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Lore[]
The road from Tenacity to Progress was a flat, barren thing, unspooling across miles and miles of cactus country from one edge of the sky to the other—but that pinched end of packed dirt in the distance never seemed to get any closer. The cowboy stared down it dutifully. He had enough water to get him to town, and enough cattle to earn his employer a tidy sum at market, all he had to do was make it there with himself and the herd in one piece. Simple enough.
If the cows saw any trace of apprehension, they did him the good grace of not acknowledging it. For that, he was grateful. Instead they walked and lowed and tried to graze despite the lifeless earth, eyes shining black and flat under the pitiless noonday sun, keeping apace with the steady hoofbeats of his mare. They were on track to make it to Progress before nightfall, and that was a boon all its own. Strange beasts had been spotted around these parts after the sun went down: hellhounds with teeth the size of a man’s forearm; unburied dead still bloated and shambling across the cracked earth; Outsiders hunting down sorry souls who bet untold riches at the casino and lost it all, only to try and run from the wages of their sin. No sir, ain’t nothing good ramblin’ in the dark chill of the desert night.
Apparently the cowboy wasn’t alone in traveling under the protection of daylight. It was just a speck, at first, moving slow as the sun in the sky, but there—a dark shadow crowned with a wide-brimmed hat on the road ahead. The cowboy hadn’t expected to see anybody until he got to where it forked north to Fort Nox. There weren't many folks left who used this particular old trail, and weren’t many who still lived out in a run-down two-street like Tenacity, neither, so the question remained.
From this distance, he could spy the hem of the stranger’s jacket dragging through the dirt behind him, the man hunched over and hiding in the shadow of his own hat as though the sun had insulted him personally. His course did not change, his speed did not quicken, and so the herd and the cowboy caught up to the stranger, step by step.
The horse stopped first. Her ears flattened against her neck, breath huffing out in agitated gusts as she shifted uneasily beneath the saddle. Any breeze drifting along the road died promptly, like a town shuttering itself against some fearful creature slouching in from parts unknown.
The cowboy offered a simple greeting, voice hoarse from dust and disuse, “Howdy, friend.”
Without so much as a response, the stranger collapsed onto the barren earth.
“Whoa there—” In one swift movement the cowboy swung down from the saddle, landing and hefting the stranger into his arms so he wasn’t lying face down in the dirt. The fella was lighter than the cowboy thought he’d be, as if beneath the coat he had bird bones, hollow and wanting. Smoke and copper and heat lingered on his scent.
The stranger muttered something, coughing while his cracked lips moved as if in prayer or possession, barely a whisper. “Water...”
“Oh! Of course,” The cowboy reached for the canteen on his hip, knowing it was half empty already but haunted by childhood stories—tales of travelers who didn’t help wandering strangers on the road, how they were punished for it when those wandering strangers turned out to be spirits or witches or some such. This particular stranger felt real enough. He accepted the offer of the canteen gratefully, downing swallows that parched the cowboy’s throat, but a decision had been made; no changing his mind now.
The stranger wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, now as bone dry as the canteen in his hand. As if lifted of some fell curse, golden-brown eyes ringed with exhaustion finally rose to meet their erstwhile savior from under the brim of that wide leather hat. He couldn’t have been much older than the cowboy himself, but whatever trials of the desert this man had survived rendered him haggard: skin sallow, pale hair stuck to his sweat-soaked brow—and yet there was something unearthly about him, beautiful in a way that evoked an animal fear deep in the cowboy’s gut. Beautiful like a wildfire. Beautiful like a well-polished knife.
“Much obliged,“ the stranger managed through a weak smile, handing the canteen back to him. “I am in your debt.”
The cowboy, suddenly realizing that staring was impolite, swallowed the lump that had appeared in his throat. “Ain’t no trouble. Are you alright?”
