10 Secrets Of Neil Gaiman’s Death Of The Endless
3. The Gift Of Death…and Life
Death visits every mortal being at two points in their life: the beginning and the end. Death has the power to free a soul from a body and usher it on to "what comes next." This may be a specific afterlife or on to reincarnation. Death refers to the afterlife as “The Sunless Lands”. She does not take souls to the individual afterlives. She leaves this to the individual Death Gods of that particular being’s faith.
Death also gives the gift of life to every living thing, infusing the soul to each being at the time of their creation or giving them a “second chance” on the road to reincarnation. Apparently, no one remembers this interaction with Death. She can also create new life from inanimate objects.
Death has occasionally chosen not to take the souls of certain individuals. One was Dream’s son, Orpheus. She allowed him to live so that he could descend into Hades to rescue his love, Eurydice. After his body was torn to shreds by the Bacchanae, Orpheus survived as a head for thousands of years until he was finally released by his father. She also spared a man in Medieval England named Robert “Hob” Gadling, who said that Death was a “mug’s game and he wanted no part of it.”