“…Not with a Bang, but a Whimper”
The Riders
The horsemen rode out, leaving only devastation in their wake. There were four of
them, four harbingers of destruction. So few to bring so much misery.
The first was an enormous man; he stood a head and a half above his average victim.
The unfortunate would just have time to gaze up in frightful awe before the enormous
battleaxe cleaved his head from his shoulders. And as the blood came spurting out of his
victim’s neck, mixing with the rider’s own colossal mane of red hair, the rider would
laugh, a deep hearty laugh tinged with the madness of war; there was nothing the giant
liked more than a good battle.
The second rider seemed almost invisible behind his formidable comrade: he was a
wan, pale man no taller than average. Those few who did take the time for a second
glance inevitably wished they hadn’t. Green, sickly eyes, dead, peeling skin, and an
ungodly stench of death…some sights stayed with you for the rest of your life; the second
rider’s visage was one of these haunting countenances. For most, though, that wasn’t a
problem: the rider’s pale green dagger respanned a life’s measuring stick from years to
hours, and those hours were spent in agony too unimaginable for any of his victims to
dwell on the rider’s horrific appearance. For a few moments after his victim’s first felt the
bite of that terrible dagger, and realized the fate that awaited them, the rider would halt
there, savoring his victim’s screams as an artist surveys his great masterworks. But he
could not linger long; there were always more victims for his contagion to consume.
If the second rider was tiny compared to the first’s girth, the third was almost a wisp.
Nonetheless, no one would ever miss his passage: where he walked, the land itself
withered and died. Green grass turned purest black, as though charred by the fires of Hell
itself. Leaves turned to dust, water to sludge, and flowers to wilted shells. Animals fell
dead where he walked, and not even the maggots would feast on their tainted remains.
Meat he touched turned rancid; milk he approached turned sour. He brought death to the
land, and to those the land sustained.
Of the last rider, almost nothing could be seen. He shrouded himself in a cloak
blacker than the blackest night, more impenetrable than the deepest fog. What lay behind
the cloak was a mystery, even to his fellow riders. When they rode over-closely to his
black cloak, even they, immortal scourges of mankind, felt a hint of mortality. His
victims felt nothing at all. He killed without malice, without joy, without satisfaction,
without torment, without emotion. He killed not to justify his existence, like the others,
but because killing was his existence. He rode at the end of that unholy band, and
somehow his passing was infinitely more terrible, and more final, than the rest. The
others left gore or disease or wasteland behind; in his wake, there was only the void, the
end of all things.
So few, but so terrible!
The Resistance
They toppled empires, made paupers of kings, and slaughtered thousands. They
pillaged great cities and burned civilizations. They were the destroyers.
And yet, for all their terrible wrath, some escaped. The survivors rebuilt, eventually.
And they remembered. The next time the riders made their chaotic rounds, man was more
ready. The giant’s battleaxe seemed a little less fearsome, the pale green dagger’s poison
a little less virulent, the famines less harsh, and the blackness a little farther away. And so,
with each passing generation, man grew stronger.
The Betrayal of Man
Fearfully, the riders redoubled their efforts. They became more subtle, more cunning.
With promises of wealth, power, and glory, the giant lured men to his banner, sending
them to fight each other with the very weapons they had devised against him. The sickly,
pale man sent forth his plagues among the vermin of the sky and ground, a thousand
avatars of his disease. The third rider bargained with the rider’s new armies, promising
them weapons and power if they would turn away from the land. Most accepted, and man
himself razed the verdant treasures of the earth. The last rider, chillingly confident of
inevitable victory, did nothing at all; the schemes of men left no fear in his heart. And so
the four become four hundred, and then four thousand, and then four million, and their
darkness covered the Earth, consuming all that lay beneath them. Soon, the riders’ dark
gaze turned to their own, the last bastion of strength humanity had left.
The Riders Undone
Still there was resistance, but it was faltering. In man himself, the four had found their
greatest instrument of terror. They had found their greatest allies in those they were
charged to destroy.
But they erred in doing so, and grievously. The riders used greed to bend men to their
purpose, and expected greed to maintain its hold even as their aims became apparent. But
no amount of gold will drive a man to suicide.
So it came to pass that when his giant gave his men the greatest weapons of all, and
bid them turn upon each other, they did not. When the destroyer of nature bid his
followers to sacrifice their own homeland, they saw their folly. And when the pale green
dagger unleashed diseases that ravaged the enemy, the armies of the four did not
cheer…for they imagined that disease raging amongst themselves. The horsemen had
offered power for servitude, and they had given power. Too much power. When man, at
long last, saw the end the four sought, he rebelled. He cast out the giant’s bloodlust,
developed medicines to combat the dagger’s diseases, and put nature on an altar of
veneration rather than sacrifice. Three of the four horsemen were cast out of the world,
and though they rained blows against the walls man had built against them, the walls did
not falter.
As to the last? He had relied so long on his fellows, invested so long in confidence
rather than action, that when the time came, he found his aged muscles too atrophied to
act. The last rider could not stand against the tides of civilization. And so Death himself
too was cast out of the world. The four horsemen were finished, their mission a failure.
To The Victors…
And so a great age of peace came upon the realms of man. The struggles of millennia
had finally borne lasting fruit. The walls men built against the riders stood the tests of
eons; the weapons of war they had built gradually fell into disuse. War, disease, famine,
and even death itself were banished from the world. The harvests were plentiful, and the
people were of good health, and they rejoiced in their victory, and drank heavily of the
heady wine of victory. And their rejoicing did not cease, for the passage of years did not
wear their bodies, and the wellsprings of their triumph flowed eternally. Truly, the last
battles had been fought. Truly, they had found paradise on earth.
On earth, and not in heaven. For the children of man were well contented with the
place they had won, and they did not gaze out upon the stars. And they bore no more sons
nor daughters, for their numbers had filled the lands, and they perished not. And they
were content with the stability and prosperity their struggles had won, and sought nothing
more.
But though the life time of the universe may be measured in uncountable eons, it is
not truly eternal. And it came to pass, in the fullness of time, that the powers that
sustained the stars themselves waned. But man, who had long ceased to gaze upon the
stars, did not pay heed. And even as their star breathed its last, and, in a final gesture of
defiant vitality, expanded to fill the heavens, mankind paid no heed. And the fire came,
and the paradise of man was annihilated. So ended the generations of the sons of Adam.
The Horsemen Ride Again
And as man perished, so did the great barriers he had erected against the riders. A
blow from the giant’s axe felled the gates that kept them out, and the four rejoiced,
believing that they had overcome man’s walls, and they rode out once more to resume
their quest. But once they had won free of their prison, they gazed upon the wreckage of
the world, which looked much as they had left it, and they knew their folly. They saw the
supreme irony of their quest. That they, who had thought themselves man’s destroyers,
had forced upon man all his achievements. That in the end, it was not their presence in
the world that destroyed it, but their absence. That a few decades of peace and prosperity
had accomplished what all their millennia of terror had not: extinguished man’s ingenuity.
And so it came to pass that the riders claimed the Earth as their own.