by R. W. Holmes
The man stared back at Zinerva in bewilderment for a moment, his breathing as ragged and uncertain as his thoughts. “You're almost there” he said to her. “The room you're looking for, I mean. But you shouldn't go. There's nothing in there you want to see.”
The R'lyehan groaned as he mustered the Herculean strength required to return to his feet and stood up, before very awkwardly stepping past the others and making his escape like the other R'lyehans.
“You are full of surprises” Jacobs murmured as Zinerva stepped out next.
“Forget that” Zinerva said dismissively. “Didn't you hear the guy? We're almost there!”
And then they arrived.
They knew because the door to whatever chamber the R'lyehans were fleeing was twice the size of the others and comprised entirely of gleaming titanium. There was no retina scanner on it, but there was an extremely out of place, very old fashioned lock waiting for them.
“Anyone happen to bring a skeleton key with them?” joked Gael.
“It must be an artifact” Zinerva chimed in seriously. “Like the ones Emily told us about. I bet it can't be opened without a specific key.”
“That would make sense for a room that looks so important” Jacobs admitted worriedly. “I hate that I'm quick to believe such nonsense, though.”
“Let us skip to the most important question” Sauriel added thoughtfully. “How do we get in?”
Artemis reached out to the door and tried the handle.
It was unlocked.
“Remarkable how only the arrogantly intelligent seem to be slowed down by the possibility of a problem” he mused triumphantly. “Here's a better question: who goes first?”
Zinerva replied by hurling a fireball at the door and blasting it inward.
Inside the room was the scroll, mostly open with three of its seals broken, and three figures standing around it.
They were all more than seven feet tall, and each was clad in a suit of the most bizarre, eldritch armor any had ever witnessed. Their faces were gaunt, and looked like they were carved from soft stone such as alabaster or gypsum. Deep fractures in their 'skin' defined their features, but these looked less like the cracks found in traditional rocks, and more like what one might find in petrified wood.
The first of them was a pale white, and was considerably more gaunt than the others. Her armor was the same, and just as her face was more gaunt, she herself appeared to be a great deal thinner than the other two. Looking at her was enough to leave someone feeling hungry, and brought about feelings of ruin and despair.
The second of them was a pale, sickly green. Flies buzzed in the air around him, and every time he exhaled the air in the room grew a little more pallid. His armor, like his skin, shared the same greenish tint, and formed a visage that altogether left anyone who gazed upon him feeling unwell and queasy with trepidation.
The third of them required no introduction, because more than half of the group already knew who he was.
Because it was War.
Like the other two, he was currently holding a hand over the last seal on the scroll. A red tendril of fiery miasma streaked down at it, joined by the sickly green one coming from the green one, and a sparser, pale one coming from the white.
“Is this a bad time?” Zinerva asked in her most candid tone.
War looked up, but the other two remained focus on the task at hand.
“Out of gratefulness for making my last few days in Hell interesting, I'll warn you to turn and run” he said to Zinerva. “Take your summoner, take your friends, and get as far from this place as you can. With any luck, old age will take the humans among you before we arrive at whatever far corner of the universe humanity has managed to spread to.”
“God in Heaven! What are we witnessing!?” Jacobs cried frantically.
The last seal on the scroll broke, causing the facility to darken considerably, but when the scroll unraveled it revealed not its contents, but three more wax seals.
“Ah, I see now...” Sauriel murmured hollowly. “That is not the 'Four Seal Scroll'. It's the the 'Seven Seal Scroll'. The Scroll of Revelations. And we're currently halfway to the Apocalypse.”
A moment of silence passed as War and his fellow horsemen stared at Gael and the others curiously, before an ominous black cloud began manifesting at the wall of the chamber opposite the entrance. Black marble pillars rose up alongside it, framing a gateway to some far off, terrible part of Hell, and allowed the last of the four horsemen through.
The room, and the rest of the building immediately dropped several degrees in temperature as the only hooded horsemen exhaled a sharp, haggard laugh.
“Finally” Death rasped. “The long wait is at an end.”
