HORSEMEN

The end began with the horsemen. The giant hooves of their steeds, smashing against the potholed concrete of the High Street. We’d complained to the council about those holes for years, but there was never the money to fix them. Sure, there were arrows and circles spray-painted around them periodically, in some show of intent to do something about them, but that was as far as Town Hall would venture into a relationship with actually fulfilling their civil duty. Now it was too late to do anything. The horsemen were already here. 

War, Death, Famine, Conquest. Everywhere you looked, there was conflict. The digital age gave us access to all manner of graphic representations of the ongoing deaths. It gave individual factions the chance to sell their propaganda. It gave us all a platform to pick our sides from. Closer to home, our government used these conflicts to dip their hands into the cookie jar, going so far as to lick their fingers to dab up the remaining dregs of cash our once fairly decent country had available. The so-called upper classes got richer, the so-called working classes got poorer.

The horsemen didn’t bring chaos with them; they just revealed it. Their arrival wasn’t the beginning of the end—it was the final smash of a drummer’s mega bell, the last hurrah of a world that had already rotted from the inside out. The hooves that pounded down the High Street weren’t announcing their conquest; they were dancing on our pathetic grave.

War marched first. He wore no armour and carried no weapons, but his eyes burned with every feud, every fabricated outrage we’d been spoon-fed by the powers that thrived on dividing us all like the fucking Red Sea. He didn’t need to strike us down; we’d done that ourselves, in pub debates turned brawls, in comment sections dripping with venom, in the flags and lines we’d drawn to separate ‘us’ from ‘them.’

Death followed. A raven haired being of impossible beauty with ice grey blue eyes, she walked so quietly and smoothly she might as well have been gliding. Her steps were muffled by the heaps of bodies we’d left in her path. The pandemic was her warm-up act, a rehearsal for the grand finale. There was no sense of self-congratulatory glee as she passed; there was no need. We’d done her job for her, one hate-fuelled riot, one cut budget by a string of corrupt governments, one preventable tragedy at a time.

Famine stalked close behind, gaunt and grinning through pitch black crocodile teeth. They didn’t just represent the hunger of empty stomachs, though there were plenty of those, but also the hunger of the soul—the insatiable desire for more. More likes, more clicks, more argumentative distractions to fill the void where hope used to live. We’d fed the beast until it consumed us, bloated on greed while children watched their plates stay empty.

And then came Conquest. He didn’t ride a horse; he drove a sleek black limousine. His suit was sharp, his teeth sharper, his pockets lined with our stolen futures. He’d won without firing a shot, without breaking a sweat. The people had crowned him willingly, desperate for a saviour who only saw them as fuel for his empire.

We were the witnesses, the participants and the victims all in one sick masochistic sex game gone wrong. There were no innocents here, no escape routes left. We lit the match, handed it to the horsemen, and asked them to finish the job.

Throw us in and watch us burn.