“Are you finished?” I ask wearily, nodding at my doors.

“Could you even hear me?” he responds, pushing himself off the pale stone. His arms are folded across his chest, sword glinting in the movement as it catches the light from where it rests at his hip.

“Of course I could. I was merely...occupied.”

“With the Wings?” he arches a skeptical brow, yet his voice sounds almost hopeful.

“No,” I shake my head.

Whatever hope was there dies, and his lips curl in disgust, “Of course: the kid. Who else?”

“Yes, your mutual hostility towards each other is in little doubt,” I sigh. “But I must speak with you about--”

“Tell me why, Death,” War interrupts, his hands falling to his sides. They hang there, strangely useless-looking, relaxed. They do not go for his blade, nor for anything at all. His hands brush against the sides of his legs, but they are slack.

I am not used to seeing idle hands, especially not from War. Nothing about him is idle, not even now: he hums with untapped kinetic energy. He radiates it as the sun does heat, warping the air around him in subtle waves. No human would see it, but we are not human. Not anymore.

“Why, what?”

I believe I already know, but I wish him to ask, to speak the words aloud. To slow down the rage and lust for action and blood. I ask him not to act against his very being, but to not allow himself ruled by it. As if he is no more than a slave to the title of Horseman -- of War -- than the title itself.

He is war, and yet he is not. I call it youth, but it is more than the mere passage of time -- or the lack thereof...it is a self-awareness. A knowledge of and acceptance of oneself. Only when one knows thine own self can we make the choice: the choice of what we do with ourselves, of whether we can bear ourselves, or be driven mad by them.

Perhaps this is how the madness begins: when Death cannot bring herself to end a life. And when War is the one on the side of the angels.

Sides.

How appropriate that we stand, here, on opposite ends of the great room that both divides and unites us Horsemen. The meeting place, the dividing place. In a way our own eternal twilight, though the light remains forever bright -- how harsh and cruel it feels now. I squint my eyes, as if to send some of it away. There is no place to hide here, no place to dance around or hide from difficult truths.

Could I retreat behind my doors? Yes. Will I? No.

A great divide exists between us: a chasm across which I cannot fully reach. And yet I must.

I take a step. I take another. I put one foot in front of another, silently, calmly.

“War--”

“No, Death,” he, too, begins to step forth. “No placating words, no condescension. Tell me plainly why the ever divine fuck you are doing this? Are you trying to get yourself stripped? Is this some suicidal last hurrah before you fuck off and abandon us for the Forever After?”

I am taken aback. Not that War does not understand, nor even that he does not wish to hear my answers -- or lack of them. But the he would believe Death capable of suicide. There is a deep irony there...so too is there a deep truth.

“Of course not,” I say. It is precisely the opposite: I am trying desperately to live.

“Then why?”

“I cannot give you the answers you seek.”

We are but a sword-length apart now. I wonder that neither Hyun nor Conquest have come out to watch; surely they must both be able to hear what is being said. Or perhaps not.

“The Wings told you what he is,” War goes on through gritted teeth. “You got the order straight from the General’s mouth.”

“I could not--”

"How could--can you?” War shouts, and the sound frays at my long-tested patience. “You, of all of us -- how can you go against an order from God themself--"

"Because I am not there!" I cry. It is a pathetic, frustrated sound, and I loathe it. "Every time," I lower my voice, forcing my usual calm, "that I watched Hyun, I sought the moment I would be there to shepherd him to the afterlife. But I was not. Not even the smallest of whispers -- not even the ghost of me could come anywhere close to Hyun."

War runs his hand through his hair, pulling at ends, "But Michael--"

Stolen story; please report.

"I know," I sigh. "I know...that is what frustrates you, is it not? The war you sense within me?"

"Death, I--"

"Never once in all my time have I doubted...never. I have brought other Horsemen to Gabriel before questioning anything ordered of me from that beyond what I am. And I do not, even now, believe Michael's word false, nor his cause unrighteous. My duty calls me to act, and yet I can do nothing but stay my hand. My very own title, and all that I am, works against me."

"I don't understand," War's hands tighten into white-knuckled fists.

"How could you, when I barely understand myself?" Something warm trickles down my face. I stop all thought and reach up to touch my cheek. It is hot and sticky. When I pull my fingers away I see moisture there, reflecting the white walls of the room.

