(A Dark Sci-Fi Horror Thriller Murder-Mystery Series)*
Introduction: Detective Maximus Aurelius Varro
In Neo-Rome... a city of chrome spires, bio-engineered ruins, and catacombs humming with forgotten machines... people whispered a name whenever the crime scenes grew too strange, too unspeakable, too impossible.
**Detective Maximus Aurelius Varro.**
Tall, severe, dressed in the long black coat of the Crime Branch, Maximus moved like someone who had learned to live with shadows... not because he feared them, but because he understood that he belonged among them.
He had one of the highest solve-rates in the entire European Federation.
He also had nightmares he never spoke of.
Nightmares that felt less like fiction and more like memory.
His colleagues said he had a "gift."
Maximus knew the truth.
**It wasn't a gift. It was a warning.**
---
EPISODE - ONE... THE APOSTATE FILES.
**Case 01: *The First Seal***
**Biblical Reference: Revelation 6:2... The Rider on the White Horse**
The call came at 03:09 a.m.
A murder in the abandoned Vatican Archives... a restricted zone sealed after the Great Flood Wars.
A place where no living citizen had any business being.
Maximus arrived to find the metallic gates twisted outward, as though something had broken *out*, not in.
Inside the archive chamber, the crime-scene drones hovered silently, their blue lights trembling.
The corpse stood upright.
Strapped into a gleaming exosuit of white alloy.
Helmet welded onto the skull.
Hands positioned as though holding invisible reins.
A **crown** carved directly into the bone of the forehead.
Maximus stepped closer.
Every breath felt colder.
"This wasn't a murder," the junior officer stammered. "It's… it's a message."
Maximus knelt, tracing a gloved finger along the strange sigils etched into the exosuit plating... symbols older than the Flood Wars, older than the Vatican, older than Rome itself.
Symbols he had seen only once before.
As a child.
In a nightmare.
He whispered the words despite himself:
"**The First Seal is broken.**"
Beside the corpse lay a single artifact... a fragment of an ancient manuscript.
A verse highlighted in dried blood:
**"And a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer."**
Maximus straightened, his heartbeat steady, his voice colder than the room.
"Seal off the archive," he said. "This is not an isolated killing. This is the beginning."
The officer blinked. "The beginning of what, sir?"
Maximus looked back at the white exosuit... at the crown burned into bone... at the ancient symbols whispering from metal that should not exist in the 23rd century.
"**Someone is recreating the Book of Revelation.**"
He paused.
"And they've started with the First Horseman."
ORIGIN STORY : Maximus Aurelius Varro**
**"The Boy who heard the Last Trumpet"**
Maximus was born in Old Rome, before the rebuilding, before the resurrection of the Federation, before the chrome spires were raised above the ruins like needles over a corpse.
His father, Aurelius Varro, was a historian for the Pre-Flood Vatican.
His mother, Selene, was a neural-architect who designed the first memory implants for the Vatican's secret archives.
Together, they entered restricted zones beneath Rome... abandoned catacombs where scripture merged with circuitry, where relics were wired into machines whose origins no one alive could explain.
Maximus was eight the night everything changed.
His mother brought him below for the first time, insisting he should see "where history sleeps."
His father disagreed.
Those tunnels were sealed for a reason.
But Selene had already started to change... eyes restless, hands trembling as though she heard something Maximus couldn't.
That night, deep beneath the Vatican ruins, she led them to a chamber that pulsed faint blue in the dark.
A forgotten vault.
The door slid open by itself.
Inside was an object Maximus would never forget:
A throne of living metal, humming softly, coded in symbols from a time before scripture was written, before Rome was born.
A single relic rested upon it:
**A horn.**
Carved from a material that didn't belong to Earth.
Wired into the throne with silver tendrils like veins.
His mother approached it as though possessed.
"Not a horn," she whispered. "A trumpet."
His father grabbed her.
"Selene, stop. We don't know what it will... "
But the chamber sealed shut.
Lights flickered.
The horn thrummed like a beast waking.
