• Published 18th Aug 2011
  • 18,968 Views, 609 Comments

Binky Pie - Miyajima

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Life or Death

Death stood at the door of the Great Library of the Unseen University. Behind her, the chaos caused by her presence had subdued to a panicked quiet as wizards of all ages, ranks and colours bravely cowered for their very lives. They were, of course, mistaken. She was not there for them. To her, they represented little more than annoying insects; gnats hovering a particularly annoying distance above the path such that they always happen to fly directly into your mouth when you least expect it.

She had not come to claim the lives of insects. Her prey was the divine, and she could sense its passing from the realm. Inside, her broiling emotions wanted to scream, to cry and wail, to strike out in fury at everything and anything around her, but she stayed calm. She tried only to feel nothing, the empty void at the heart of it all. Death was the nothing at the end of life. She would become nothing.

Before her the library stretched into the infinite dimensions, weighed down by infinite knowledge on infinite pages in infinite books. The weight of letters tore at the universe as if it was wet paper. Death was not strictly a librarian, but she kept a lot of books. Her own stacks contained all the lives, all the stories, that ever had been or will be, so she was more than familiar with L-Space.

She could sense where the goddess had gone. Into the stacks. Between the pages. Down the spine, and hopping the cover onto another chapter of another book entirely. Three figures hovered at her shoulder.

One said, She has passed beyond our power.
One said, You must follow.
One said, You must end this.

She heard the words, but paid them no heed. She focused her incredible and undeniable gaze on the tunnel that cut through the fabric beyond her, from one universe to the next. She began to walk toward it; first slowly, then gathering speed, and finally, scythe raised high, leaping through the compressed space of reality, tearing a portal into a pastel-coloured realm a deep part of her was all too familiar with.


Stibbons was forced to peek his head above the pile of books he and the other faculty staff were hiding behind by the Dean’s incessant poking.

“I… I think it’s gone.”

Slowly, Ridcully, the Dean and the Bursar’s hats rose above the barricade, followed by their eyes. Ridcully assessed the situation with a quick, calculated sweep, and stood up to his full height, brushing the dust from his robe.

“Right, well, I think that’s rather enough of all that. It was probably just a… a…” he began, his ordinarily rigid mental discipline failing at trying to find a suitable lie.

“Thingummywut?” suggested the Bursar.

“Yes. One of those. Nothing to be concerned about.”

There was a pause.*

“... Let’s go back to the dining hall,” he finished, to quiet murmurs of agreement.


*Somewhere on campus, a student coughed. He was just as surprised as anyone else, but certain literary conventions must remain in force.


Bill Door was shocked. Bill Door was happy. Bill Door was ecstatic. He and Fluttershy were staring one another in the eyes, and both of them wore an expression of mixed exhilaration and relief. Neither could quite find something to say, as they stood there beneath the stars caught in the leaves above.

Time felt like it was standing still for Bill Door, but he conceded that some time must have passed, because eventually Fluttershy was the first to break the silence.

“We… ought to get back,” she had stated, reluctantly moving away from him. He merely nodded, and stole the opportunity to kiss her again, before they began walking back along the forest path towards Ponyville.

They didn’t talk, and Bill Door felt that the need for words between them had diminished. Fluttershy’s contented silence spoke more to his heart than any words could hope to. The forest was soon behind them, and the pair once more joined the path that wound through the fields and hedgerows surrounding Ponyville. Above them, the stars shone bright, stretching out into the endless sky and lighting it like a hundred thousand lanterns. In their glow, Bill Door thought he could see a halo around Fluttershy, beams of light catching in the strands of her mane as it moved to her steps. She was beautiful. She was alive.

He could contain his feelings no longer.

“Fluttershy, I-”

There. In his stomach. He felt it. A tug. An all-too-familiar tug. His voice faltered, and the words died in his throat. Fluttershy turned her head to face him, and her expression shifted to one of puzzled confusion as she saw Bill Door stop short on the path.

Bill Door looked up at the stars. They were no longer soft and comforting. They had become cold and distant. The blackness of the sky seemed to swallow them up. The chill of the night crept beneath his skin and wrapped around his bones as his heart began to pound.

No... it didn’t pound. It can’t pound. A thought rose unbidden to his mind: ‘I don’t have a heart.’

Fluttershy was becoming concerned. “What is it?”

Bill Door didn’t hear her words. As she spoke them, time seemed to slow down. Not like it had earlier that evening, in that pleasant way that time seems to stand still in a moment of pure joy or happiness, but rather according to that most ancient of mechanisms shared by all living things; the stretching out of an awful, terrible realization, empowering the mind to make that potentially fatal decision to face the foe or flee. Danger was approaching.

