The snow fell gently upon the city of Ankh – Morpork, soft as a whisper, cold as – well, snow. The city toasted warmly under its natural blanket, sleepy and lethargic on Hogswatch Eve, rousing itself occasionally with the bangs and rumbles of any great city before rolling back over and snoring even louder than before. For once, all was more or less quite in the prime city of the Disc.
From the confines of his dark robe, Death reaches in and pulls out an hourglass, the sand on the top half dwindling steadily down to emptiness as the grains joined together into a single mass below.
Death watched the snow for a few moments more, marveling, for even Anthromorphic Personifications can be moved by simple things, remembering another time, another Hogswatch Eve night rather like this one before directing his attention to the job he was here for. A small, if cozy looking hovel nestled snugly between two larger homes and a plume of grey smoke rose from the tiny chimney like an invitation.
Death did not knock for he had no need, nor had he ever gotten the hang of working a doorknob. He melted through the door like a living shadow and emerged on the other side, scythe in hand.
The old woman was sitting in front of the fireplace, lightly rocking back and forth in her chair as she put the final touches on the pair of knit mittens in her lap. The squeak of the rocking chair made a lovely counterpoint to the click-clack of her needles and she hummed a little tune to go along with the melody. The mittens were decorated in the brightest colors she had been able to scavenge and were made for a tiny pair of hands, a child's hands. She re-wound the stream of yarn back into a ball and tucked her needles away into the burlap sack at her feet. The mittens would go to a child from the Beggar's Guild – they tended to be the worst off.
The fireplace crackled and the sparks jumped in the air as one of the logs finally snapped in two, heating the room with a sudden burst of warmth. The old woman smiled and closed her eyes, savoring her final moments of a long life as Death raised his scythe and cut.
He lifted a skeletal hand to help her from her chair. She did not appear to be frightened or confused, but merely looked and wondered why it all felt so familiar. Death inclined his head gently, as if to acknowledge her unspoken question: we have met before.
There was a definite familiarity to the encounter, but the woman couldn't place it. It felt like a name on the tip of her tongue, or that fancy foreign word she'd heard somewhere – déjà-vu. It felt like cold and snow and dying fires, like hypothermia and eyelids frozen shut, but it also felt like the promise of a warm place to wake up to.
She was fading, softly, like the last vestiges of snow dissolving in the sunlight. She smiled and reached for something only she could see, something far, far away, where the light was always golden and the children never had to peddle matches to survive. She turned for one last look at Death.
For some reason, she felt like he should be wearing a Hogfather hat.
Death watched as she dissolved completely, satisfied with a job well done. He left the same way he came, slipping through the wall like a phantom and back into the snow. He made his way down the cobblestone street, vanishing more and more with each step.
He left no footprints in the blank whiteness.
In the tiny hovel, the fireplace smoldered down to ashes as the final traces of light withdrew completely.
The Match Girl was one of my favorite scenes in Hogfather ^^
- SilverInkblot