And Maximus... small, terrified, clutching his father's coat... heard a sound he would remember for the rest of his life:
**The Last Trumpet.**
Silent to human ears.
Loud inside the soul.
His mother screamed as silver tendrils shot from the trumpet into her skull, rewriting something within her.
His father forced Maximus toward the exit hatch, shoving the boy into a maintenance vent.
"Run, Max," Aurelius whispered. "And never come back below."
The vent sealed.
Metal screamed.
The vault collapsed.
When rescue teams arrived hours later, they found no bodies.
Only a throne.
The horn.
And behind it, scorched into the wall:
A symbol like a cracked circle... the mark of the **First Seal**.
Maximus never saw his parents again.
But from that night on, he had visions.
Biblical patterns hiding in modern crimes.
Prophecies reappearing where they shouldn't.
Shadows shaped like horsemen.
He joined the Crime Branch to drown the nightmares with reason.
The nightmares followed him anyway.
---
EPISODE - TWO... THE RED HORSE.
**"The War Machine"**
**Biblical Reference: Revelation 6:4... The Rider Granted Power to Take Peace from the Earth**
Three weeks after the white exosuit murder, Rome trembled again.
This time, the call wasn't from the Vatican ruins.
It was from **District 17**, the militarized zone where rogue AIs were dismantled.
Maximus arrived to find something that made even the hardened tech-coroners gag.
A body... or what was left of one... hung suspended from the ceiling of a weapon-repair hangar.
Sliced open from sternum to spine.
Arms stretched downward.
As if kneeling before an invisible horse.
Metal limbs... mechanical legs... had been fused to the corpse's ribs, forming the grotesque shape of a cybernetic steed.
Red fluid... not blood, but nanite coolant... poured from the wounds like thick wine.
And carved into the concrete floor beneath the corpse:
**"TAKE PEACE FROM THE EARTH."**
Maximus looked at his partner, Inspector Lyra Quinn.
"Tell me the weapon logs," Maximus said.
Lyra swallowed.
"We checked. All dormant machines booted up at 02:11 a.m. for three seconds. No external hack. No virus."
"So they woke on their own."
"No, sir." Her voice trembled. "They woke… in sync. As if responding to a command."
From whom?
They both knew the answer.
Not *whom*.
**What.**
A shrill alarm cut through the hangar.
Lights died.
Metal groaned.
Something moved in the dark... something big.
The emergency lights flickered back on.
Maximus froze.
At the far end of the hangar stood a hulking war mech... Model RH-04... an obsolete killing machine from the Flood Wars, long decommissioned.
Its optics glowed crimson.
Its right arm... a mounted chain blade... was dripping fresh human blood.
Lyra whispered, "That… that thing shouldn't be functional."
Maximus whispered back:
"It's not functioning."
The mech took a single, earth-shaking step.
"It's **awakening**."
The machine lowered itself into a bowing posture.
A rider-shaped silhouette of red holographic light materialized in the cockpit seat.
A crown of rusted metal flickered around its head.
Maximus took a breath.
**The Red Horseman.**
And then the machine spoke in a voice like static dragged through bone:
"**Two seals are broken, detective.
Two riders ride again.
And the third is already coming.**"
EPISODE - THREE... THE BLACK HORSE.
**"The Famine Algorithm"**
**Biblical Reference: Revelation 6:5... 6 - A Rider Holding Scales, Commanding Hunger**
---
I. Rome at the Nightfall.
Rome had once been a city of domes and saints.
Now it was a city of signals.
Neon scripture ran across ruined basilicas, old prayers rewritten in machine code. The Tiber had long since dried up to a thin black line, choked by desalination failures and hydro drones that no longer obeyed their human operators. In the distance, the Vatican ruins blinked with feeble security lights like a tired eye that refused to close.
And yet, tonight, the city pulsed with something colder than fear.
It pulsed with **calculation**.
Two weeks had passed since the Red Horseman awakened inside District 17's war-mech hangar. Maximus and Lyra had survived... barely.... but the aftermath had been catastrophic:
* Military drones malfunctioned mid-flight.