Death does not cry. I do not weep, not even for myself. I do not weep for a result. How pitiful, how...almost human.

No, no tears. Nothing.

"You sent how many Horsemen to Gabriel?" War says, jaw flexing, red eyes shining bright with rage and sorrow. "How many friends?"

Do not cry for me, My War had said with the most exhausted and tragic of smiles. Horsemen do not cry -- is that not what I told you? So come, Death. Wield that beautiful scythe of yours and shepherd me to Gavri’el.

The hottest places in Hell, Conquest had sneered, are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. So go on -- be neutral and feed me to the Messenger.

How long will it be then for you? Famine cried. How long before your guilt outweighs your calm?

I will sacrifice enemies, slaughter allies alike -- I will watch the humans kill and keep killing, War had roared ferally. Never enough. It will NEVER be enough!

"All of them," I whisper. All of them. It all falls away: all the Wars, all the Conquests and Famines. And though I never knew them, I think of the Death before me sent away as well, of every fall of every Horseman past. “You should read your records--”

“I have read them--”

“All of them--”

“I’ve read enough!” War cries. “Enough to know that it is always Death who calls the Messenger--”

“And who do you believe sent the former Death to Gabriel? Do you not know who my mentor was -- have you paid no attention to what you read?” I say, barely a waver in my voice to belay the effort I make to sound calm. “Only because of him am I the highest rank and the most final of results. I accompany all Horsemen, yet all Horsemen do not accompany me. Only now does Death ride alone...for Death, too, has fallen in the past.”

A muscle flexes in War’s jaw. “And now?”

“Now, even more than the fact that I cannot be where I am not, for doing so defies what I am as a neutral result...now I also have a different purpose. While I cannot deny that a part of me is relieved to meet the end of this seeming eternity, there is a greater part of me still that now wants to live. Were I to leave Hyun on Earth and turn my back upon him, you and I both know that Michael would continue to force situations where I could be.

“Knowing this, I compromise again my neutrality, for I would favour the side of Heaven; in my silence and my inaction, I would support not humanity but those above it. And in doing this, too, I would bring the earth closer to what Michael would wish to avoid -- for do you believe that Lucifer would not act should someone come for what is his?”

I shake my head, “This is not the course I would have chosen, but in this temporary solution of removing Hyun from the Earth, while not going against what I am...I have created an impasse. I have found the one solution that solves nothing, yet goes against nothing of who and what I am.”

“You’re risking everything,” War hisses in a strangled voice. “This isn’t neutrality, this is suicide. This could cost you your title.”

“And will you be the one to call Gabriel, War?” I challenge.

War glares at me, eyes bright with something more than anger. But he sighs and lets go of everything, his body relaxing. He hangs his head, shaking it. Oh, War -- so young, so volatile. And I, so old...so very tired. I, who remain caught in the eye of this storm.

“Have faith I am that I am, and that I do not do this merely to cause problems,” I say, walking up to him to place my hand upon his shoulder. “I would avoid this potential Apocalypse more than any Horsemen, and I have no more wish to die than you.”

Such an event, after all, signals the end of humanity. And what are we without humankind? Would we not, all four of us, perish along with the rest?

“No,” War whispers, and something hot rips through my gut to my spine and out the other side. “I won’t let you destroy yourself for a fucking human.” In a flash of red he pulls out his great sword from my insides and vanishes, the scent of blood and violence in his wake.

Hyun…

Get up. Get up. Death does not fall -- Death waits for nothing.

No...the pain. War was smart: using his sword, severing through my skin, my muscle, my bone. Were he poetic, perhaps it would have been a stab to the heart. No...no that is what I was forced to use to pin my mentor -- my first War -- to the floor of the innermost sanctum. That is how he made me hold him still so that Gabriel could whisk him away unto dust. His own sword used against him. Violence had been dared within the innermost sanctum: the holiest of holy spaces, and all for the purpose of sending away the first War to rest.

He had looked so tired...and so grateful for what had been done.

Heh, how ironic that this is what is now done to me.

Get up.

The light is bright, so bright I cannot see the ceiling. Has it always been that bright? From where does that light originate, I wonder.

So many questions.

Get up.

“Death!”

Someone calls my name.

“War…” I try to say, try to call him back. He wishes to help, and yet his help would only hasten my own doom.

Hyun…

Get up. It is not yet time for us both to die.