Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure
short story by Richard Parks
Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure is a fantasy short story by Richard Parks. It was first published in the online magazine Tor.com for April 21, 2010, with a subsequent stand-alone Tor ebook edition appearing February 1, 2011. It subsequently appeared in the e-anthology The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com on July 15, 2013.
Summary
The Apocalypse is done with, the Earth wiped clean of life, and only the Four Horsemen, Death, War, Pestilence, and Famine remain to bear witness. One day they come across the impossible—a living pine seedling. They ponder but fail to fathom this development, and all leave but Death, who remains, thinking. He finally realizes the divinity—the Consensus—must have made the tree, intending to restart the cycle of creation.
Addressing the Consensus, Death asks that the detached aspects of the divinity (the Horsemen and the Adversary, who suffers in Hell) be reabsorbed into it, their purposes having been fulfilled. Refused, he decides to resume his function, leading his brethren against the tree. To prevent them from killing it, the Consensus reabsorbs all the Horsemen but Death, who is consigned to his own pocket dimension.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55611941. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2011 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.