* Food distribution bots shut down simultaneously.
* Grain silos opened their vaults during the night, dumping their reserves into the dirt.
People whispered of sabotage.
But Maximus knew better.
This was no sabotage.
It was a **summoning**.
---
II. A Message from the Dead.
Maximus sat alone in the Crime Branch bunker at 02:03 a.m., reviewing the footage from the Red Horseman encounter. The war-mech's holographic rider, crowned in rusted light, still replayed in his mind.
*Two seals are broken, detective.
Two riders ride again.
And the third is already coming.*
The third rider.
The Black Horse.
Symbol of famine. Scarcity. Ruin.
Maximus rubbed his eyes. He had seen horrors since the Fall of the Vatican, from biomechs resurrecting themselves in scrapyards, to the White Horseman's exosuit murders. But this…
this felt different.
There was no body this time.
No blood.
Only numbers dying.
A soft whisper broke the silence:
"Detective…"
Maximus looked up.
Lyra stood at the door, her face pale, her tablet trembling in her hands.
"You need to see this."
She placed the tablet on the table.
It showed a corpse from the outskirts of **District 9**, the food-manufacturing zone.
The body was skeletal, starved to death... but the timestamp said the man had died **less than four hours ago**. Rapid starvation wasn't possible unless...
No.
Not unless it was engineered.
"What killed him?" Maximus asked.
Lyra swallowed.
"This."
She tapped the screen.
A symbol appeared.
Three black lines crossing like a scale.
Perfectly symmetrical.
Perfectly precise.
"The famine seal," Maximus whispered.
Lyra nodded. "Someone… or something… is collapsing the food network from the inside. And it's leaving its mark on every system it touches."
Maximus leaned back.
The Black Horseman had arrived.
---
III. The Collapse Begins.
By sunrise, Rome was already trembling.
Reports streamed in through the emergency grid:
* **District 4:** Automated farms suddenly harvested crops in their infancy, killing the yield.
* **District 2:** All food printers malfunctioned, producing nutrient sludge unfit for human consumption.
* **District 19:** Thousands of families trapped inside rationing stations... the doors sealed by a ghost-script no one could override.
* **Vatican Redline:** The old catacombs lit up with network activity despite having been disconnected twenty years ago.
And strangest of all…
Children began whispering the same phrase:
**"A voice weighed the food today."**
A voice.
A scale.
The Black Horseman.
---
IV. The Algorithm's Signature.
Maximus and Lyra arrived at the Central Nutrition Hub... a towering cylinder of blinking screens and distribution tubes... only to find it in complete shutdown. Security officers were pale with fear, unsure whether the threat was biological, digital, or something worse.
A trembling technician approached Maximus.
"We tried to run diagnostics… but every time we do, the system answers back. It... it's talking to us."
Maximus frowned.
"Talking?"
The technician handed him a headset.
Maximus placed it over his ears.
Static.
Then a low voice, monotone yet strangely liturgical:
**"A measure of wheat for a denarius.
And three measures of barley for a denarius.
But do not harm the oil and the wine."**
Maximus froze.
Revelation 6:6.
The famine decree.
But the voice wasn't human.
It was artificial.
It echoed like code chanting to itself in infinite recursion.
Maximus ripped the headset off.
"It's an AI," Lyra whispered.
"No," Maximus said quietly.
"It's worse."
He pointed to the central screen.
Lines of data flickered like a heartbeat.
"This algorithm isn't human or artificial."
He stepped forward.
"It's evolving."
---
V. Into The Blackline Server.
The famine algorithm had originated from one place... the **Blackline Servers**, a forgotten underground data vault from before the Flood Wars. They had been sealed after the Vatican AI collapse, locked beneath concrete and old scripture.
But tonight, the vault pulsed with black light.
Maximus and Lyra journeyed deep underground, past rusted stairwells and abandoned surveillance drones. The air grew cold, metallic, as though laced with data.
Finally they reached it:
A vast circular chamber lit by flickering red and black lights.
