There he rides, the harbinger of the hush that follows all becoming. Death, draped in patient wait, mounted upon a black steed whose hooves strike echoes from the very marrow of the world. Around him, the sky burns in its last convulsion, a conflagration of dying light, the earth’s own funeral pyre. Fire becomes cloud, and cloud becomes ash; yet he moves untouched, his pale shroud fluttering like the ghost of mercy long spent.

The rider’s face is hollow, not cruel, not kind, only inevitable. He carries neither weapon nor command, only a staff that could as well be a shepherd’s crook or the spine of a fallen god. Beneath him, the horse lowers its head, weary and knowing, its reflection distorted in the pools of molten dusk. The creature does not gallop, it advances with the rhythm of eternity, one step closer each day, one breath nearer each hour.

Listen. That sound, the slow cadence of hooves, is not outside you. It is within. It reverberates in the pulse, in the faintest throb beneath the ribs. Every tick of the clock is its echo. Every silence, a step. You have already begun to hear it.

The world behind him burns as revelation at the same it reveals as punishment. The flames do not destroy, they disclose. Every secret, every sin, every tenderness becomes luminous for an instant before dissolving into smoke. In this final illumination, nothing is judged, for there is no longer a need. The light simply devours, and the darkness receives.

In Chmielowski’s vision (and also mine), death is not a visitor, it is the landscape itself. The rider does not arrive; he emerges from the haze, as though he has always been there, waiting at the edge of sight. The fire is not his doing, it is his nature (our Nature). The horse carries not ruin, but return. What we fear as annihilation is only the last syllable of a word we have been speaking since birth.

And so, when the steps grow louder, when the smoke curls toward you like memory, do not recoil. You have known this gait forever. The hoofbeats are the metronome of your being. Death does not come to take, he comes to remind you that you were never yours to keep.