“No!” Father Jacobs bellowed suddenly. “This is wrong! This is all wrong! The R'lyehans have forced this! Only the Lamb may open the seven seals!”
“Y-Yes!” Sauriel stammered. “The priest is correct! Brothers, you must stop this at once! Something is amiss!”
Death paused, as if to think, and then raised a single, bony finger towards Sauriel.
“Come forward, angel” it demanded. “Speak your piece, and I will decide if we will have it.”
Sauriel grimaced, before taking off his belt and sword and passing it to Father Jacobs.
“Should anything happen,” he said to the priest, “raise my blade. I have no doubt you are worthy to wield it.”
Father Jacobs stared back at Sauriel confusedly, left helplessly to stare on in confusion as he made his way up to Death itself and knelt down before it.
“This is a farce” said Sauriel. “The true apocalypse could never happen so abruptly. Heaven would know if the second coming were soon. The R'lyehans have cheated God's word and turned it against us!”
Death nodded, seemingly amenable to Sauriel's words, before suddenly and without warning drawing his sword and stabbing the angel with his blade.
“I know” it proclaimed with a deep, rumbling chuckle. “I helped them do it.”
A gasp escaped Sauriel as he struggled to steel himself against the wicked blade plunged straight through his chest.
“When you get back to Heaven, tell them-,” Death started.
Sauriel dove forward, directly into Death, and tackled the primordial back a few steps. With the last fading vestiges of strength he had, the angel then grabbed the scroll off of the table and hurled it back at Father Jacobs.
“RUN!” he bellowed.
Death audibly growled, its voice a mixture of snapping bones and shattering stone, before ripping its sword out of Sauriel. It raised it higher then, and a wreath of ominous black flames encompassed it.
“I'm sorry, brother” Sauriel managed. “It's too late to see me dead for good.”
Death swung its sword down, but caught only air as Sauriel shattered into a shower of faintly glowing lights and cascaded to the floor. And when Death looked up, Gael and the others had already fled with the scroll in tow.
“Famine, Pestilence, seek them out immediately” Death commanded. “War, begin marshaling the troops and take the fastest we have after those thieves while I finish the summoning. I want that scroll in my hands and Hell marching on Mars within the hour.”
Outside of the Olmstead Warehouse building, Debra was getting over her beating well, and the shell of Grim's arm had grown back. Kiki was enjoying her usual game of unnerve the passersby with her appearance, and Gael and the others had just finished running out of the maintenance stairwell screaming.
“WE HAVE TO GO!” Artemis bellowed at Kiki.
“Go where?” Kiki asked as she lazily fished out her car keys from her pocket.
Without so much as a response, she then found herself raised up into the air by Artemis, who was wasting no time in hauling her over towards the garage she'd parked at.
“And where's Sauriel?” Kiki sputtered in bewilderment.
“Sauriel has returned to heaven” Father Jacobs said shakily as he ran alongside Artemis, the belt, sword,
and scroll still in his hands. “And if we don't do something soon about this, I will be greeting him there.”
Kiki squinted at the mostly unfurled scroll Father Jacobs held from her perch atop Artemis's shoulder and frowned.
“Wait, what is happening?” Debra asked as she let Grim carry her along as well. “Did the R'lyehans set another trap?”
“No, they finished opening the scroll” said Gael. “Sort of... Listen, we're about four sevenths of the way through the end of the universe, and Sauriel just died so it would stay that way.”
“Oh shit...” Kiki murmured fearfully. “That's a Book of Revelations reference, isn't it?”
“As in, The Apocalypse?” asked Debra.
“Apocalypse and revelation are actually the same word” Zinerva chimed in smartly. “But yes, the world is ending and the four horsemen are coming after us to finish the last three seals.”
“Could we kill them?” wondered Father Jacobs. “You know, send them back to Hell?”
“You know, I'm not an expert, but I seem to have a knack for understanding what's going on with demons” said Gael. “So I'm going to go ahead and gamble that the only thing keeping the horsemen from leaving Hell were those seals, so no, we can't kill them. They'll just open a portal and come back right away.”
