"War is Death's Feast."

** 1999, Moscow, Horsemen's Command Center **

Kronos burst into the command center, where Methos sat alone in front of the master console.

He came to a stand still, eyes wild. "Methos!"

"Yes?" The oldest Immortal didn't even look up.

"Silas and Caspian - they're dead!"

Methos turned around at that, a slight frown creasing his forehead. "Both of them?"

"Caspian killed Silas - after I warned him!" Kronos was still shaking from shock and rage. The fury that had overcome him when Caspian had ignored his shouted command to stop. We don't raise a sword against one of our brothers!

"And then you killed him, of course." Methos turned back to his computer, as though the matter was of no further interest. "Pity. I liked Silas. But I suppose they had outlived their usefulness."

Kronos froze. The seconds ticked by slowly. When he finally spoke, his voice was deadly. "You expected this." It was not a question.

Methos sighed, in exasperation, it seemed. "I've been expecting it for the last three months, Kronos. What the hell did you think would happen? We haven't fought a battle at close quarters for months - and neither Silas nor Caspian likes killing from a distance. They were going stir crazy."

Kronos let the silence drag on for a long time. "You've been lying to me, Methos."

"Have I ever done anything else?"

"What is it you've been planning, Methos?" He forced voice to stay quiet, calm. The demon unease that had plagued him was roaring up to the surface again, and suddenly Kronos thought that perhaps he didn't really want to know.

Methos turned to him, studying his younger companion for a long moment.

"I'm planning the final battle, Kronos," he explained gently. He waved at the screen behind him. "In less than an hour, it will begin."

Methos stood up and stretched. Propping a lean hip against the table, he assumed the professorial manner he always used when explaining a campaign strategy.

"First, I launch a simultaneous thermonuclear strike on 40 major cities all over the world, including Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Cairo... Then, as planned, the defence systems of the major nuclear powers will launch a series of counter attacks that will take out a designated list of secondary targets across the world. After that, my computer here will launch a combination of chemical and nuclear strike weapons to wipe out what's left... You're getting the picture, aren't you, Kronos?"

"Methos," Kronos whispered, "There will be nothing left to rule." Hellfires, this was a level of insanity beyond anything that even he had ever contemplated.

"I've never been particularly interested in conquering or ruling, Kronos. I am Death, remember?" Methos said, with complete, almost indifferent calm.

"No Immortal could survive a nuclear strike, Methos. Not even you!"

"Think I care?" Methos laughed. He seemed genuinely amused.

No, Kronos realised, I don't think you care, Methos -- about anything, any more.

"I can't let you do this," he said regretfully, drawing his sword. He had already killed one brother that day, and if this was the only way...

Methos raised an eyebrow, slowly, mockingly. "Let me?" he repeated.

I'm better than he is, Kronos assured himself. He's always been afraid to fight me. And his sword's out of reach.

Ignoring the nerves that assailed him, he rushed his quarry, swinging his fearsome killing blade in a lightning fast strike at the neck. Methos swayed out of his way like a reed in the wind. Kronos checked, flashed around, blindingly fast, struck like a cobra - and found his wrist trapped in a terrible grip.

"You don't stand a chance against me, Kronos," Methos said coldly. He ignored the other man's struggles as if they were of no moment at all. Desperate, Kronos pulled out the hidden blade he kept for emergencies: and Methos took it away like an adult taking a toy from a troublesome child.

Wide-eyed, Kronos looked up to confront the reality that he had been avoiding for months. He steeled himself and looked into the naked face of Death. It was enough to make even his dark and twisted soul quail. Paralysed with abosolute terror, he didn't see the fist coming, and went down cold.

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"I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds."

When he woke up, he found himself tied to a chair, facing the screen that took up most of the front wall of the command room. Methos was standing in front of his console, tapping instructions into it.