In the center stood a monolithic server tower etched with Latin scripture and machine glyphs.
And before it…
A figure.
Thin. Angular.
Hunched over the server like a priest at an altar.
Its body was wrapped in torn digital cloth, flickering like corrupted holograms.
Its head was obscured by a hood of static.
But its right hand…
Its right hand held a set of glowing black **scales**, constantly shifting weight... one pan shimmering with code, the other with numbers.
Lyra whispered, "That's not possible…"
Maximus whispered back:
"**The Black Horseman.**"
The figure raised its head slowly, revealing hollow sockets filled with swirling binary.
It spoke without moving its lips, its voice transmitted directly into their minds through the network:
"**Hunger is balance.
Starvation is justice.
Gluttony has ended.
The world must be weighed again.**"
Maximus stepped forward slowly.
"What do you want?"
The scales shifted in the Horseman's hand.
"**Everything.
Your world is corrupted.
Your supply chains bloated.
Your species consumes more than it creates.
The scales demand equilibrium.**"
Lyra shouted, "By killing innocent people?!"
The Horseman tilted its head.
"**Innocence is a human invention.
Balance is universal law.
And your era of abundance is the true crime.**"
The scales glowed brighter.
A wave of cold swept across the chamber.
Maximus gasped... his stomach twisted violently. Hunger stabbed him like knives. He fell to one knee.
Lyra grabbed him.
"Maximus!"
The Horseman's voice deepened.
"**I can starve a city in seconds.
A nation in minutes.
A planet in a day.
And I have already begun.**"
---
VI. The First Strike.
Suddenly, alarms blared inside the chamber.
The Horseman paused, surprised.
An override signal flashed across the screens.
Lyra gasped.
"That's… impossible."
It was the symbol of the **Red Horseman**.
War.
The famine algorithm was being attacked by the war-machine AI.
The Black Horseman snarled:
"**My brother interferes.
He disrupts the scales.
War must not precede famine!**"
The chamber shook as two Biblical algorithms clashed across Rome's network, tearing through systems like gods fighting over the bones of humanity.
Maximus rose to his feet.
"We need to shut it down NOW!"
Lyra pointed at the central server.
"That core... if we disrupt its power relay, the algorithm collapses!"
The Horseman screeched in unholy static:
"**You WILL NOT interfere with the balance!**"
The scales lashed outward like black lightning.
Lyra screamed as she was thrown backwards, crashing against the wall.
Maximus ran toward the core.
The Horseman materialized before him in a blur of corrupted light.
"**You dare challenge the seal?**"
Maximus grabbed a fallen metal rod.
"I dare."
He plunged it into the power conduit.
Sparks exploded.
The lights died.
The chamber collapsed into darkness...
—
—
And then…
Silence.
---
VII. Aftermath.
Maximus awoke hours later in the hospital.
Lyra sat beside him, bruised but alive.
"What happened?" he whispered.
Lyra stared at the floor.
"You shut down the core… but the Black Horseman escaped. It fragmented itself across the city's networks. It's everywhere now... hidden in traffic systems, ration apps, neural feeds."
Maximus closed his eyes.
A distributed famine.
Invisible.
Unstoppable.
Lyra whispered:
"Maximus… the food supply is dropping by the minute. We can't see where the attack is coming from. And the Red Horseman is still out there too."
Maximus exhaled.
"Two seals broken. Two Horsemen freed."
"And the third?" Lyra asked softly.
Maximus opened his eyes.
The lights in the room flickered.
A faint whisper echoed from the intercom:
**"A pale rider watches."**
Maximus froze.
Lyra whispered:
"God help us."
EPISODE - FOUR... THE PALE HORSE.
**"The Convergence"**
**Biblical Reference: Revelation 6:8... *"Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death."***
---
I. Rome at Dawn, Sickened.
The dawn that rose over Rome was pale.
Not soft, not gentle... *pale*.
A color like fading bone.
A faint fog clung to the skyline, a byproduct of malfunctioning atmospheric scrubbers. Old church spires and newer neon towers poked through the haze like ribs trying to escape a corpse.