“Also, if Death catches us, he'll kill us for good” said Zinerva. “No Heaven, no Hell, no Fairyland or whatever alternative you've carved out for yourself, just... nothing. Oblivion. The End. Seriously, the balls on Sauriel to do what he did... If he'd died even a second slower, he wouldn't have gone back to heaven.”
“How can Death be that strong though?” asked Father Jacobs. “What makes him that way?”
“You don't know?” Artemis queried confusedly. “Funny, how the horsemen were made is common knowledge in Hell.”
“Then elaborate” Kiki said as Artemis finally arrived at her car and unceremoniously hurled her into the front seat. “Oof.”
Artemis hopped into the passenger side front seat then, and found Zinerva joining him on his shoulders as Gael, Father Jacobs, and Debra all squeezed into the back together. Grim followed up by hopping atop the back of the convertible and calmly grabbing hold of the vehicle with his bare hands.
“The Horsemen are pieces of God that don't exist” replied Artemis.
“What!?” Gael, Jacobs, Debra, Grim, and Kiki all exclaimed in unison.
“You heard me!” snapped Artemis. “Now drive! I'll explain on the-,”
The very city shook as an eruption from high up in the Olmstead building deafened the area. Only the sound of Kiki's car wheels screaming as she peeled out of the garage overcame it, at least until they turned out into the road and were nearly crushed by garbage truck-sized piece of debris.
“WHAT THE F-,” Kiki started, her words cut short as another pile of rubble landed dead ahead of them and she was forced to swerve away.
The others looked back and up, and saw to their horror that the entire Olmstead building was coming down.
“This is about to be Enterprise Island 2.0” said Gael.
“Artemis, why don't you finish telling them what we're up against...” Zinerva said as she hopped away from the baphomet spawn and over to Grim's shoulder instead.
“I'm going to make this brief” said Artemis. “I want you to imagine everything you've heard about God, and then imagine the horsemen. Famine is the epitome of ruin, whereas God is bounty. Pestilence is plague, atrophy, and decay, while God is health, enrichment, and wholeness. War is bloodlust, violence, and brute force, while God is kindness, peace, and eloquence. They say that in the oldest of times, God created the horsemen by examining himself and pulling those twisted opposites into being so that they might cancel Him out and essentially unmake the world He created.”
“It's important to add that Death is different” said Zinerva.
“Of course Death is different!” exclaimed Gael. “It's not even the opposite of anything about God, it's just the opposite of life.”
“Not exactly...” said Zinerva.
“Yes, it's much more frightening than that” said Artemis. “Like Famine, Pestilence, and War; Death does not really exist. It's an abstract created from God looking at himself.”
“Your ability to enunciate is getting so good, Artemis. I'm really proud of you” Zinerva chimed in encouragingly.
“Uh, right...” Artemis murmured awkwardly. “What I mean to say is, Death is God's death. Just as Famine, Pestilence, and War are parts of God that do not exist, Death is also a part of God that doesn't exist.”
The vehicle grew silent for a moment, or at least as silent as a vehicle could be with the sounds of a building slowly collapsing in the distance. The reality of the situation was woefully present to all of them, but it was the least spoken of the group who felt the need to say it out loud.
“They will chase us forever” said Grim. “What can we hope to do against such powerful beings? How many will die simply by being between us and them?”
“No cost is too great anymore” Father Jacobs said unexpectedly. “For us to fail is for all to die. If keeping this scroll from them until the second coming is what must be done, then I will do it.”
“I don't think any of us are going to live that long” said Kiki. “Statistically, it's probably millions of years away. You'll all be dead, the demons will have wasted away, and Grim and I will be part of The Revelry.”
“What's the-,” Artemis started.
“We don't have time for that!” exclaimed Gael. “Look! The fire in the center of the building!”
Everyone, save for Kiki, turned their gaze to a growing blaze at where the thirty-seventh floor in the Olm Industries warehouse skyscraper used to be. It seemed to be intensifying, until a fresh detonation shook the building around it and hastened the skyscraper's own demise.