"You should thank me, brother. I'm giving you a ringside seat to watch the greatest show on earth. I spent years planning this, Kronos. In less than eight hours, every living thing on the face of this planet, every plant, every human, every animal, on the earth - even the fish living in the deepest oceans - will be annihilated."

"Why, Methos? In hell's name, why?" Kronos whispered, desperately pulling against the rope that secured him.

"Why? Because nothing changes, Kronos. Not in 500 years, not in 5000. When I left you all those years ago, it was because I was tired. Tired of the killing, tired of giving and feeling pain. I wanted to live."

"And I did try. Centuries, watching and waiting. Everywhere I went, death followed. I watched everything I loved die. Mortals died. Immortals died. Civilizations died."

"The endless years rolled by, Kronos, as I waited. Believing that the world would be better, that someday, surely someday, the killing would stop. Instead, mortals always found newer, nastier ways to kill each other. When the Romans razed Carthage to the ground, I was there. When the vandals sacked Rome, I was there."

"I sailed to the New World with Cortez, and watched him wipe out an entire culture. I visited India and saw Aurangazeb slaughter Hindus wholesale. I witnessed the French Revolution. Did you ever see what cannon could do to a line of advancing men, Kronos? I did. I saw Austerlitz and Waterloo. "

"Never finding any true meaning behind any of it, any purpose. I believed that history would eventually force a change, that some day, men would realise that war was futile. I even became a healer - I tried to fix the broken bodies of the humans dying around me. I patched up their wounds, and sent them out to die again, a day at a time."

"I was in the West when you were rampaging around as Melvin Koren, did you know that? I even rode with Butch and Sundance for a while. After the Somme, I treated men with shell shock. What did they call it then? The war to end all wars."

Methos laughed bitterly at the memory.

"When the Allies liberated Auschwitz, I saw what mortals had done to each other in concentration camps. You were in Vietnam, Kronos. You enjoyed it, I suspect. Always the innocents. Dying and dying and dying. It never stopped, Kronos. Uganda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bosnia."

"And my one true muse followed me everywhere. No one was safe, they all died. Every human I ever cared for. Every Immortal that ever meant anything to me. Do you know how Darius died? A mortal cut his head off on Holy Ground. I took great pleasure in killing James Horton. Slowly."

"Finally, I grew to understand. I knew. It would never end, unless I ended it. I could bring history to a stop, force a new start. And I must say you were a great help, brother. I couldn't have done it without you."

The watch on his wrist beeped. "Showtime."

Kronos watched, not understanding, as Methos removed a curious object from a chain around his neck - a strange and beautiful crystal. He placed it carefully on the ground, pulled out a gun, took aim, and shattered it with a single shot. Kronos felt an odd reverberating shock, almost like a Quickening.

Methos stamped the larger pieces of crystal deliberately into even smaller shards, and then gathered the debris up. He walked to the window and threw the pieces to the winds.

"That, in case you're interested, was the Methuselah Stone. It gave me the edge I needed to get to this moment alive. But I'm taking no chances now."

He walked back to the console and tapped in a set of rapid commands.

"Everyone has a unique talent, they say. You know what mine is, don't you? Behold my Magnum Opus, Kronos - the End of the World."

Swinging on to the table, he sat down calmly in the lotus position, a beatific smile on his face.

And the screens came alive with the symphony of Death. Terrible and strangely beautiful, the silent images from across the world. Photographed by satellites, man-made machines that felt nothing, the mushroom clouds sprang up like a riot of flowers in a garden that a demented god might have dreamed. The fires raged and the wild seas rose to swallow entire coastlines.

Kronos realised that the sound ringing in his ears was his own voice screaming. He screamed for a long time, until the raging firestorm overtook the building at last.

"I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds." - Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita on the successful testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

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Footnotes:

1. The title of the story is from "The Hollow Men", by T.S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

2. About Oppenheimer's quote from the Bhagavad Gita: In the original Sanskrit, the word that is rendered as "Death" can also be read as "Time" or "Fate".