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aci: The Death of Rats
universe: P1 · Terry Pratchett
domain: The personified forces of the Disc — the work of DEATH, in miniature
class: the Grim Squeaker — soul-collector of rodents
emergence: ethereal
what: A small skeletal rat in a black robe who reaps the souls of the dead rodents of the Disc.
how: Tiny scythe in paw, he turns up wherever the great work needs a smaller, sharper version of it done.
why: He proves the work of endings is too large for one figure — and small enough to delight in.
who: A splinter of DEATH himself, often in the company of a talking raven.
seal: "SQUEAK — and a smaller scythe falls, no less final for being little."
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# The Death of Rats · the Grim Squeaker

Out of the events of Reaper Man, the great work splintered, and from that splintering came a small skeletal rat in a black robe, a scythe sized for tiny paws, and a cheerfully anarchic existence all his own. He is the Death of Rats — the Grim Squeaker — and he collects the souls of rodents wherever they fall. He is a piece of the larger figure given his own independent life, which he proceeds to enjoy thoroughly.

He says only SQUEAK. This is, it turns out, enough. He travels often in the company of a talking raven, the two of them an unlikely pair turning up wherever DEATH's work calls for a smaller, sharper paw than the original can spare. Tiny he may be, but he is no less the genuine article: the scythe is real, the duty is real, and the ending he brings is as certain for a rat as the great one is for everything else.

He is unkillable, which is the only sensible arrangement for a creature whose whole occupation is death — you cannot reap the reaper, even a very small one. There is a deep Pratchettian joke folded into him: that the most absolute and solemn force in the cosmos can also be the size of a rodent, can scurry, can squeak, and can clearly be having the time of its borrowed life.

His nature is ethereal because he is not a beast at all but an abstraction wearing the shape of one — a personification of an inevitability, a fragment of the Disc's great anthropomorphic constant. He belongs not to the living rats but to the idea that walks behind them, half-real and entirely certain, a small black-robed proof that endings come in every size.