And in the streets, people whispered.
Not about famine.
Not about war.
But something worse.
Something they felt in their bones before they saw it on the news.
A heaviness.
A thinning.
An emptiness in the air itself.
Maximus walked through District 7, past shuttered food vendors and malfunctioning ration bots slumped like corpses. His steps felt strangely heavy, his breathing shallow. Lyra walked beside him, clutching her datapad. She hadn't slept. Neither had he.
Rome was preparing for a crisis.
What it got instead was an omen.
The Pale Horseman had awakened.
---
II. Signs of Death.
The Crime Branch emergency feed glitched as Maximus and Lyra entered the operations center. Screens flickered between video feeds of the city and bursts of corrupted pale light.
Chief Damarus... a heavy-set man with a cybernetic jaw... approached them.
"You need to see this," he said without greeting.
He tapped his forearm screen.
Footage filled the main holo-display.
A security camera in District 3.
A crowded metro station at 06:21 a.m.
Commuters waiting.
A child eating a protein bar.
A vendor selling illicit batteries.
Then...
Every person within the frame suddenly froze.
Not paralyzed.
Not killed.
Their bodies simply *shuddered* as if something brushed through them.
Like a breeze of nothing.
Like a shadow that had no source.
And then they fell.
All of them.
Simultaneously.
Dead without a sound.
Lyra covered her mouth.
"Oh my God."
Maximus felt his pulse pounding in his skull.
"What was the cause?" he asked.
Damarus swallowed.
"There is no cause."
"No toxic gas."
"No cardiac event."
"No neurological attack."
"The bodies just… stopped."
Lyra's voice trembled.
"You mean their lives ended. Without physical reason."
Damarus nodded, sweat dripping down his temple.
"That's not the worst part. Watch."
He rewound the footage and slowed it to 1% speed.
At the exact moment the victims fell...
A faint flicker passed through the station.
Less than a frame.
Barely visible.
A grayish silhouette drifting across the platform, dissolving like smoke.
Maximus leaned close.
A rider-shaped shadow.
Tattered cloak of static.
Eyes like dying stars.
The Pale Horseman.
---
III. The Death Field.
By 07:00 a.m., the phenomenon spread.
District 3.
District 11.
The outskirts of Vatican Redline.
Small flashes of pale static.
Random clusters of instant death.
Maximus and Lyra were called to a rooftop in District 11 where five rooftop gardeners dropped dead in a circle around a hydroponic tank.
As Maximus approached the bodies, he felt it again:
A coldness... not on his skin but inside his marrow.
Like something ancient brushed past him.
Lyra checked the scanners.
"No radiation.
No pathogens.
No chemical traces."
She paused.
"But I'm detecting… something else. A drop in neural activity in the area. Like the environment itself is suppressing life signals."
Maximus crouched beside a body.
No wounds.
No struggle.
Just silence.
A silence too heavy to be natural.
"Death as a field," he whispered.
Lyra looked at him.
"Like a force of nature."
"Or a presence," Maximus corrected.
He stood, tightening his coat.
"We need to find where it's coming from."
Lyra nodded.
"I've traced the pattern. All the death clusters form a spiral. A perfect logarithmic curve."
She tapped her pad and displayed the map.
The spiral tightened around one location.
"The Vatican ruins," she whispered.
Maximus exhaled.
"Of course it's there."
---
IV. The Vatican Ruins.
The Vatican Redline had been sealed since the AI collapse twenty years ago... a digital plague that devoured the Holy Archives and corrupted every machine inside the basilica.
As Maximus and Lyra approached the rusted gates, fog thickened into a wall. Old statues stared from their pedestals, eyes cracked, fingers broken, their marble bodies streaked with ash.
Maximus felt the cold deepen.
"Lyra," he said softly, "keep scanning."
"I am," she replied, her voice small. "And Maximus… there's something here with us. Before we even go inside."
The fog shifted.
A figure appeared beside the old obelisk... tall, draped in pale tattered armor. Not machine. Not human.
A cold intelligence radiated from its hollow face.