Bill Door couldn’t speak. How could he? He didn’t have any vocal chords. But he could make himself heard.

Something’s wrong.


Twilight was emotionally torn. A part of her wanted to run circles around this fine, upstanding specimen of pongo abelii, more commonly known as an orangutan, and another part preferred to remain rooted to the spot while it worked out what in Harmony’s name was going on here.

She gave way to the second emotion first, and spent some moments in rapid-fire thought. An orangutan had just… appeared, in her library, carrying her missing friend on its shoulder. Also she might have just discovered the secret to interdimensional travel, but that was just mere detail. Firstly she had to figure out where this orangutan had come from. Why was it here? Was it friendly? Did it need a cup of tea? In these situations does etiquette dictate I offer said cup of tea, or do I scream and panic? These questions and a dozen more like them streamed through Twilight’s mind before she settled on her first course of action, one that had served her well over the years.

Ignore it, for the time being. Let the inexplicable remain, for now, inexplicable.

“Pinkie! Where have you been!?”

Pinkie Pie leapt down from the Librarian’s shoulders and, after greeting Spike who then returned to the kitchen, turned to face Twilight.

“Twilight! You wouldn’t believe where I’ve been! It’s a world that’s flying through space on the back of a giant turtle! And there’s elephants, and magic, and wizards, and big cities, and gods, and zombies and-”

Twilight pressed a hoof to her friend’s mouth, cutting off the stream of description. “I’m sorry, you lost me at turtle. But you’re safe, right?”

“Pretty sure! My new friend here was just showing me the way back home! He’s a librarian, like you, Twilight! You should see it, there’s more books there than I think there might be in all of Equestria! You’d love it. I should book us a vacation there. When I’m less busy. Which I suppose I am now because I’m back?”

Pinkie furrowed her brow and stroked her chin with her hoof, making ‘hmm’-like noises before a sudden awful and crushing realization hit her.

“I’m late for work at the bakery! I’m never late for work at the bakery! Mrs. Cake will be furious!”

Twilight smirked. “Actually, about that-”

“SorryTwilightnotimetotalkIhavealotofworktocatchupon!”

And just like that, she was gone, a small whirlwind of papers left in her wake. Twilight was left alone in the room with the Librarian. They stared at one another for a few seconds.

“Ook?” he proffered.

“ ‘Ook’ indeed,” Twilight agreed, “I hope she wasn’t too… disruptive?”

The Librarian frowned. Twilight winced.

“On behalf of Equestria, please accept my apologies. … Can I… get you a cup of tea?”

He considered this proposal for a moment, and nodded, gratefully. Crossing the boundaries of dimensions did take it out of you. Twilight smiled and left the Librarian alone in the main room, indicating as she passed into the kitchen that he had free and complete use of all the library had to offer.

Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie had arrived at Sugarcube Corner with such alarming speed* that she hadn’t even paused to notice it was night time. She burst through the door, knocking it clean off its hinges for the third time that year. It was only as she rushed to the kitchen to begin her daily routine of cleaning ovens, preparing doughs and icing pastries that she finally realized both Mr. and Mrs. Cake were probably still soundly asleep. At least, that was probably the case, given their absence both from the shop front and the kitchen. Also the lack of customers. And the ‘CLOSED’ sign Pinkie now had dangling from the end of her nose.

She sheepishly tip-toed back into the storefront and carefully replaced the door and sign (Mr. Cake had ensured, after the several such similar incidents, to put the door on a style of hinge that facilitated its replacement), and sneaked upstairs to her top-floor rooms.

She was intercepted on the landing by the fierce and mildly disapproving glare of a rudely awoken Mrs. Cake. Or at least, she would have been rudely awoken, but as it was, she had set an alarm that had woken her precisely ten seconds before Pinkie Pie struck the door. She was organized like that.

“Miss Pinkamena Diane Pie,” she stated, in a quiet voice so unbearably loud to Pinkie’s reddening** ears that it might have shaken the very foundations of the building, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”


*An observer watching from the Golden Oak Library might almost say she pink-shifted.

**Well, pink-ening.


Bill Death- that is, Death Door- I mean, Bill Door, was distraught. He ran towards Ponyville, Fluttershy flying low beside him. She was equally as concerned, not least because Bill Door’s hurried explanation of his sudden change in demeanour had left her with more questions than she had answers, but also because she had a nagging sense that this blossoming romance between them might be about to come to a premature and all-too-upsetting end.

