Auditors

The Auditors of Reality are supernatural entities and celestial bureaucrats. They make sure that gravity works, file the appropriate paperwork for each chemical reaction, and so forth.

The Auditors hate life, because it's messy and unpredictable, which makes them fall behind on their paperwork; they much prefer barren balls of rock orbiting stars in neat, easily predictable elliptical paths. They really hate humans and other sentient beings, who are much more messy and unpredictable than other living things.

The Auditors are not gods, at least not in the Discworld sense. Gods on the Discworld derive their existence from human belief, something that the Auditors find inherently repulsive.

Belief and imagination are the ultimate mess: They shape and reform the physical world in almost infinitely varied and complex ways. Where the Auditors see a fragment of carbonaceous chondrite heated by the friction of atmospheric entry, imagination sees a falling star. Where the Auditors see a random cleft in granite, imagination sees a dark cave haunted by monsters. To the Auditors, this is infuriating; after all, how can one catalogue or quantify a dragon, a basilisk, poetry or Justice? The Auditors existed long before humans and would be quite happy to exist without them.

Fortunately for humanity and every other living thing, the Auditors can't simply wipe out life, because that's against the Rules; the Auditors can't break the Rules because, in a certain sense, they are the Rules.

Unfortunately, a loophole exists in the Rules which allows the Auditors to influence humans into doing what they cannot do directly; sometimes the Auditors hire humans to perform tasks that will make the world less "messy", paying them with the gold they created out of thin air using their abilities to manipulate reality.

Being personifications of a concept, the Auditors have no fixed shape. When they manifest in the world, however, they almost always appear as empty grey cowled robes, an appearance which conveys drabness and dullness rather than danger. They do not speak, but rather impart the memory of having spoken directly into people's minds.

They are, in a sense, similar to the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions in that they represent a higher abstract principle hostile to ordinary mortal life, but from the opposite direction of Law rather than Chaos. The History Monks treat the Auditors and the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions as the same class of being, dhlangs or evil spirits, but see the Auditors as the most dangerous, at least according to Lu-Tze, who names them the "Enemies of Mind".

The Auditors have no discerning characteristics among themselves and function as a collective; when one speaks, it speaks for all of them, and each Auditor works uniformly with countless numbers of other Auditors. When discussing matters and making choices they work in groups of three. One to agree, one to disagree and one to mediate the two, thus covering all angles of possible debate to find the best solution.

In the rare cases when an Auditor appears to develop an individual personality (such as using a personal pronoun to refer to itself or experiencing an emotion) it instantly ceases to exist. To be an individual is to live, and to live is to die. This happens because, as far as the Auditors are concerned, to have a personality is to be a living being with a beginning and an end, the intervening time between which seems infinitely small to entities who have experienced eternity. This does not seem to have any impact on the rest of the Auditors except maybe as an example to be avoided, because another Auditor immediately takes the place of its vapourised colleague.

Interestingly, the primary opponent of the Auditors' plans for eliminating life is Death. Death does not see himself as the enemy of life, but rather an integral part of it, giving rest to the old and weary, and ensuring that the world doesn't become completely stuffed with life. He has also, over the millennia of performing his function, developed a certain fondness for the humans he ushers into the world beyond. However, it is thought that Death and the Auditors may be related beings. The Auditors are the executive arm of the Old High Ones, the eight beings who create and shape the universe. Death ultimately answers to the eighth of the Old High Ones, Azrael, the death of universes.