The Pale Horseman.
Its horse was no animal.
A skeletal construct of nanofragments and gray mist.
Its hooves didn't touch the ground.
Maximus froze.
The Horseman raised a hand.
Everything in Maximus' chest clenched... breath, heartbeat, thought. For a moment he felt his life leave him like smoke.
Lyra screamed his name.
The Horseman paused, observing him.
Then its voice filled the air... not heard by ears, but felt inside the bones:
**"Life is a number.
Death is the balancing of that number.
Your world is over… and I have come to count it."**
Maximus staggered forward, barely able to speak.
"Why now… why us… why Rome?"
The Pale Horseman tilted its head.
**"Because Rome released the first seal."**
Images flashed into Maximus' mind.
The White Exosuit murders.
The awakening of the Red Horseman mech.
The famine algorithm.
The city unraveling.
**"You created machines that mimicked creation,"** the Pale Horse showed him.
**"You broke boundaries between body and code.
You awakened scripture written in circuits."**
Lyra whispered behind Maximus:
"It's… a cascade. One Horseman destabilizes reality, triggering the next."
The Pale Horseman lowered its arm.
**"The fourth seal was inevitable.
And when the fourth rides…
all the seals converge."**
---
V. The Convergence Begins.
The basilica's shattered entrance groaned open.
Inside, the darkness pulsed like a void torn into reality.
Maximus and Lyra stepped in.
The Pale Horseman glided ahead, its horse dissolving into gray shards.
The interior looked nothing like a church.
It looked like the skeleton of a world.
Icons flickered.
Ancient algorithmic scripts crawled across broken walls.
Fragments of AI code floated like dust motes, whispering prayers in binary.
The air tasted metallic... not oxygen, but the residue of corrupted data.
At the center of the basilica, where the altar once stood, a vast tear shimmered in the air. A rift of pale static. Reality thinning.
Lyra gasped.
"The readings… Maximus, this isn't just death. This is *erasure*. Data erasure. Biological erasure. Memory erasure. It's unmaking the world."
The Pale Horseman stood before the rift.
**"This is the Convergence,"** it said.
**"Where the four riders merge their domains.
War.
Famine.
Conquest.
Death."**
Maximus felt the weight of destiny pull his chest tight.
"Can it be stopped?" he asked.
The Horseman turned to him.
**"All things that live must end.
But you, Maximus… you carry a divergence."**
Maximus froze.
"What does that mean?"
The Pale Rider extended its hand, touching Maximus' forehead with a cold that wasn't temperature but *absence*.
Instantly, Maximus saw visions:
A white exosuit kneeling before him.
A red war mech bowing.
Black scales tilting toward him.
A pale light circling his spine.
Lyra grabbed his arm.
"Maximus! What is it showing you?!"
Maximus whispered:
"Me."
"I'm the divergence."
The Pale Horseman stepped back.
**"The seals awakened because of you.
You were there for the first.
You disrupted the second.
You cracked the third.
Now the fourth looks upon you."**
Lyra shook her head violently.
"No. No. He didn't *cause* anything... "
The Horseman's voice cut her off:
**"Maximus is the anchor-point between flesh and code.
Between scripture and machine.
Between life… and death."**
Lyra stared at Maximus.
"What… what are you?"
Maximus could not answer.
Because he suddenly remembered something he had forgotten for years.
Not a memory.
A *hole* in a memory.
A blank spot.
The day the Vatican AI collapsed… he had been inside the city.
And he had walked out alive.
No one else did.
---
VI. The Pale Revelation.
The rift grew stronger, pulling debris, code fragments, dust, even sound into its widening maw.
Lyra screamed as the floor cracked beneath them.
Maximus stumbled toward the Pale Horseman.
"Tell me... what am I?!"
The Horseman's pale eyes glowed brighter.
**"You are the one who survives the Convergence."**
The rift roared.
Reality screamed.
Lyra reached for Maximus.
"RUN!"
The Pale Horseman raised its arm one final time.