As if to make a point, the stranger rose to his feet, only to double over in a fit of coughing despite himself. It was little more than a reflex for the cowboy to stand and steady the man, holding his arm and gentling his shuddering back. Funny, that the shoulder under his palm prickled as his fingers wrapped around it. Curiosity was a deadly entertainment, particularly with a man such as this, but it reared its head in spite of any propriety the cowboy could muster.
He released his hold on the stranger’s arm, catching the faintest glimpse of something white and downy beneath the close-kept shadows of his coat. Feathers. When the cowboy looked up, he found the other man staring back.
“I’m fine,” the stranger answered, setting his jaw against something unnamed and unspoken between his teeth. He watched him now, gaze bright beneath the shade of his hat. “Don’t mean to impose, but where you headed?”
“Progress,” the cowboy answered.
The stranger thought for a moment, eyes pitting through him with no trouble at all. “That’s in an amenable direction, and travel is more pleasant with company. May I join you?”
And so they walked.
The stranger didn’t stumble again, carrying on his slow gait alongside the uneasy plodding pace of the cowboy’s mare. He stepped light, this wandering stranger, footfalls unvoiced and unimpeded by rock or scrub or the memento mori of dried-out bones that littered the trail. Their mutual quiet swam with the midday heat along the horizon.
“Why’re you headed to Progress, if you don’t mind me askin’?” he offered by way of conversation.
“To catch a train,” the stranger replied simply, as if there was no more explanation to give. The cowboy nodded.
Silence was everyone’s closest friend and bitterest enemy on the road—safe in its reassurance that danger ain’t near, but potent in its foreboding. A promise that whatever’s out to get you ain’t here... yet. The cows knew this, and they watched with a prey’s patience, a single living thing with a hundred eyes all fixed on the stranger in the wide-brimmed hat.
“I’d like to repay your kindness,” the stranger broke that sacred silence, squinting into the horizon. “Don’t much care for being in debt.”
The cowboy looked down at him, a smile summoned to his face not by any gladness in his heart but by the demands of gentility. “Naw, don’t worry ‘bout it none. Just aidin’ a fellow traveler.”
“You’re too kind,” the stranger said, an observation, not a pleasantry. “I must insist. I cannot let such generosity go unanswered.”
The manner of those words struck the cowboy as strange, and that deadly entertainment called curiosity circled around once more. The sweat that trickled down the back of his neck was cold as ice as he asked against his better judgment, “What did you have in mind?”
The stranger shrugged, easy-as-you-please. “How about an old tale of the West? One I reckon you might not’ve heard.”
Despite the dead wind and fierce heat, gooseflesh rose on the cowboy’s skin. “I couldn’t possibly trouble you for that—”
“Consider it a payment,” the stranger replied, a familiar forlorn tug tucked into the upturn of his smile.
It was a pitying thing to the cowboy’s eyes, the same regretful sigh his father had made, leading prize cattle out to slaughter when the crops rotted in the field and there was nothing anyone could do to save them.
The cowboy’s throat closed around something shaped like anticipation as the stranger began his tale.
No one knows who prophesied this one, since the real prophets were killed for their truths long ago, and any who profess the same nowadays are selling snake oil. But this is a real one, from the age before the fall of Heaven. Back when a fella felt the joy of corruption and the sting of sanctity, because each of those meant something when they had the other. Now, everything out here is profane—but I digress.
There is a beginning of all things, and there is an end of all things. Ain’t no stopping the beginning, since it’s already done and begun. Ain’t no way to stop that we are here, that we have been here, and that we done the land wrong. But the ending... Well. It is said that the end of all things will be upon us after the fall of Heaven’s gates, when Hell and man have bled the land dry, and rendered us all unto a final judgment.
The flows of life and death will become commerce, taken in by misers of industry and churned on machines of smoke and brimstone. I reckon this is already in motion, if you heard tell of the Sulfur Rail and its 
mechanical devil-king.
