//------------------------------//
// Quatuor Equites (Part One) 
// Story: The Harbingers of the Apocalypse (In Preambulis De Apocalipsi) 
// by Matthebrony 
//------------------------------//

Famine paused the moment his eyes opened, he sat there staring at the floor, still wearing the insane ear-to-ear grin that he was when he fell asleep. The first thing he noticed was pain, but that was nothing new. He had felt pain for a hundred-thousand years, he could deal with a few more minutes as long as he was awake. His head unconsciously lolled to the side, making several dozen crackling noises as the bones and ligaments reminded themselves they weren’t part of a corpse, not yet. He was a tan creature in any form, with dry, cracking skin. Living up to his title, he was so thin that you could see his ribs outlined perfectly through his chest and almost make out his organ systems jumbled up right underneath. Right now in his angelic form, his body fit that same description perfectly, with large, leathery wings and the tip of a long bone peaking through the end of the appendage. Famine had no eyes, only a spell cast upon him allowed him to still see through the dead sockets. One odd trait that lingered about him was that he was always wearing an unsettling cheshire grin. Not from joy, feeling your stomach acid slowly burn and dissolve the lining of your body was a none too pleasant experience. No, he smiled because the utter malnourishment pulled his skin so tightly across the bone, his skull’s ghoulish stature shone through his face. But this time the grin widened, and now, it was out of happiness.

Pestilence awoke with no start, he didn’t even open his eyes again, feeling no need to. He licked his lips, they were constantly dry from his sickly state. He felt a need to know where he was and begrudgingly decided to take a look around, a sticky sliding sound emanated from the glazed film of mucous over his eyeballs as his eyelids dragged across them. He took it slowly, turning only his eyes, making no effort to close the mouth that had hung open in pained sleep for thousands of years. Trying to awaken slowly, however, failed when a spasm rocked his body and he coughed violently, spraying a cloud of noxious gas from inside his intoxicated lungs. He exhaled slowly, watching the dark green smoke seep out from his putrid mouth. The horseman of plague was a deep green color, his wings had holes in several areas and were constantly covered in a sticky film. He had taken several forms previously, but they all wound up ill and disgusting all the same. Pestilence normally had a small swarm of flies and maggots crawling up and around him, trying to eat him alive as they gnawed at the dead-looking flesh. His head and body were splattered with great boils and warts, some the size of grapefruits, oozing pus and blood. Sometimes, the sickly, weakened flesh tore and stripped off, leaving the soft, vulnerably layer underneath to get infected or chewed on. Pestilence made a decision and effort to stand, his legs shook from the unfamiliar movement. After one step, he spasmed again and retched violently on the floor, bringing about the unsightly green puddle of plague and illness that always seemed to follow him around.

War woke with a jolt, snapping his body out of it’s none-too-fitful state. He stretched with a little effort, not used to movement of any kind. His limbs and mind sang and screamed with the same burning pain, but he tried to ignore it. He remembered his wings and tested them, stiff, sore, painful, same as ever. The curse put on him by the Princess apparently re-created stab wounds and sensations very well, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for him to sustain real injuries on the battlefield. War felt a viscous fluid building up in his throat, he coughed, and blood splattered the wall of his cell, smattering the stone. He had forgotten about that, a trickle of blood ran down his face and he made no attempt to wipe it up. His body, ravaged by imaginary pain, always tried to repair nonexistent wounds. He constantly coughed blood from overflow in his system, his veins pulsed and clotted often, his gums had stretched over his teeth, giving him red, fleshy bulges lining his mouth instead. War was a deep red color, with a strong and muscular figure from his constant training and combat. Despite his strong stature, he always seemed crippled from his constant “injuries”. Although fit, his body was still ravaged from very real war wounds from the brothers’s past attempt at Equestrian takeover. His wings were leathered like the first two brothers’s, but they glowed a fiery red like the rest of him and were covered in scars, burns and tattered holes from his many years of combat and violence. War violently fell to his knees and growled in hurt, one of the cutting sensations had just occurred, he hated those. The one time War never felt his pain was acting out his namesake. On the field, he could count on those pains to feed his rage, giving him an advantage over all others. Thinking of battle re-ignited the insatiable bloodlust that came with him, thinking of bloody, gored bodies lying on war-torn streets. He snapped himself out of his reverie and decided to make sure everything inside him was functioning properly, lungs, arms, wings again...War tensed up as his body was suddenly wracked with an imaginary burn. As his skin seared with the invisible injury, War found out his vocal chords worked just fine as he screamed in agony and rage.

Death awoke silently, his consciousness torn into fragments between all the bones that lay scattered across the cell as they always had been when he slept. After a few moments of spiritual recovery, Death cast a familiar spell, the skull glowed faintly and, slowly and smoothly, the bones one by one floated toward the ceiling, making a midair macabre collage of remains. They gently started connecting to the matches they fit with, clicking as they bonded and sealed with magical links. The legs soon formed, the dorsal vertebrae snapped together in midair and the ribs slid and fit in between the crags in the spinal column. The wings connected, the long, whiplike bones drifted into each other and brought themselves to the sockets on his back. Teeth positioned themselves in and clicked into the lower jaw, which wandered upwards and fit into the holsters of the upper skull. The head then connected and fused with the neck-bone below it. Death stood still in the cell, feeling no motivation to do anything, it came with the package of his curse. During his long stay, he had no company except himself, no one to talk to at all. Instead of pain, hunger or illness, Death simply felt nothing, no warmth, no cold, only a dark, unfeeling consciousness. Death often faked emotion but inside felt, well...dead, an empty apathy. The only thing he could actually care about was making sure others understood his emptiness, after all, it was only natural to die, and who should he be to argue with nature. At this point, he just barely cared enough to put himself back together. He always thought he was gifted with the worst of their curses, but could feel no self pity or annoyance when the others disagreed, you needed emotions for that.