Portal:Discworld/Article of the day/2

Article of the day

Death's Domain is a dimension in the Discworld novels, shaped by human expectation and Death's own attempts to have a life beyond his allotted task. It gave rise to a Discworld Mapp of thesame name, drawn by Paul Kidby, with additional material by Pratchett and Stephen Briggs.

The first thing visitors notice is that the Domain is black. Everything in it is black (or different colours and shades of black), except the things that are bone-white. The exceptions are purple mountains in the distance and, since Reaper Man, golden cornfields between the mountains and the Domain proper. Very few living people have entered the Domain, but among the notable exceptions are Albert, Ysabell, Mort, Rincewind, Twoflower (and, arguably, the Luggage).

Things that are black include all the plants in the garden, the house, the peacocks (although they have white skull-shaped "eyes" on their tails), the cats (Death likes cats) and the bees (Death also likes bees, possibly because a hive mind has no fear of him). Things that are bone-white (and indeed skeletal) include the trout in the pond, some of the birds and the garden gnomes. Death cannot create, he can only copy things. The items in the garden are things he has seen elsewhere, including the fish pond, and presumably the fish inside it.

Although nearly everything in the Domain is black, it is not all the same colour. On the Discworld, and congruent dimensions, splitting darkness with an eight-sided prism produces different colours of black.