The Death Of The Discworld
It had only happened once, but that was all it needed to happen to ensure that it did, in fact, happen.
This is how the Discworld ended.
A bony figure was standing in a field of black wheat. Each grain was a metaphor for a human life.
He gazed out to the seemingly infinite horizon, occasionally stopping inspected the crop.
He held out his thin hand, and an hourglass appeared with the faint sound of 'vlorp'.
This hourglass was of the typical size, but each chamber was very large. It also had most of its sand spilled into its lowest chamber.
Below the base, engraved onto the turtle-shell frame holding the glass in gothic letters, the words GREAT A'TUIN appeared somewhat larger than they were to one's eyes, if any humans were in Death's Domain at that point, as if one's mind was reading the same text in a larger font in a book you could not in fact see with your physical senses.
If one squinted a little, one could likely see four lesser hourglasses attached to the main chamber, each one having an oddly pachydermic quality to them. These had each dwindled to only a few stubborn grains that refused to drop until the turtle hourglass ended.
A voice, like the lids of coffins closing mixed with the voices of a large number of sentients, spoke.
I assume this means my service is at a close soon.
A sussuration of voices echoed around the Reaper, the crop of metaphorical humans echoing his words in the huge space.
The harvest is complete. The Job is done.
There was a sudden surge of observance. As if unseen eyes had awaited this moment for eternities upon eternities, and were only now materialising the actual bodies from which they observed.
This was inevitable, as you know. You are an agent of entropy. All things end, even if their energy can never truly be destroyed. Homogeneity is how all things will eventually go. Everything, given time, is simply mathematics given flesh by physics. And physical forces tend towards sameness, if not total inactivity. Life ends. Forces end. The story... Ends.
A clock tolled, the metaphoric imagery for a field of black crops slowly disappearing , as a great cacophony of light and sound continually being sucked into a black point, took up the landscape.
IT IS TIME
The Death of the Discworld looked up at the part of itself that was also Azrael, the Death of Universes, looked at the Death of the Discworld.
The Death of Rats crawled out of Death's cloak, and perched on his shoulder.
squeak
It muttered quietly, before vanishing, and becoming a part of the Discworld's Death.
The more humanoid Death looked at the hourglass in his hand again, and watched as the last grains fell.
Parts of him that had grown to be more human due to his observance of humans, not to mention the humanising influences of his grand-daughter when she visited, felt that something needed to be said.
'Goodbye' felt a bit too casual. 'Adios' implied there was a fare to be well. But 'au revoir' implied that this was not the final end.
It was the final end.
But the Death remembered a phrase it had heard uttered by his servant, Albert, who had spent a long time perusing Death's access to L-Space.
so long, and thanks for all the fudge?
Wait, that doesn't sound right, can i have a do-over, i don't typically do sendoffs all that mu-
Space and time ripped apart as a sharp, scythe-like pendlum bigger than reality swiped the Discworld from the world of the living. The singularity surrounded by colours vanished once the deed was done.
Without life, there was nothing. Without narrativium, there was no Death, there was no Auditors, there was no Azrael.
There was just briefly a echo of a skeleton of a giant turtle and four skeletal elephants, upon which a world slowly disintegrated.
And, for a brief moment, an elderly man garbed in red, with yellow stitching on his pointed hat spelling the word WIZZARD appeared from a door where there was no door before, floating in space, stuck his head out, and looked about the now-devoid-of-turtle region of space.
"Huh. Nothing in this one, guys. Just a projection of space. Are you sure the Octavo's around here?"
The door closed, and time solved its final loose end.
end