She was not the sort of pony to open herself up to just anyone, and the thought competed for space in her mind with the warning Bill Door had given before they both began their sprint towards the town; Death is here.

Bill Door just kept running. He knew his time in Ponyville was drawing to a close. That he would worry about later, for now he merely worried that things seemed to be getting a touch too dramatic for his liking.

And in his mind, where there was drama, there were usually the Auditors.

At the Library, Twilight was deep in discussion with the Librarian, who despite his usual surly nature, found himself enamoured of this lilac-and-lavender example of equus ferus monocerus. He sensed in her a kindred spirit, a like-minded individual who shared his not only his love for the written word in its myriad forms, but also for order, organization and systematic filing. These were traits rarely encountered in horses, as far as he was aware. He was just about to give his opinion on Twilight’s explanation of the Colter Expansive Classification in the form of a succinct response full of meaning and subtlety* when the two of them were interrupted by an arc of blue-tipped flame cutting through the stacks of the library and setting many of the books within them ablaze.

From this inferno stepped a figure shrouded in a cloak as black as night; so black that to look on it was to see a manifestation of nothingness, as no feature or wrinkle was made known to your sight. Beneath its pale, skeletal hoof it clung to the shaft of a harvest scythe, and the bladed edge shone with the ferocity born from the death of photons as they were carved in two by its passing. Its face was that of a grinning skull, in whose empty eyes burned a flame as bright, as radiant, and as blue as a winter’s sky, and down its cheeks ran channels burned by tears of flame that fell and scorched the floor where it stood.

This, both the Librarian and Twilight felt instinctively, accessing a portion of their minds in which was stored the most basic of all understanding, was Death.

And yet, Twilight felt something else, something familiar.

The figure rounded on her, and held the edge of its scythe to her throat, spitting the words:

Where is she.


*”Ook.”


The 'she' in question was busy crafting a very plausible explanation for her past several months of absence to her employer. Or was it a week? She had conflicting memories of both, and it was beginning to give her a headache.

“So, to sum up,” Mrs. Cake began, when Pinkie had wound her lengthy and frequently distracted monologue to a close, “you took a part-time job as Mr. Door’s assistant, someone tried to call you across dimensions using a magic spell which accidentally swapped you and him and stranded you both in each other’s places, you then spent some time doing his job full time whilst also starting a cult, which ended up with you being chased by yourself, throwing a party in a big city, meeting some wizards and ending up back here because you got lost in a library.”

“That’s about it, yup,” Pinkie replied, her head drooping.

“Well, I needn’t say that I’m very disappointed, Pinkie,” Mrs. Cake continued. “It was completely irresponsible of you to disappear like that without a word of warning, and speaking as your employer, you really ought to have told me that you’d taken up another job which might impact on your work here.”

If Pinkie Pie could feel any more dejected, she was worried she might just dissolve into a puddle on the floor. But as she had been speaking, Mrs. Cake’s expression had softened, and she embraced Pinkie tightly, crying with relief.

“I’m so glad you’re safe. Your parents would have never forgiven me. I was worried half to death, you silly pony!” she said, between sobs. Pinkie hugged her back, tears beginning to well up in her own eyes. Mr. Cake, Pound and Pumpkin tilted their heads around the frame of the door at the noise. The twins rushed Pinkie and grabbed whatever part of her was available for further hugging, while Mr. Cake looked on from the door and smiled in a fatherly way.

Then Twilight appeared, sparks falling from her horn that glowed with the latent energy of a teleportation spell.

“Pinkie! Quick! You need to hide, there’s some… some thing after you! It’s, it’s like-”

Pinkie looked up at Twilight in shock. “A creepy-looking skeletal pony in a cloak blacker than a burnt pastry carrying a ridiculously-sharp farming implement?”

“Yes! It’s… It’s burning my library! I left your orang-utan friend to deal with it, but I don’t think he’ll be able to occupy it for long.”

Pinkie gently removed herself from the various Cakes, taking particular care to nuzzle the twins on the head.

“We need to find Death- Bill Door, he’ll know what to do.”

“Last I saw him he… Went to Applejack’s! Come on!”

And with a burst of magic, they were both gone.


Bill Door could smell the smoke. In only minutes the Golden Oak Library had been engulfed in flames. He kept running while Fluttershy had torn herself away to get Rainbow Dash’s help. Together she hoped they’d be able to put out the blaze before it spread to other buildings in Ponyville.

