They say the first time someone saw him, really saw him, was in Stillwater Bend.
A town choked by smoke and fear.
A place forgotten by law, overrun by those who knew no mercy.
The raiders who took Stillwater strung the sheriff up outside the chapel. Used his badge for target practice. They called themselves the Black Vultures. Rotten men. Cruel in that specific, meaningless way of men who'd never faced consequence.
They laughed when word spread that a stranger was coming.
Just one man.
They weren't laughing when he rode in.
Wyatt had been tracking the last of Betsy's killers across three states. Every step dragged through blood and guilt, the weight of the coin humming softly in his pocket like a warning. Barely slept. Barely ate. Just followed the path, like some cursed soul marching toward a destiny he couldn't outrun.
He didn't mean to stop in Stillwater Bend.
But something called him there.
Something waited.
He arrived at dusk, the sky hanging low with red clouds and dying light. His horse — the same massive, ghost-pale beast he'd ridden since he transported here— moved like it was cut from smoke. Its hooves made no sound on the dry dirt road.
He dismounted in the square.
Didn't say a word.
The raiders came out laughing, pistols in hand, mouths loud with threats they wouldn't remember for long.
Wyatt let them speak.
Then he reached into his coat.
And drew his guns.
They weren't normal.
The moment he touched them, the air shifted — as if the world held its breath.
Forged of a blackened metal that shimmered violet in the dying sun, they weren't crafted so much as given. One carved with ornate lines and Old World symbols, cold and cruel — Mercy. The other etched in flowing script, ancient and alive, burning softly at the core — Judgment.
No one saw where they came from. One day he simply had them.
Like the coin, they were part of him.
A gift from a god he still hadn't met.
The first shot blew a man's arm clean off.
The second pierced a skull and set the raider's hat spinning like a top.
The raiders scattered, but the bullets never missed.
They ducked behind cover — he walked through the fire they lit, cloak burning, eyes glowing in a red hue behind soot-black lashes. He took six more rounds to the chest and never slowed. They begged. They cursed. They screamed.
But he kept walking.
When it was over, thirteen men were dead.
One was left breathing, crawling through the mud, his hands slipping on blood.
Wyatt knelt beside him. Quiet. Calm. Studying his face.
"You lit the fire," he said.
The man whimpered, "What… are you?"
Wyatt stood.
"Not what I was."
He raised Judgment.
And pulled the trigger.
They buried the bodies in a pit behind the saloon.
A traveling preacher came two days later, heard the stories. He saw the hoofprints scorched into the earth. Saw the bullet holes that didn't match any weapon he knew. He listened to the townsfolk describe a man who wouldn't die. Who walked like death and shot like lightning.
He stood before the crowd and read aloud, his voice shaking:
"And I looked, and behold—an ashen horse:
and he who sat on it had the name Death,
and Hades followed with him."
The name stuck.
The Ashen Rider.
The Pale Death.
Death-Walker.
And his guns — they took names of their own in whispered breath:
Mercy, for the clean kills.
Judgment, for the slow ones.
He never called himself that.
Didn't need to.
The West did it for him.
But the myth hid the man.
Wyatt Boone still bled.
Still woke from dreams of fire and screams and Betsy's face.
He stayed away from Hosea. From Dutch. From Arthur. He couldn't face their grief, their belief that he was dead. Couldn't carry the truth — that he'd failed, that he'd survived only because something unnatural had chosen him.
The coin never left him.
Even when thrown across rivers or buried beneath stone, he could always feel it. Always call it back.
It pulsed in his pocket like a second heart.
And sometimes, at night, he heard a voice.
Not loud. Not cruel. Just there.
"Soon."
Wyatt didn't know what it meant.
Not yet.
But deep in his bones, he knew this wasn't the end