“SLAM ON THE GAS!” Artemis screamed at Kiki. “EVERYONE ELSE, GET YOUR HEADS DOWN!”
Even with the several miles Kiki had speedily put between them and the skyscraper, they were all helpless to the cloud of dust and debris created by its collapse as it washed over them. Kiki cursed violently as she heard a literal storm of pebbles, both large and small, pepper her vehicle mercilessly, but it was something she'd have to worry about later. Swerving violently, she weaved through the chaos created by other drivers as they abruptly stopped their cars in an attempt to wait out the calamity.
Several cries of surprise erupted from the car as they felt themselves ascending a moment later, until they finally cleared the debris cloud and found themselves merging onto the highway.
“Kiki, I am so sorry I ever doubted your capabilities” Father Jacobs proclaimed with a nervous laugh. “You truly a wonder.”
“Yeah, that's great and all,” Zinerva called from Grim's shoulder, “but we have more problems than we thought.”
All eyes, even Kiki's this time, turned back to what remained of the skyscraper, and what they found was a pillar of flame rising up thousands of feet into the air. Flocks of something too far out to make out could be seen circling, and the other enormous buildings surrounding the remains of the Olmstead one were beginning to tilt or outright topple.
“Oh shit” said Debra. “Uh... we're being chased.”
“Huh?” Zinerva queried confusedly. “By what?”
“Look!” Debra said as she pointed directly behind them. “Those things flying around the tower, some of them are coming our way, and I don't see them flying in any other direction.”
Father Jacobs looked down at the scroll in his hands in despair. “They can sense it, can't they?” he murmured knowingly. “We truly are doomed to run from them for all eternity now.”
“That is not helping!” snapped Gael. “Just because we think there's nothing we can do about this doesn't mean it's the truth. Maybe there's a way to reseal the scroll. Maybe Jacobs could try praying, I'm sure Sauriel can get us more information now that he's where they probably made the scroll in the first place.”
“Y
-Yes” said Father Jacobs. “Of course. All of Hell is pouring into the world, someone should be praying anyway!”
Chapter 20
On A Pale Horse
The highway stretching before Kiki was still relatively sparse because she'd been one of the first out of the city. She knew this, and was glad for it, but the terrible reality of what was going to happen to every person between herself and the horsemen was weighing heavily on her mind.
“I feel like I'm going to be sick” she grumbled drearily.
“You are actually the most important person in the vehicle” said Artemis. “So don't. All of us die if you fail.”
“I am definitely going to be sick” groaned Kiki. “The world is going to end, Artemis. The universe! And everyone in it. And the difference between it happening now or later is based on my ability to drive a car.”
“You're really good at it though” Debra chimed in encouragingly. “The best, even.”
Gael stood up in his seat and took a moment to get used to feeling the wind as he scouted out the oncoming cloud of winged horrors in the distance.
“Anyone know what those things are called?” he asked.
“They're Stolas spawn” said Artemis. “Just as I am a Baphomet spawn and my form takes after Baphomet, the Stolas spawn take after Stolas. They have great eyes, and-,”
“They're like owls, but bigger” Zinerva interjected as she crept away from Grim and into the back with Father Jacobs and Gael. “Also, their legs are massive. As long as their bodies even, so four feet long, and their talons can crush a skull like it's nothing.”
“They're from Pestilence's domain” added Artemis. “And they're supposed to be extremely knowledgeable despite never coming here.”
“And they never shut up about poisons!” snapped Zinerva.
“What about other demons?” asked Jacobs. “What else can we expect?”
“That could reach us out here?” Zinerva pondered. “Maybe a bub.”
“A what?” asked Grim.
“Short for Beelzebub spawn” Zinerva clarified. “Beelzebub himself was Lord of the Flies, so really what we're worried about is Pestilence's domain. Think tall, classical, huge wings, all the good stuff. They're a lot rarer, though. I've only ever heard of them.”