Jun 17
Four Horses, details from a 17th Century Persian manuscript.
Musée Guimet. Miniatura mogol con cuatro caballos.
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Four Horses, details from a 17th Century Persian manuscript.
Musée Guimet. Miniatura mogol con cuatro caballos.
“Don’t look for a form of practice which makes things easy. Actually you want to look for a form of practice, not necessarily which makes things harder—that’s not so productive—but brings you in touch with where you are most confused.”
Ken McLeod - Four Horses
[Alive On All Channels]
The apocalypse is neigh, four horses roll up and they are just regular horses but MAN are they wreaking havoc
the four horsemen of the apocalypse but the horses all throw their riders and fuck off together whinnying happily because enough's enough
Tous les jours au bord de l’Apocalypse https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/tous-les-jours-au-bord-de-lapocalypse-55682e425fc4
Il y aura toujours la promesse d'une apocalypse pour demain ou pour dimanche. Si ce n'est dimanche ce sera Pâques, Noël ou la Trinité. Cette apocalypse dont nous parlons tous est entièrement contenue dans nos esprits, nos boîtes crâniennes & elle a nom "abortion", "mariage homosexuel", "Ukraine" ou même "populisme".
Éditions La Dondaine 2022
4 HORSES
Scalpel Sword
Retribution was uncanny. Even when his nature was hidden under the veneer of the quiet doctor he was before he died, and how he sometimes still played a,t when he missed his own kind.
General Anderson still didn’t know what to make of him.
Where the Horsemen made sense, and even Frenzy, who was once Bruk and his best friend since basic training, could be rationalized, Retribution left him cold.
“This won’t hurt,” Retribution said mildly, even as he slipped a syringe into Anderson’s arm, the lightest touch of all the doctors on base. “But breathe through your nose a moment.”
Anderson did, although the place where the needle was only felt the slightest bit cold. “What is that?”
“A vaccine. We synthesized it from Pestilence recently. It should offer some protection form the alien’s bioweapons.”
“How? We’ve never been able to…”
“I can’t die, General, and I studied epidemics in medical school. I took samples, and the rest of the medical community worked with me through video calls.”
Clever. The kind of clever that was keeping them the slightest bit ahead in this war. The one reason the aliens, who outnumbered them by millions, still hadn’t won.
The Horsemen were an advantage, but it was Humanity’s stubborn refusal to go down without a fight that kept them standing.
And now tow of their own had chosen to swear to humanity’s Doom just to keep them fighting a little bit longer.
Sometimes, it the darkest part of the night, when alien scouts screamed over the base too fast to hit, Anderson considered doing the same. War would take him, if he asked. They told him so.
Death wouldn’t. She had Retribution and didn’t want any others.
“Thank you,” Anderson said, and took the cotton ball Retribution handed him, surprised the doctor no longer wore gloves. “I have a stupid question for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“You used to wear gloves.”
He knew Isaac, before Isaac turned into Retribution. Isaac had saved his life twice, and hundreds more besides. He had always been a stickler for protocol, and his blue gloves were the kind of standard that was a comfort.
Retribution chuckled, not quite amused. He held up a hand, a careful distance from Anderson, and moon-pale mist washed over his skin.
“Why bother?” he asked dryly when the mist faded. “I am Sworn to Death. I can’t get sick myself, I can’t carry any disease or infection, and I can sanitize my own skin.”
“Does that work on bacteria?”
“It works on anything that can die.”
“Poison?”
“I do still wash my hands, General, but no. It doesn’t work on poison. I use gloves like every other doctor for that kind of work.”
“I have a rude question this time.”
“I don’t mind. Although I do have two more injections for you.”
“That’s okay.”
Anderson waited until the second injection was done and Retribution was prepping the third. “How are you still a doctor?”
Retribution stilled for a moment, and then tapped bubbles out of the syringe carefully before he replied.
“It was my reason,” he explained as he gave Anderson the shot with hands that were surgeon-steady. “My reason for Swearing to Death. I was sick. Stage four cancer in my lungs, kidneys, and bones, heading for my brain. We can’t afford to lose a surgeon these days. There aren’t enough of us to go around as it is.”
“We’[re working to get a school going. It won’t be like the old days, but it might get us to limping.”
“I know. I’ve already volunteered to teach.”
“You can do that? Doesn’t She mind?”
Retribution chuckled, and threw away the syringe before digging in his pockets. To Anderson’s surprise, he produced an old-style lollipop.
“I keep them for the children, and the soldiers who need enough sugar to stomach real food,” he explained, and proffered it to Anderson, who took it on reflex. “And no, She doesn’t mind. She likes that we fight her.”
“That’s weird.”
“She is a primordial being of literal death. Weird doesn’t even scratch the surface.”
“Okay, fair. But really, how are you still a doctor?”
Retribution handed Anderson his shirt and watched clinically as he got dressed again. His mist lingered in the corners of the room and Anderson stayed well away from it.
“Because until the day I walk beside Death’s Pale Horse, I will fight her,” he said at last, and held out a hand when a tiny songbird winged in through his open window. The bird landed fearlessly on his hand. He petted its tiny head with a single finger “I wouldn’t be much of a human if I didn’t go down swinging.”
“And you’re still… human?”
“Until my dying day,” Retribution chuckled like he knew a secret, and there was a strange glimmer in his eyes. “You have a war meeting in ten minutes, General, and I have four hundred vaccines to give out today.”
It was a dismissal, and Anderson, the most senior of all Humanity’s generals, left without a word.
But somehow, for reasons he couldn’t understand, he was comforted.
Retribution was a doctor.
There was strength in the hands of a man who chose a scalpel over a sword.
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Four Horses
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were supposed to destroy Humanity. But well, aliens showed up, and it turns out that the Four are territorial enough to fight for the people they will someday wipe from the planet.
Four Horsemen
Horsemen Four
Mercy Mercy Mercy
To Save a Bird
Together Time
Unleashed Doom (Patreon Only!)
Crescent Moon
Retribution Born (Free on Patreon!)
Two Sworn (Free on Patreon!)
The Storm Rolls In (Subscriber Only!)
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MORE STORIES!
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Haunted with four horsemen.
“I can see ghosts now,” Isaac said to Mercy, his eyes on a child who wandered down the hallway. “But they don’t speak.”
“They are not souls,” mercy told him, and glimmered between most and skull-face for a moment. “They are echoes, nothing more. Their true selves have already passed onward.”