• The Oracle, a man thought a woman is called,
    Removes his dragon-bone mask and smiles
    Because today is the day of fruition
    Of all his scheming, dastardly wiles.


    THE WORLD WAS QUICK to assume Eydard was a woman, quick to call him The Oracle and quicker still to seek out his counsel. Eydard was, in fact, a man, and while he was a Seer, a prophesier, a foreteller of the future, he was not The Oracle, and his counsel, even in the beginning, was always willfully deceitful.

    But the world was composed of fools and idiots who danced to the tune of futile ambtions, full of crafty politicians who proposed grandiloquently empty programs and pointed accusatory fingers. The world was teeming with immoral heretics condemning religious bigots, was seething with crime and violence, with murderers and rapists and thieves. The world bred vicious animals and threw them onto a cruel stage created by men, forced them into a play of life where money spoke louder than anything else, play of life that was despairingly accurate but at the same time was a cruel mockery of what life once was. Morality was dead and gone – if it had ever existed. Chivalry was myth, old wives’ tales remembered by few and believed by even fewer. Everyone hated each other and everyone turned to The Oracle they had all but elected into her (his) position for support against one another.

    The Oracle appointed by the Heavens had, in actuality, sat in her home, condemned insane and disregarded like lovely Cassandra. Her Sight revealed only a crepuscular blankness, blocked by the imminent Armageddon so instead of searching for Truth she waited patiently, meekly, until her world was ended by her husband’s jealous whore.

    And with her death, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse blurred and meshed and melded into one person, one person who was assumed a woman so he could be assumed The Oracle as well, one person who referred to himself as the Condemner, the Escort. He was separately and at once the conqueror on his white mount, the warlord on his red, Famine with his scales on the black and Death astride the pale green. His sole purpose, his drive, his ambition was to Condemn the corrupted, irredeemable world and Escort it to its grand finale as blood that was thicker than water but also ran frequently and freely in small rivulets congealed and darkened.

    He prophesized the End,
    And so chose the Heroes,
    Those with the power to defend.


    IT HAD BEEN VERY EASY to find the Seven, the Seven the Heavens had cursed and blessed and charged with the responsibility of carrying the fate of the world on their shoulders, who were given the gifts to combat Hell’s ever present Seven. It had been very easy to find the Seven and watch them die ignoble, unnatural deaths at the hands of their counterparts, and easier still to choose seven other ambitious, arrogant idiots and paint them and parade them before the world before sending them to their deaths, which were just as pathetic as their lives.

    Because seven ordinary men and women could not teach the world morality and could not cure mankind of its vices; by the time The Oracle’s seven had entered the world the Heavens’ Seven were dead and buried because the world did not deserve redemption, not when blood that was thicker than water still ran frequently and freely in small rivulets congealed and darkened.

    And the Seven die one by one
    Consumed by the endless sins
    Of the Prodigal Son,
    Who’s reviled by The Oracle