Someone broke a seal.
***
Far away and away and away, down below, a man was standing at an artillery emplacement. He was not manning it. He was talking to the OTHER man standing at the artillery emplacement.
“-and that’s how the computer works,” he finished. “Now will you PLEASE go away?”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course, of course,” muttered the other man. He scratched at his long, sweaty bird and adjusted his tall, sweaty crown a hair. “So it’s like a REALLY big bow then, right? Right?”
The artilleryman sighed like his soul was being sucked out through his face.
“Oops. No more time! I thank you for your efforts, bowperson.”
And lo, he whistled to his white horse that had been standing there watching everything, hopped atop it, and rode away waving his bow overhead in excitement.
***
Someone broke a seal
***
All too close and yet distant, a man sat at a computer. He hunched too low in his chair and he tucked his elbows too close in; everything about him screamed discomfort and inside him a barely-contained rage festered and rotted like the fattest grapes on the thickest vines. Finally he sighed, stepped back, and looked at the fruits of the last fifteen minutes.
ybo shuld klil eechothar
Carefully, delicately, his finger hovered above the enter key, and just as he began to press it there was a DING and fifteen thousand more tweets filled his screen, explaining that nothing mattered and fighting anything done to anyone was pointless and everything was the same everywhere so who cared who did what.
“God-damned botfarms,” muttered the man. Outside his window his big red horse grazed untroubled in the pasture on green grass and unmown weeds. A giant sword made the breeze whistle softly around it, lodged to the hilt in a tree due to a particularly troubling troll.
“DICKS,” shouted the horseman. “Goat-begatters! Well, to hades with it all!” And he threw his computer out the window and marched to the field and jumped onto his horse and was bucked off his horse and yelled at his horse and jumped onto his horse again and rode away, fuming.
Ten minutes later he came back for the sword.
***
Someone broke a seal.
***
The man stood by the edge of the fields and watched the crops grow.
They were fat. They were fine. They were strong.
They were also being fed by irreplaceable groundwater from an aquifer that had been so overdrawn it was turning into dry gravel far underneath his feet. A thousand years of carefully-trickled rainwater undone every half-hour, gone to nourish a field of nut-trees growing ten thousand miles away from their optimum habitat.
The man scratched his beard. Beneath him his black horse snorted and leaned closer to the trees, hoping for a snack.
“So…if it’s a denarius for a quart of wheat…and the denarius is…about a hundred dollars? Maybe? …and it’s however-many nuts to the wheat grain…. And the cost of the water and the land is…”
The tiny set of scales in the man’s free hand wobbled like an arthritic drunk with inner ear damage.
“And if the aquifer isn’t being recharged because of anthro-po-geenic climate…change?”
The scales exploded, one bowl bouncing off a tree and the other very much not bouncing as it smacked into the man’s forehead.
“FUCK,” said the man, and by the time he’d pulled himself upright and finished swearing he knew the seal was broken and it was time.
“Oh thank goodness,” he muttered, as he scraped bits of scale from the ground and peeled it from his forehead. “You know,” he told his horse, “this used to be an art.”
The horse stared at him, then tried to eat the scales.
He was delayed again.
***
Someone broke a seal.
***
Death was busy, as he had been and was and would be forever. But he paid attention, and the big pale horse whose legs never stopped moving changed course for a long-awaited appointment.
***
They met up somewhere just before what passed for dawn around there. It was the closest place, and it had coffee and a gas station and some of those little overpriced bags of chips.
No grass though. The horses were properly irritated.
“Maybe we could go to Megiddo?” asked the man on the white horse. “I’m pretty sure this was all meant to go down near Megiddo.”
“They flattened it,” said the man on the red horse shortly.
“I thought they rebuilt it.”
“Oh they did. Then they flattened it again.”
“I meant after that.”
“They flattened it again after that.”
“And-”
“And again after that too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“If you two are quite finished,” said the man atop the black horse, “perhaps we could move on? I doubt Armageddon is still happening near Megiddo. There are more important places these days.”
“Armageddon is really less of a place and more of a mindset,” said Death philosophically.
“And it’s just arrived?” asked the man on the black horse.
“Oh no, it’s always been around. It just doesn’t matter much. I think some folks were expecting it a few years ago, and some a few decades back, and others centuries before that. As long as folks want it it’ll be there for them. Like a nice comfy blanket.”
“So shall we just… ride around then?” asked the man on the white horse.
“If you’d like.”
“If we’d LIKE?” demanded the man on the red horse. “We’re meant to bring forth war! And conquest!”
“And famine,” chimed in the man on the black horse.
“And famine, if that matters,” said the man on the red horse.
“Tell me, and tell me honest,” said Death, “does it seem like they need help with those sorts of things?”
There was a sad and very very honest silence.
“I didn’t think so.”
“I was trying,” muttered the man on the red horse.
“Me too!” said the man on the white horse.
“I was trying real hard.”
“Me too!”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”
“So what are we meant to do?” demanded the man on the black horse. “Just… stand here and let you go off and do all our jobs for us?”
“I haven’t done anything in a thousand years,” said Death. “It’s really just supervising these days. You can do it too.”
“What, just WATCH?”
“It’s all a bit big for a single artisan now. It’s all in the mass production. And THAT means management.”
“Management. Management. Management. Yes, I do like the sound of management.” The man on the black horse twiddled his scales around his finger. “Tell me, do they still not touch the wine and oil these days?”
“Oh yes, oh very much yes. But the oil’s a bit different than what you remember.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
“Learn?” scoffed Death. “We’re management, remember. And I’d better not see you boys rushing this one. This is their Apocalypse, we’re just living in it, and they want a nice long slow one. Take it as it comes and appreciate the view.
“Oh absolutely! You should see the size of the bows they have now.”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”