these are black and silver boots Death is a fictional character from the DC comic book series, The Sandman (1988 - 1996). She was created by Sandman writer Neil Gaiman and given visual life by illustrators Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III. In the stories, Death is both the end of life and a psychopomp. Like most anthropomorphic personifications of death, Death meets with the recently deceased and guides them into their new existence. However, unlike most personifications of death, she also visits people as they are born, according to Destruction in the "Sandman Special". Evidently, only she seems to remember these encounters. In the special issue, it is also revealed that Death was known in Ancient Greece as Teleute. Death is also a complete opposite of the traditional western culture personification of death (see Grim Reaper). In The Sandman, Death instead appears as an attractive, pale young woman dressed in casual clothes - often a black top and jeans. She also wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck, and has a marking similar to the eye of Horus around her right eye. She is pleasant, down-to-earth, and perky, and has been a nurturing figure for both incarnations of Dream. This strange paradox has helped make Death one of the most popular characters from Sandman. Death is the second eldest of the Endless, a family of anthropomorphic beings. Death is possibly the most powerful of the Endless having been shown (in a flashback in Brief Lives) to be virtually omniscient and being able to intimidate the Furies, who show no fear of the other Endless, simply by raising her voice in The Kindly Ones. The witch Thessaly mentions that Death is the only one of the Endless who is bound by no rules. Death's realm is not portrayed in detail in the series, except for a brief scene in her 'house' in the Sandman Special, Song of Orpheus, and later in The Books of Magic series. This is where she keeps her floppy hat collection, her goldfish Slim and Wandsworth and possibly her gallery. A brief glimpse of her realm can also be seen in the first issue of The Wake, where a messenger visits her as she walks in open grasslands, and in The Little Endless Storybook, when Barnabas visits her, again in her 'house.' One day every century, Death lives (and dies) as a mortal, in order to understand the value of the life she takes. She does this by merging herself with a mortal fated to die that day. At the end of Death: The High Cost of Living her Endless self briefly converses with the merged being that is the mortal host and her Endless self.