Assassination Tango Earth 9dS895WW
A skeletal figure dressed in torn black robes drifted lazily through the night sky. He sat astride a jaundiced yellow hover bike that cut through the air silently. His name was Poe, and he was the Horseman. That was the title he had taken for himself after the Invigilator had made him a destroyer of worlds. The woman whom he replaced had called herself the Shiva; it was a courtesy that the giant had permitted them to choose what to call their position. He had opted for the term Horseman on behalf of himself since he had come from a world with deep religious roots. The title, he learned later, dictated what abilities one had as an executioner of worlds. His powers had been molded to match those of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He was a bringer of death, destruction, disease, plague, and war. He was unstoppable; a force of nature, and he was now trying to save the multiverse. The Invigilator ordered worlds destroyed on nothing more than a whim. There was no rhyme or reason for what he did. Poe had destroyed enough of them to realize that there was no pattern to why he chose a world. Sometimes it felt as if the planets he was ending were simply failed high school lab experiments. He’d noticed that each dimension he entered had a creator listed most of the time. Sometimes he ran into the same name over and over again, but mostly were just one and done. This meant that the Invigilator did not create worlds, he merely disposed of them.
He supposed that some worlds deserved to be destroyed, the ones that were hybrids of humans and animals or machines. He had no problem destroying those places, as they were abominations in God’s eyes. They desecrated his sacred image, but there were other worlds where the people were Godly folks, or at the very least lived in a quiet kind of harmony. He saw no purpose for continuing to wipe those people out. They did not live like the people in Sodom or Gomorrah. Poe felt that he was a reasonable man. He was a southern Baptist, through and through, having grown up in the country of Louisiana. He carried a light Cajun accent since he had lived most of his life in New Orleans, and he was fluent in French as well as English and Spanish. He also spoke the secret language of the slaves. It was a dialect that had grown to life in the numerous slave quarters; a language that had only been spoken in whispers for fear of their owners discovering their private thoughts. After the Insurgency, as the slave revolution was better known, his people had earned their freedom and the right to speak their minds and so the secret language began to vanish like a weak scent in a hurricane, but a select few kept it alive, and used it to do their secret work.
His skin color when he was human had been dark, a deep ebony hue that nearly shone in the sunlight, which he had preferred to contrast by wearing red or white suits. That changed when he became the Horseman. His flourish of color and stylish clothing vanished with his morbid task, and he took to wearing a tattered cloak and carrying a sword, a bow, and a set of scales. He had decided against wearing a crown, as he was not so presumptuous as to consider himself royalty and only God was the one true king, but he did employ a light yellow hover bike that he used to fly from one world to another. Symbolism. One had to appreciate it. So strained was the color of his vehicle that it could barely be said to be of anything but a jaundiced canary tone, and instead often appeared as to be bone white in the proper light. Nonetheless, it was his steed, and with it he brought death wherever he went, and hell followed behind him. He had been relentless and without mercy in those early years.
His reasonability made him realize that what he was doing was wrong, and that he could no longer continue to attend his assigned duties. At first, in order to justify his actions he had envisioned each world as having violated one of the sacred commandments, but the more he continued his burden the more it became clear that he was killing off good people. They were righteous people; people who knew the Lord and followed the scriptures out of nothing but love. He had tried to rapture them, and then kill the rest, but instead of going to heaven, they all ended up back on his personal space station. He could not care for and sustain billions of people from one world, let alone a dozen or a hundred planets. Still, he tried. As resources such as something as simple as living spaces were stretched thin and more people were added to his home tensions began to increase and riots broke out. They began killing one another. In an unthinking fit of rage he had turned his powers onto his own home and killed every person there. His actions shocked and horrified him.
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He then lived as a gypsy, travelling from one world to another, waiting for the call that would send him off to destroy countless more lives. It was then that he had gotten into the habit of gathering a snow globe from each Earth that he visited. It was something his mother had done whenever she had gone somewhere new on vacation, and he kept the tradition alive.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He had been sent to a world and given a surprising order, take ten years to have the job completed. This world was to die a slow death. Given the time frame he had opted to smite the doomed domain with a pestilence that killed the plants and made the water grow more and more toxic over time.
His curiosity proved his undoing. He periodically returned to the world from time to time and watched as the civilization collapsed and the survivors of the initial outbreak began to devolve. Deviant behaviors became the norm. The people broke into tribes, and used their vehicles to chase down loners and outsiders, whom they killed for their belongings and then often cannibalized them. Children grew up feral and family meant nothing. They killed each other over canned goods. Strange cults that were abominations began to grow as people sought meaning in their lives. Finally, Poe could take it no more.
Ashamed, he reversed the apocalypse that he had started. He undid the doom that he had brought, but he could not reverse it. His powers were destructive in nature. The best he was able to do was to stop the process where it was, but that was all. He had taken God away from them. He had taken away all hope. His plague would have killed the world off in the time he’d been allotted, but he could not stand the thought of being responsible for tearing down their society to such a degree and then killing them off. This slow death he had given them was a nightmare that he could not bear to see through to the end. So he had stopped the blight and gave the humans there an opportunity to begin again. They might not have much, but they at least had a chance.
Then, he began spying on the Invigilator, being very careful to escape his notice. The being already knew about his betrayal and was seeking a new Horseman. He saw the man that he had settled on. He was named Declan Mason, and all that was left was for the Invigilator to decide which version of him he wanted to use. He had ten candidates, and Poe decided that he would kill them all. He would not allow the Alien Overlord a new harbinger of death. He would kill all the potential candidates for this man, and any others that the Invigilator might want in the future. If the Invigilator wanted worlds to die he was going to have to do it himself.
Now, Poe floated outside of the apartment of the ninth candidate. This Mason, like the others, was a self-motivated man. A millionaire by the time he was sixteen, and well on his way to becoming a billionaire by twenty. Unlike most people of wealth, he had worked hard and done his homework. Poe knew that even though it was two a.m. the man was still awake and reading reports.
He hated to kill such a man. Poe could see that he was honest in spite of being a businessman. He was also generous, having given away millions of dollars to help the homeless in his home town. He even believed in God. Poe himself, had long ago dismissed the beliefs that he had in a divine creator. He had seen universe after universe that had been made by unknown beings of power after all. It was nice to see someone who still had faith, though.
He stepped through the apartment complex’s wall like a wraith into a dimly lit room. He saw his quarry seated on a plush leather couch scrolling through a tablet. Its glow was what provided the little bit of light in the room such as it was. Mason was focused on the device, but even if he hadn’t have been he would never have heard Poe. The robed skeleton was a specter shrouded by shadows and silence. His form floated slowly and deliberately behind his quarry. A scythe slipped from behind his back and into his left hand. He raised his arm, letting it hang in the air the air for just a moment like the sword of Damacles, before bringing it down in an uninterrupted arc. The blade was so sharp that it did not make a sound as it cut through the air. It met no resistance as it cleaved through the man’s neck. He may as well have been cutting a light beam for all the opposition the body provided. Poe watched as the blood sprayed upwards like a geyser, the head rolled away from the body, and came to a stop at the armrest. The body slumped to the floor as Poe watched impassively.
He shook his skeletal head. Here was another senseless death; the death of a productive man made in the name of the Invigilator. It hurt him, but he had been washed in the blood of quintillions, what was one more murder? At least this man had died to stop the posturing dictator. He now had only one more person on his list to kill, and the Invigilator would have to find another pawn in his game of Armageddon. Then Poe would kill whomever the alien chose as well their dopplegangers.