Tidings of the end-times will arrive on the backs of five Harbingers, heralds from all corners of the earth.
From the South: The 
First Harbinger rides an ivory steed, conquering all in her wake. Any who stand in her way shall kneel, or burn.
From the West: The 
Second Harbinger leaves the land of Angels, delivering retribution upon those who slaughtered the innocent and damned the holy. Forged in love, broken in death, tempered in vengeance.
From the North: The 
Third Harbinger is one with shadow and smoke, balancing the bloody ledgers of sin on the edge of her knife. She is Our Lady of Restitution.
From the East: The 
Fourth Harbinger travels through the deep waters of the world, his appetite for all things unsated and unstoppable. He’ll consume everything until there ain’t nothing left to consume.
From Above, So Below: The 
final harbinger walks with death at his side, a specter sowing decay with every step. He harvests the living crop of man, reaping souls to carry beyond the bounds of Heaven and Hell and into an Unknown Country.
These five will ride together. They will topple the wicked who reap the bounty of imbalance, lay low devils and behemoths of steel, strike down the King of the Sulfur Rail himself.
The balance of the West is shifting. The coming of the
clockwork angel and the 
gunslinger’s revival were just the beginning—now the Harbingers are here to end what they started. Some say their arrival is what beckons the storm of chaos to wash the West clean of all its mired sins. Some say they will punish the wicked and usher in a new age of man. Most think they’re simply here to raze us all and be done with it—
The stranger swayed, throat catching and coughing once more, and in the span of a panicked heartbeat the cowboy leapt down from the saddle to try and catch the stranger before he could fall again. This close he could see the forlorn furrow on the stranger’s brow, how he met the cowboy’s eyes with an exhaustion that ran marrow-deep.
“What do you think?” the cowboy asked. “About the Harbingers? What’re they gonna do?”
The stranger pondered this with a mirthless chuckle, voice rasping. He summoned up the thing in his throat and spit it to the ground: a clump of wet, bloody white feathers.
In a voice thick as coal smoke, the stranger rumbled, “I think we are all livin’ on borrowed time, hoss, and the powers that be ain’t keen on lettin’ us sinners remain in debt.”
He stood slowly, stepping away from the cowboy’s support and rising to his full height. The cowboy hadn’t noticed that one of the stranger’s hands was hidden beneath his sleeve, but as it emerged he could see fingers sharpened to points in some unholy claw—black as burning pitch and red as hellfire, reaching up to scrape off his battered coat and bandanna and drop them to the ground as a rattlesnake might, shedding its skin. Where half the stranger’s body roiled with darkness even under the light of day, his left shoulder erupted into white feathers, spread like an infection down his arm and across his chest and ending in a crackling hiss where they met the shadows on his skin between the parted collar of his shirt.
The cowboy couldn’t imagine how he ever thought this stranger was a man. He heard the stamp of his mare’s hooves behind him, the way she snorted and whinnied and rolled the whites of her eyes in fear at the thing that stood before them, so close that either one could reach out and touch the other. The cowboy could run. He should run, every fiber of his being screaming at him to turn tail and take his horse and tear through the desert in any direction that was away from here—but his knees trembled, his hands quaked, and the burning gaze from beneath the brim of that hat fixed him in place.
A train whistled in the distance, and somewhere in the back of the cowboy’s mind he registered that as strange, since they were miles from the nearest railroad. A shame that would be his final thought, but then again, the West don’t care one whit for the dignity of men. The stranger conjured a blade on his clawed wrist, stepped closer, closer—and only then, as he wiped away a tear rolling down the cowboy’s cheek with that heavenly hand, did he slip the hellish knife between his ribs.
“Much obliged,” the stranger murmured into his ear as the knife slid out of his body, as his body slid onto the ground, and as the cowboy’s soul slid out of both—collapsing to the dirt.
The earth rumbled in the distance.