The goings-on in the centre of town weren’t being ignored, of course, and ponies were leaning out of their windows, filing out of doors onto the street, shouting, questioning and beginning to panic. Some amongst them tried to call for order, to arrange a bucket line, but the prevailing mood was one of fear. As Bill Door closed the final distance between himself and the library, he saw two figures, silhouetted in the fire, tumble from the building into the street.

He could see the wicked, vicious glint of a scythe. His scythe. He saw it arc through the air and cut into the ground like it was going through fine sand. The figure of the Librarian - for it was the Librarian, one did not easily forget such a man - struggled to regain the upper hand in his fight with Death.

And Death was angry. Angry at herself. Angry at the Auditors. Angry at Bill Door, and Pinkie Pie. Angry at wizards and zombies, at cultists and librarians and plague and The Duty. She swung again and again, but each time her stroke fell short by less than a hair’s breadth of prematurely claiming the Librarian’s life.

As he saw this, Bill Door recalled another time, another place, when he had been forced to fight a spectre of himself. On golden hills ripe for harvest, facing down a monstrous machine of knives and whirring sickles, piloted by an arrogant, self-obsessed shade of all that he could be, if only he stretched out his hand and took it all for himself.

An emotion that he had not felt since then boiled up inside him. Rage. And pity.

I never wore a crown! he called out to the spectre. She looked up, momentarily distracted, and the Librarian seized his chance. Unfolding all the power in those deceptively sinuous arms, he knocked her clean on the jaw. She reeled, snarling, but this lesser, mortal prey no longer held her interest.

I never wanted to rule! Bill Door cried while forcing himself between Death and the Librarian.

For what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man? he pleaded. The other Death; smaller, somehow lesser, as if a shadow could cast its own shadow, stood defiantly opposite, tears burning down her cheeks, smoke rising from rings of grass where they fell.

I don’t want to rule. I don’t want a crown. she replied, in a voice not unlike Bill Door’s, but behind it a trembling of wavering emotion, I want to become nothing, and for that, I have come for you, and for her.

She raised the scythe and swept it across the ground at Bill Door’s feet, cutting the blades of grass so cleanly that they stood for a further second before falling and burning up.

Bill Door looked down at the grass, then back up at her.

Ugh. Drama.


“Applejack! Where’s Bill Do-”

Twilight was unable to finish her sentence due to having a glass of water reflexively thrown at her from the nearby bedside table by a particularly startled Applejack.

“Oh, land’s sakes, it’s you, Twi. What’re you thinkin’ jus’ teleportin’ in on me like that? An- Wait. Pinkie?”

“Hi, Applejack!”

“Where in the hay have you been all week?”

“Long story! It might take years to tell properly so I’ll just be short and say that I’ve been on holiday! Working! As the grim reaper!”

Applejack blinked. Twilight also blinked, as the glass finally slid off the end of her horn and rolled across the now wet wooden floor. Applejack turned to face her.

“I’m jus’ gonna pretend I didn’t hear most of that. But, right, Bill Door? He walked off with Fluttershy when she came by to check on Winona.” She yawned. “In fact, Big Mac said he saw ‘em walkin’ out near Whitetail Woods this afternoon. Seemed a bit sour about it. Why, is somethin’ up?”

“We need to find him, fast! The library’s on fire!"

Applejack blinked and leapt from her bed, sweeping her hat down from the hook nearby.

"... And there's a hippomorphic personification of Death trying to kill Pinkie Pie!"

Applejack paused.

“Well, I... Uh. I don't know how to deal with that one. But, uh, you two go on ahead, I’ll head into town and get folk organized for fire-fightin'. Let's tackle things one at a time!”

Twilight nodded, and she and Pinkie were gone. They reappeared outside Fluttershy’s cottage to find the lights out and the door locked.

“Oh, where could they be…” Twilight said, pacing nervously around the door while Pinkie looked over towards the smoke rising from Ponyville with some concern. She frowned as she felt a pinch in her knee. Something scary happening, indeed.

“Twilight, I think we need to get the others,” she said suddenly, in such a serious tone of voice that Twilight stopped pacing immediately. Pinkie turned to her, “this is an Elements of Harmony job.”

Twilight looked her in the eyes, and nodded. “We’ll just have to hope Fluttershy’s alright.”

Pinkie looked out over the town and squinted, hard. A grin broke out on her face. “I think she’s fine! Look, she and Dashie are gathering clouds to put out the library!”

“And if she’s there, then Bill Door ought to be, too!” Twilight smiled. “Come on!”