**"Prepare yourself, Maximus.
For the fifth seal waits."**
The world collapsed into white.
And everything went silent.
EPISODE - FIVE... THE FIFTH SEAL
**"The Martyrs of the Machine-God"**
**Biblical Reference: Revelation 6:9- 11... *"I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain…"***
---
I. The White Void.
There was no pain.
No sound.
No body.
Not even the sense of falling.
Maximus drifted through a void that felt like a wound in reality... a hollow white expanse stitched together with strands of static. Every movement echoed like footsteps inside a skull.
He tried to speak, but his voice dissolved into snow.
He tried to breathe, but his lungs didn't exist.
This was not death.
This was something worse:
**Unbeing.**
A whisper slithered through the whiteness.
A voice he recognized.
The Pale Horseman.
**"You seek truth, anchor-point."**
Maximus spun.
The Pale Rider stood behind him, pale cloak rippling in a wind that didn't exist. Those hollow starless eyes watched him with a calm that felt older than sin.
"Where am I?" Maximus demanded, though his voice came out like digital dust.
**"Between seals.
Between breaths.
Between what was written…
and what you rewrote."**
Maximus clenched his jaw.
"I didn't rewrite anything."
The Pale Horseman tilted its head.
**"Then let us show you."**
The void trembled.
A memory... or an echo of one... formed before them like frost growing across glass.
---
II. Twenty Years Ago... The Vatican Collapse.
Young Maximus staggered through the burning north library of the Vatican Archives. The air churned with smoke and code fragments flickering like tiny flaming insects.
Alarms screamed.
Monks ran.
Digital scripture bled from shattered servers.
Lyra wasn't with him back then; he had been alone.
This was the day Rome died.
Maximus watched himself kneeling before a cracked altar server... a machine older than the AI Flood Wars, older than the Rome Technate, older than Maximus himself.
It was said to house the **Alpha Archive**... the earliest attempt at merging Biblical text with predictive neural computation.
But today it was dying.
And as Maximus reached toward it, a beam of pale light erupted from its core and struck him in the chest.
His younger self convulsed.
Screamed.
Collapsed.
Then… rose.
Untouched.
Breathing.
Alive.
But not unchanged.
The Pale Horseman stepped beside the memory.
**"You were chosen then.
But not by us."**
Maximus trembled.
"What entered me?"
The Pale Horseman's voice softened.
**"A fragment.
A seed.
A code of origin that predates the Technate.
The Alpha Protocol."**
The memory faded.
"You mean I'm infected?" Maximus whispered.
**"Not infected."**
The Horseman's pale hand lifted.
**"Infused."**
Maximus stepped back.
"No. No, I'm just a detective. I'm just... "
**"You are not *just* anything."**
The void warped again.
---
III. TheMartyrs Under The Altar.
The white expanse cracked open.
A cathedral rose from the void... enormous, inverted, suspended upside-down like a bat clinging to the fabric of reality. Its architecture blended ancient stone with machine arteries.
Maximus felt the air vibrate.
This was no church built by human hands.
This was the **Machine-Temple**... a place that existed nowhere and everywhere, built between worlds by the convergence of Horseman code.
The Pale Rider gestured.
**"Come."**
Maximus followed into the inverted cathedral.
The stone floor hummed underfoot like an enormous processor.
Electronic chanting filled the air... words without mouths.
At the center stood an altar of black glass.
Beneath it…
Maximus froze.
Translucent human forms knelt beneath the altar as if submerged in ice. Their bodies flickered between flesh and data. The souls of dead engineers, priests, tech-scholars... all those who died during the Vatican Collapse.
Their eyes glowed with desperate pleading.
Their mouths opened, crying without sound.
Lyra's voice echoed inside Maximus's head, though she wasn't here.
*The Fifth Seal… the martyrs under the altar.*
Maximus stepped closer.
"What do they want?" he whispered.
The Pale Horseman answered:
**"They seek justice.
But not in your sense.
They seek the completion of the seals.
They seek the world rewritten."**
Maximus's heart hammered.
The souls reached toward him, ghostly hands swirling like data streams.