Had this been five, ten years ago, looking down at a body wouldn’t have meant nothin’ to the stranger. He wouldn’t have felt a damn thing, wouldn’t have stopped to think on it, wouldn’t even have left a body behind at the height of his power when his form was more shadow than man, and he was free to slake his bloodlust as he pleased—but it wasn’t five or ten years ago. Now he gazed at the wreckage of it all: the blood on his blade, the thin death rattle of the cowboy’s breath as his chest stilled, the horse galloping away for safer pastures that withered long ago. Damn the angels, damn their consciences.
He reached down to help up the wayward soul, reduced to a blank-eyed shade of a man, and rested a hand upon his shoulder. Where once was fear and curiosity and kindness, now there was nothing at all, staring into the unseen distance between life and death as if there were an answer on the horizon if only he looked hard enough. Do the dead see something in the world the rest of them miss? They seem so intent on nothing.
Well, they’d all find out soon enough.
The earth shook beneath the stranger’s feet. The train whistled again, a scream into empty air like a thousand bellowing vultures scenting death on the wind, that roiling rumble deeper than thunder in its wake. It grew louder, and louder, and louder still, until the bowels of the cracked desert earth split asunder and from the chasm rose the stench of smoke, the screech of metal on tracks, and finally, the Sulfur Rail itself.
It was a beast of cinders and fire, ash and coal, a titan of steel machinery that dwarfed men and monsters with a grandiosity only outdone by the conductor of the train himself. The sight of it was enough to drive any sane mortal mad. The train’s hulking form cast a noonday shadow, blocking out a corner of the sun. A railroad formed up beneath it as the wheels churned and slowed and eventually came to a shuddering, seething stop.
Steam greeted them as the doors hissed open. The stranger stepped onto the train, guiding the soul of the cowboy over to the devil serving as the ticket taker. The devil nodded at the exchange. This fare would do.
A foreign pang shuddered under his ribs as the soul shuffled toward the other passengers huddled in the next car over: rail barons and beggars, gentlemen and gunslingers, cowboys and angels, all riding the same sorry train to Hell. The stranger grimaced and turned back to the ticket taker as the doors shut behind him.
“Tell your boss 
Talon’s here, and I want to talk. The Harbingers are gathering.”
The ticket taker blanched and scurried off, leaving him alone in the stagnant air of the train as it idled on the track, an impatient machine. The train’s conductor was a particular man, with lavish tastes and an uncompromising will—every window was filigreed in sterling silver, every curtain draped in precious velvet. The Sulfur Rail was an expensive ticket in all regards.
Out of the corner of his eye, Talon caught sight of someone watching him from the doorway of the next car. He could feel his jaw tighten under his teeth.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” he growled, but the cowboy’s soul didn’t move. Anger simmered in his heart, impotent and helpless, a reminder that he never had one to begin with and was worse off for the addition of it. He stalked over to the soul, staring him down as he had done when the fella was alive, but now he didn’t waver at the fire burning in Talon’s eyes. Indifferent. “Do you want me to apologize?”
The soul just kept on staring.
“Do you want me to say something?”
The soul just kept on staring.
“I’m sorry! There. You happy?”
The soul just kept on staring.
Talon spat, reaching to grip the shadow of the cowboy’s neck—
Then the soul lifted a hand to Talon’s cheek and wiped away a tear from the space beneath his eye.
He’d never wanted to weep before—a pitiful act, the sanctimonious mourning of angels and men for lost lives that had never been theirs to begin with—but all the rain that never touched the desert fell inside his chest, a storm unstoppable, threatening to water the West in tears and drown him where he stood.
Talon tore himself away, cast his gaze out the window at what he had left behind: the lonely road to Progress, an empty canteen, the blank stare of a body that once was a man, and a herd of dead-eyed cattle stepping over the corpse of their shepherd as they grazed the barren ground, searching for something green among a mess of dead white feathers smudged with blood and brimstone.
Maybe they all deserved what was coming.