolled her hoof toward Rocky, looking him in the eyes and saying, "Guess."  Between breaths, or perhaps the last time he blinked, the headsmare's axe had appeared at Rocky's hooves.  "Just realize what you're getting into.  His children are dying, he's become a burglar to quickly get the money that they need in order to save their lives.  He has a family."

"He killed my family!  He killed me!  He doesn't deserve his family!"  Finally, Rocky's pent up anger exploded, bringing him to take the very same stance that Celestia had taken over him, ready to hack off the stallion's head as he sat and watched his children writhe in fever dreams.  

Deep down Rocky Road's heart broke for them; he had more than once resorted to violence when money was the only thing standing between himself and homelessness, something far more tolerable than the death of a child.  For the first time ever, Rocky came to the conclusion that perhaps things were right just the way they were; that perhaps he deserved what had happened to him after a life of refusal to befriend anyone, refusal to even be a decent person.  Perhaps his family deserved whatever peace was to come in being dead rather than living with him as a role model.  The axe clanged to the floor, but when he looked down it just wasn't there.

Maggie walked over to him and placed her wing around his shoulder.  Just her very touch made him feel calm and cool, bordering on a kind of deep chill, but the kind of pleasurable one that only comes about when you've been scorched to the bone in the heat of a long day.  "Revenge is petty, Rocky.  I'm glad you made the right choice."

"What do you mean, the right choice?  I haven't made a right choice once in my life."

"Well, then this is a shining example of why it's never too late to start."  Maggie walked over to the desk at which the stallion's wife was sitting.  She opened a black velvet pouch produced from beneath her wing and dumped out seven bits onto the counter.  "Tell me, Rocky, how much is a life worth to you?"

"I..."  Rocky stuttered a little bit, surprised by the dramatic shift in conversational tone.  "I don't think I can answer that, Maggie.  Lives are priceless."

"I wouldn't say priceless, you just have to know the right currency in the right amounts.  Watch."  Somehow, the ghostly bits that Maggie had poured out onto the desk had become real, and the mare at the desk had absentmindedly counted them along with the rest of her money.

"Honey!  We have enough to get the medicine!"  The mare called out.  She had to muffle her obvious excitement so that she didn't wake up the children, but she was happy to the point of tears.  The stallion, who was pacing outside, quickly came back inside and gave her a hug.

"Oh that's wonderful news!  I couldn't handle another day of this...  It's gotten to the point where I almost can't live with myself anymore."

"We'll never have to do that again, ever.  I promise you we'll make things work this time, everything's going to be okay."

As the couple finished their exchange with a deep, tight embrace, Maggie turned to make eye contact with Rocky again.  "Ain't they cute?"

"You're a lot more perky than I thought death would be, you know that?"  Rocky Road couldn't help but crack a smile as he hugged into Maggie's wing.  Just the thought of hugging the reaper brought a grin to his face, but the inner peace wasn't exactly hurting the situation.

"If I took my job seriously I'd be pretty messed up by now.  I've seen things that would make your nightmares cower, the horrors of wars that came about before your time of reason, of crimes, of justice or of self control.  The darkest depths of sentient life have been revealed to me, the watcher and guardian in the shadows, to see how they choose to dispatch their victims.  I've seen the kinds of things that people do just because they know they'll never get caught, when thought is abandoned and pure hedonism, sadistic pleasure, and maniacal behavior become just as alive as the body hosting them.  I've seen natural disasters that have killed entire villages, villages that simultaneously pray for their safe passage, and then when their entire world ends in the flash of a tidal wave or volcano, they ask me 'why?' and I can't answer them.  I've witnessed accidents that have broken the fortitude of all who viewed the victims' corpses, and I've seen the bodies of millions, all loved ones, carted away on meatwagons and burned in the ditches just to help control the spread of disease."  As Maggie spoke, her gaze became more and more disjointed.  She stared off into space, losing herself in her own little world before popping back into the conversation with a big smile.  "But I've also seen puppies and rainbows and a foal's first steps, and those are just so much nicer to think about."

"Heh..."  The small flashback that Maggie showed off at first was somewhat disconcerting, but Rocky tried to change the subject before things turned potentially bad.  "Well at least you're friendly.  Everypony's got this image of death as a quiet, frightening figure that chases you down if you don't go quietly."

"Well they've got it all wrong!  I wouldn't chase you."  As the pair spoke, the world they were standing in simply faded away into dust, all of which was blown away with the simple flap of Maggie's wings.  At this point, Rocky didn't want to question any of it.  He just wanted to keep on talking to his new friend.

"Oh no?"

"Definitely not.  If you don't wanna stay dead that's your choice, we'll just put you back in as another baby, but you gotta ask first.  Plan ahead, though, because walk-ins tend to have pretty drastic changes to gender, ethnicity, and the time you're born."

"What happens if I do want to stay dead?"

"Also your choice."  The surrounding area at this point was a pure humming white light in all directions, though Rocky felt a discernible floor, and Maggie started walking away.  "You're welcome to stay here as long as you like, or even go haunt around your planet for as long as you want, but if you can't touch anything."

"Will I get in trouble or something?"

"Nah, nobody really cares what you do, but touching things in your world as a ghost is physically impossible.  If you wanna touch you have to be alive, just like with this place: you gotta be dead to do anything.  It's pretty binary like that, but we're not going to corral you into some kind of afterlife daycare, that's what living is for."

"I guess this is the part where you tell me about the meaning of life, eh?"

"Well, you forget that when you're born, so sure.  It's because, and you'll figure this out really quick, living in a timeless, dimensionless plane of existence gets really boring really fast, so y'all made this little make-believe place that you like to visit every eon or so.  It makes you forget everything you've ever known and live out a meager existence in a place where time flows only in one direction.  Makes things interesting, knowing everything at once just takes away surprises."

"You're telling me that the entire world is just a vacation home for spirits?"

"I guess you could call us spirits, though we're really just wayward beings who happened to be passing through this particular piece of time-space on our journey through the white."

"The white?"

"It's what we call the environment that exists outside of all time and space.  We're all creatures of the white, but we have the power to squeeze ourselves into time and space and experience it, but that cuts us off from our bizarre way of thinking if it's done for too long.

"So... you're like, a crossing guard at an elementary school that makes sure the little kids get across the road safely?"

"Kinda.  I like to think of it more as a theme park operator.  I'm here to make sure everybody has a good time and gets off the ride safely."

"What's next, then?"

"Well, you're welcome to get back on the ride, or go visit some of the other places that you've all created.  Or you can just stick around and make some friends, they could last you several lifetimes out here."

"Where exactly is here?  All I see is...  Well, I guess it's "The White" that I'm seeing."

"Mmn, and I suppose you still see yourself and me as ponies, right?"

"Indeed I do... should I not?"

"Well... it's just an illusion from your planet.  Once you get used to viewing things outside of the third dimension again you'll be able to see our true forms and start gathering up your true memories.  For now just take your time getting acclimated.  It's gonna be a long eternity."

~Fin