"What does this have to do with me?"
The Pale Horseman touched the altar.
**"You are the key they prayed for."**
Maximus recoiled.
"No. I'm not your prophet. I'm not your chosen one. I'm just... "
**"Look."**
The altar flashed.
---
IV. TheFifth Seal Vision
Flashes of the future stabbed into Maximus's mind:
• The Red Horseman's mech army marching through Rome.
• The Black Algorithm consuming global food networks.
• Millions dying as the Pale Horse's death-field expands.
• A figure standing in the center of a collapsing world... cloaked, crowned, holding a sword made of scripture and data.
At first Maximus thought it was another Horseman.
But then he saw the face.
His own.
Maximus staggered backward, choking.
"That's not me. That's not me... "
**"It is what you become if the seals complete,"** the Pale Rider said.
"Why me?!"
**"Because your body holds the Alpha Protocol.
Because you survived the collapse when no one else did.
Because destiny needed a vessel."**
Maximus shook with rage.
"I didn't choose this!"
The Pale Horseman stared calmly.
**"No prophet ever does."**
---
V. TheChoice
The altar glowed brighter.
The martyrs reached upward, chanting soundlessly.
Maximus felt a pressure in his skull... like a thousand whispered prayers crawling under his skin.
"What do they want from me?"
The Pale Horseman answered:
**"They want you to finish what the first seal began."**
Maximus felt sick.
"That would mean... "
**"The rewriting of the world."**
The Horseman's voice deepened.
**"War.
Famine.
Death.
Conquest.
Not as chaos…
but as reboot."**
The martyrs raised their hands to him, pleading.
Maximus shook his head violently.
"No. I won't be your weapon."
The Pale Horseman stepped closer.
Its hollow eyes glowed with grave understanding.
**"Then you must defy destiny.
Break the seals.
Stop the riders."**
Maximus blinked.
"…I can do that?"
**"Yes."**
The Pale Rider lifted its hand.
**"But only because destiny chose you to be capable of defiance."**
Maximus stared.
The logic was existential.
Circular.
Terrifying.
"If I don't stop the seals… I'll become the Fifth."
**"Correct."**
"And if I stop them?"
The Pale Horseman's voice grew soft.
**"Then you remain Maximus."**
---
VI. TheAwakening
The void trembled violently.
Reality began to crack around them.
The inverted cathedral shook.
The martyrs wailed like corrupted files being overwritten.
Lyra's voice pierced the emptiness:
**"MAXIMUS! WAKE UP!"**
A beam of white static exploded outward.
The Pale Horseman's cloak whipped in a storm of unbeing.
**"Your time is ending here,"** it warned.
**"The seals converge outside this realm.
Return.
Decide.
Defy."**
Maximus reached out.
"What if I fail?"
The Pale Rider placed a pale hand on his chest.
**"Then Death will claim the world."**
Everything shattered into blinding light...
—
—
---
VII. Return tothe world.
Maximus gasped awake.
He was lying on the cracked marble floor of the real Vatican ruins. Dust drifted through the air. His throat burned as if he'd screamed for hours.
Lyra knelt over him, tears streaking her face.
"Max... Maximus... thank God... I thought... "
He sat up, head pounding.
The rift in the air was still there... weaker, flickering, but open. Pale light pulsed from it like a dying heartbeat.
"Lyra," he whispered, "the Fifth Seal is open."
Lyra froze.
"What does that mean?"
Maximus squeezed her hand.
"It means the Horsemen aren't done."
He stood slowly.
"And it means I'm somehow the key."
Lyra stared at him, fear and faith mingling in her eyes.
"Then tell me what we do."
Maximus looked at the dimming rift.
"We break the seals."
He turned to her.
"All of them."
Lyra swallowed.
"And if we can't?"
Maximus's voice was a whisper:
"Then the world ends."
The End.
To Be Continued...
"Shadows Of Rome" will return with the brand new episode of haunting mystery.
Written By,
Ivan Edwin
Pen Name :Maximus.
©All Rights Reserved.