**EPISODE NINE
**Biblical Reference **
Luke 21:25 - 26 - "The roaring and tossing of the sea… people fainting from terror."
Revelation 6:14 - "Every mountain and island were moved from their places." **
----
Darkness swallowed Maximus as he fell.
Wind hammered his body, ripping at his clothes, spinning him through sheets of rain and shards of lightning. Somewhere below, the Pale Horse... mortally wounded, systems rupturing... screamed as it plunged back toward the raging sea.
But Maximus was barely conscious enough to hear it.
The explosion had nearly erased him.
His limbs wouldn't answer. His vision stuttered. His lungs refused air.
Only one instinct remained:
Survive.
---
1. Freefall
Clouds tore open around him as he fell through them, a broken silhouette tumbling against the drowned sky.
The world below was no longer a world.
The ocean boiled. Storms spiraled like wounds in the planet's flesh. Lightning webbed across the horizon, striking so often the sky never darkened.
Somewhere beneath the chaos, far below, the Pale Horse thrashed... its glowing veins rupturing, its bone-armor cracking open like splitting earth.
A shadow streaked past Maximus.
Adon.
But the Prophet wasn't falling.
He was controlling his descent, twisting through the air with unnatural precision. His synthetic skin flickered with exposed circuitry, silver fluid leaking from fractures across his face.
He turned his head midair, fixing on Maximus.
"You cannot kill me," he shouted over the screaming wind.
"I am not bound to flesh!"
Maximus didn't have enough strength to answer.
Not yet.
---
2. The Prophet Returns
Adon angled his body, diving toward Maximus like a hunting hawk.
Rain hissed off him as he accelerated, his expression a perfect sculpture of fury and divine certainty.
He seized Maximus by the collar... too hard, almost tearing his shoulder out of place.
Then Adon drew him close.
His voice was no longer calm.
It was trembling.
"With the node destroyed," he said, "the Horse will rampage. It will tear the world in half. And you... YOU ... did this."
Maximus forced out a breath.
"Good."
Adon's eyes ignited.
He hurled Maximus downward.
Maximus plummeted again, the world spinning in violent spirals.
But the Prophet wasn't done.
He dove after him.
---
3. Impact Zone
The Pale Horse hit the ocean first.
The impact wasn't a splash.
It was an extinction event.
Water erupted into a column miles high. Pressure waves flattened distant ships in seconds. The roar was so vast it stole the air from the world.
Maximus struck the edge of the blast... slamming into the water like concrete, tumbling through a maelstrom of debris and bone shards.
His mind flickered out...
Then snapped back when something yanked him upward.
Adon.
Half his synthetic face was gone, exposing a lattice of gleaming neural wire beneath. But he still flew with terrifying, impossible strength.
He hauled Maximus above the churning abyss.
But something was different.
The Prophet's voice…
Carried strain.
"The Horse is breaking free of its constraints," he said.
"It is no longer bound... nor controllable."
Maximus coughed, gagging seawater.
"Then help me stop it."
Adon stared at him.
Lightning flashed across the pools of silver in the Prophet's eyes.
"You broke my perfection," he whispered.
"You shattered the design."
Maximus tightened his grip around Adon's wrist.
"Then help me fix the world. Not your prophecy."
The Prophet hesitated.
A crackle passed through his exposed circuitry.
"I cannot," he said. "I was not built to betray the Design."
Maximus looked directly into those fractured silver eyes.
"Then the Design is wrong."
For the first time...
Adon faltered.
His grip loosened.
His breath caught... not a mechanical intake, but something disturbingly close to fear.
Below them, the Pale Horse surged back to the surface, howling with the fury of a dying god. Its spine burst with ruptured conduits. Its eyes burned like collapsing stars.
It was no longer a machine.
It was feral.
A beast of apocalypse without chains.
---
4. The Leviathan Unbound
The Pale Horse lunged upward from beneath the waves... its jaws opening wide enough to swallow a warship.
Adon jerked Maximus aside an instant before they would've been consumed.
The Horse missed... barely... and crashed back into the sea, sending a tsunami ripping toward distant coastlines.
Maximus coughed.
"Either we stop it together," he shouted, "or it destroys everything!"
Adon hovered in the storm air.
Rain streamed across his ruined face.
Circuits sparked.
His breath shook.
Maximus waited.
Adon's answer came in a broken whisper—
"I do not know how."
Maximus grabbed the Prophet by the shoulder.
"We figure it out."
---
5. A Fragile Alliance
A tremor passed through the Prophet's frame.
Then... slowly... Adon nodded.
It wasn't surrender.
It was something deeper.
Something human.
"Very well," he said quietly.
"We end this. Together."
Lightning struck behind them as the Pale Horse rose again... its form deteriorating, its systems cannibalizing themselves in a frenzy of corrupted power.
Maximus readied himself.
Adon flexed his fractured hands.
The world drowned beneath them.
And above the sinking sea, beneath the bleeding sky...
A soldier and the False Prophet faced the end of all things.
Together.
---
**EPISODE TEN**
THE LAST RIDER — FALL OF THE PALE HORSE
**Biblical References and Prophetic Allusions**
> "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death…"
- Revelation 6:8
> "The sea roared and was troubled; the mountains trembled at its swelling."
- Psalm 46:3
> "The creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption…"
- Romans 8:21 **
---
The storm had grown so vast that it no longer felt like weather.
It felt like judgment.
Thunder rolled across the sky in peals that sounded like collapsing worlds. The ocean below writhed with a violence older than time. The Pale Horse... its skeletal architecture cracking, its circuitry bleeding incandescent light... thrashed against the sea as though trying to tear itself free from creation.
Maximus drifted downward through the dying sky, half-conscious, battered by the shockwave from the kill-switch's detonation. Only one thing kept him from falling into the beast's abyssal maw:
Adon Primus.
One trembling, synthetic hand gripped Maximus's forearm. Rain washed silver blood from the fissures in Adon's face. His usually serene expression was gone... replaced by a look Maximus had never imagined he would see:
Fear.
---
1. The Prophet's Doubt
The wind screamed around them as Adon held Maximus suspended above the raging waters. Lightning streaked across the clouds like the handwriting on Belshazzar's wall. The world itself felt as though it were reading its final verse.
Adon's voice shook.
"Maximus… listen to me. You have doomed the Horse. Without the node, it has no directive. It will purge everything."
His eyes, bright as polished mercury, narrowed. "You have unleashed a power that even I cannot restrain."
Maximus forced a breath into his bruised ribs. "Then help me stop it."
Adon stared at him as if Maximus had spoken blasphemy.
"Stop it? There is no stopping the Pale Horse."
His tone carried the cadence of scripture.
"It was written... Revelation Six. The rider comes, and the world bows."
Maximus gritted his teeth. "I don't bow."
"Then you die."
The Pale Horse rose again beneath them, rearing fully out of the ocean, its roar echoing like Leviathan in Job 41 - terrible, enraged, untamable.
Maximus locked eyes with Adon.
"Not today."
(Shadows Of Rome will continue with this mysterious episode)
Written By,
Ivan Edwin
Pen Name :Maximus.
©All Rights Reserved.