The world was dying. Its empty oceans hissed and boiled; its bloated rivers writhed and bled. Its highest mountains crumbled, its most abundant jungles dried, and concrete cities were reduced to mounds of silver sand. Amongst the wreckage and the ruin, four riders came forth.
Not four horsemen. Translation can be hard, especially from a source over a millennium old, especially into a language not invented when it was written. It never said men, as if there would be men in charge of this. Men had created this mess in the first place.
No, 'horse-man' was the literal translation for a creature also called centaurus, polkan, kinnara, a dozen different names in a dozen different tongues. A being described as half-human, half-horse, on the misconception it had qualities of both, when in truth they were each half of its whole: a man comprising half of a centaur's majesty, rather than the inverse, an exercise in anthropocentric vanity.
To say otherwise was to see all humanoid creatures through that narrow prism, as if an angel was also half a man, rather than a man being a fraction of an angel's might, created in their image: angeloid, rather than the angel being humanoid. These creatures were part angeloid, part something else. Depictions of the devil always show him with hooves.
But there were definitely four of them. Xanthos, the yellow, consumed by a sickly wan pallor; Podargos, the swift, unnaturally thin beneath her taut black hide; Lampon, the shining, clad in armoured barding, its spikes slick with fresh blood. The three came forth together, but Deinos came fourth on her own. She was always the final visitor.
If Podargos could be described as skeletal, Deinos was something else entirely. She was the thing that skeletons were, the hollow of their ribcage, the gaping darkness of their skulls. She was the spirit of the other three, but also their absence, the end of all of them, the zero within the four. She couldn't be described at all.
"Finally," Podargos rasped, a hollow longing in her tone. She only ever breathed in. "The hour we have yearned for has arrived."
"Not a second too soon." Lampon spat every syllable through clenched teeth, releasing them in short, sharp bursts. Even her agreement was aggressive.
"I couldn't bear to wait for any more," Xanthos moaned. The others turned away from her breath, her black rotting teeth, the dark mucus dripping from her blistered lips.
" ," Deinos said, as silent as the grave. She was focused on what was to come, and what was to go: everything, nothing, and all that went between.
