Joe had asked him once what his earliest memory was, and he had answered with something flippant about sand.
The truth was a tavern in his childhood. The tavern was old and cozy and crowded with so many people, all different and strange. Though the images in his memory grew less strange as time passed and he learned the names of the odd things they wore – chiton, kimono, kaftan, leisure suit, jeans.
He didn't know where this tavern might have been, or if it had been anywhere, but the memory remained bright and sharp no matter how many years passed. Memories of waiting and uncertainty and stories told to keep away the dark.
And then looking outside, and in the nothing out there – seeing them.
Seeing her.
Duncan had asked him once, why he had chosen the name Death when he rode with the horsemen. He'd said something about how it had seemed like a good idea at the time, and being called 'mildly inconvenient wound' hadn't sent quite the right message. Too lengthy.
But he remembered a pale girl with sad, dark eyes, trailing a funeral procession.
A girl who had stopped and looked at him as he stood in the window of a tavern as a child, and who he had maybe fallen in love with a little bit.
"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life."
Brant Tucker, in World's End.