Bill Door dodged again and again, desperately trying to keep Death away from the other ponies. He had no weapon that could stand up against the scythe of office, and whilst this Death embodied The Duty, however badly, it refused to listen to his call. All he could hope for was to buy time. The Librarian was helping Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack, and a blue pegasus with a rainbow mane that he hadn’t been introduced to yet as they tried to stop the fire spreading.

Just! Stand! Still! Death snarled at him, her voice somewhere between an angry shout and a despondent scream.

Just a little more time.

Just a little more.

“Death!”

He turned, and in that instant saw Pinkie Pie, followed closely by Twilight Sparkle. Death saw them too, and the rictus grin of her skull turned almost to a smile.

We’re all together again. she said, and with a cruel stroke, cut Bill Door across the throat. His eyes opened wide in shock. Pinkie stopped in her tracks. As the body of Bill Door collapsed, lifeless, to the ground, a small gold-rimmed timer fell from a pocket of his jacket, and rolled to a halt on the burning grass.

Pinkie stood facing her shadow. Facing Death. All the world seemed to fade away into nothing, and for that moment, all her world consisted of was her and it. Life and Death. She realised then, in that instant, the truth of all the things her grandfather had taught her, and all that she had learned of Death in her time on the Disc.

He… She. It, was alone. Sometimes they were content with that. At other times they screamed, they cried, they reached out to connect, to feel a fleeting moment of what Life was, what they could never truly have. Each time it had burned them, but in the process it had left a mark, and Death felt loneliness more acutely than ever before. And now she stood before it, an avatar of Life.

But it wasn’t just her. She had her friends. Maybe, just maybe, together they could teach this small fragment of Death something that no other would ever be able to comprehend.

Pinkie felt an all too familiar glow envelop her as Twilight, Rarity, Applejack, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy joined her. Not a word had passed between them, but no words needed to. They each closed their eyes as the magic of friendship lifted them into the air and encircled them in a band of vibrant colours.

Death was transfixed. She couldn’t move. As a cascade of coloured light descended on her, surrounded her, enveloped her, she felt something stir within her breast that she had never truly felt before. The memory of it rang out in her mind, a memory of when this Death was Pinkie Pie, when this Death was Alive. Now it was more than mere memory, and the warmth of it embraced her.

Pinkie embraced her, and for a second time, the watchers all around them heard a sound unlike any since the dawn of the universe, as the fiery blue tears of Death splashed down Pinkie’s back in great, heaving sobs.

When the light had faded, only one figure remained. Death was gone, and Pinkie was herself again. Her whole self. She wiped her eyes and nose on her leg as she sniffed the last of the tears away. There, on the ground before her, lay a balloon in gothic pink, bearing the words ‘Pinkie Pie’.

She gently cradled it in her hooves as she sat, while her friends gathered around the body of Bill Door, each trying to resuscitate him. Pinkie took the balloon in one hoof as she turned and moved toward them. She didn’t cry when she looked upon Bill Door’s lifeless form, but instead focused her attention on the small, golden timer that had been ignored by the other five.

Deep inside her, the part of her that was Death and the part of her that was Life both knew what could be done. As it has been stated, Death does not end Life, they are merely a servant of the universe, a fragment of Azrael, and they ensure that a life ends when it is supposed to, when the last grain of sand, pearl, eggshell or what have you has run from the top bulb to the bottom bulb. Death’s timer had no sand in it. It had never had sand in it. But now there was an emptiness about it that was something new.

Something Pinkie knew that she could fill, if only she dared. The part of her that was, that had been Death came to the forefront of her mind. The loneliness it had felt since time immemorial. The brief glimmers of a life aped, a life imitated, in the small things like listening to Albert’s predictable, shuffling steps, or in watching the wind toy with the ears of grain in a late summer’s field. The joys of eating curry in Ankh-Morpork. The irritations suffered from the whims of wizards and necromancers. Cats. Cupcakes.

She looked at the balloon, and with a smile, let a small portion of air depart from it. It didn’t travel anywhere, strictly speaking, but it was gone, and had arrived in another place.

Bill Door gasped for breath and opened his eyes. Fluttershy very nearly knocked the breath back out of him.


One said, looking through the fabric of the multiverse, Well. We tried.
One said, Back to the drawing board.
One said, Hold on, how does that even work? He’s Death, he can’t just be revived willy-nilly by some knock-off Death-stand in from a different universe. I mean, this is just shoddy. Things that die stay dead, no matter the ‘power of love’ or the ‘magic of friendship’, it’s just- What?

One said, You said… it.
One said, Yes, you did, I heard it.

One said, Well now you’ve said it too! Are you two trying to get me in troub-

Three said, Oh, bugger.

And disappeared.