*maniacal laughter* 

You have made a BAD MISTAKE, my buddy, my guy, because now here are 1600 words about this novel.  More stuff is here in the tag.

Right, so, remember how I write novels when I’m pissed off about stuff?  Like…I got pissed off about the lack of happy F/F ships with superpowers and wrote a novel about that.  And I was pissed off about misuse of all-powerful sorcerers (Merlin, I am cranky about the show Merlin), and I wrote a novel about that.  And I was pissed off about use of psychic powers and Antichrists and Apocalypses (*glowers at SPN*) and I wrote Falls the Shadow, this novel.  Kind of by accident.  Like.  I meant to write a fifteen, maybe twenty, page thing playing with the idea of a character who had visions of the Apocalypse.  Smash cut to eighteen months and 250K words later…

So yeah.  The basic premise of this novel is that Sam Lightworth and her older brother Oz have been the best hunters in the country since they were kids, until it came to light during a hunt when she was fifteen that Sam has precognitive dreams.  Since most hunters don’t really have a concept of grey areas (such as a human girl with visions of the future) Oz takes the logical solution of getting his baby sister the fuck out of the life before someone can kill her.  Cut forward a year and a half, Sam’s been in hiding at a boarding school and, for the first time in her life, she has something like a normal life, with a normal friend (Kit), and normal demands on her life.  She hates it.  When her brother turns up, bloody and battered and bearing news of their dad’s death, it’s the best thing that’s happened to her all year.  So she and Oz leave, with Kit in tow.  They also pick up Michael, an old…friend who met Sam exactly once when they were both kids.  She broke his arm and he cracked four of her ribs.  Naturally that…happens.  The majority of the plot rotates around Sam, Michael, Oz, and Kit learning about their places as the Four Horsemen.

• Sam Lightworth, Antichrist and Horseman of Death: seventeen at the start of the book, she and her brother Oz are considered dangerous even by hunter standards—there’s a fairly even split between the hunters who want to be them, and the hunters who want to be a minimum of three states away from them.  Sam…well, I love her dearly but she’s a bit of a sociopath, she has a handful of people she cares about in the world and her interest in everything and everyone else is summed up in “I put a lot of work into this planet.”  On the other hand: when someone threatens her people, she goes from zero to homicide pretty fast.  When she was eleven another pair of hunters almost got Oz killed after they’d promised he’d be well out of the line of fire, and she almost eviscerated them before Oz came around enough to stop her.  On the metaphysical end of things, Sam isn’t the child of Lucifer so much as she is the creation of Lucifer—a blood ritual when she was about a year old infused her with Lucifer’s ichor, with her mother’s blood to ‘set’ the magic.  This grants Sam an assortment of abilities in addition to her cold, sometimes borderline uncaring mentality.  Sam can see the future in her dreams (consequently she doesn’t sleep much), as well as having almost limitless telekinetic ability within her line of sight and the ability to command demons without effort.  That first one she’s known about most of her life, the other two come up over the course of the novel.  Sam is also called ‘the girl in the gunmetal crown,’ after a vision of herself as the ruler of Hell in which she wears a crown forged out of dark metal and sits on a throne of broken glass.

• Michael Temnota, Horseman of War: Sam’s eventual love interest and her angelic counterpart.  Like I said, their first meeting was…interesting, a little violent.  So when they meet up again in the novel, there’s some tension there, of the ‘we could mutually rip each other’s throats out but it’s funnier to wind you up’ sort of variety.  Michael’s memories begin when he was seven years old, the time at which he was adopted by Jenna, one of the fixtures in the hunting world.  This is due to the fact that he was chosen to be Sam’s balance in the world, the divine influence to her infernal—a plan that fell through a little bit, to the point that he almost Falls from Grace at the end of the book. (Michael and Sam are bound together on a number of levels, which means that if she says ‘Jump,’ he doesn’t need to ask ‘How high,’ and if she says ‘Apocalypse,’ he’s already getting a broadsword.)  Where Sam has Lucifer’s blood in her system, Michael has the archangel Gabriel’s blood in his, which give him the ability to compel people’s behavior (to a point), the ability to walk through the dreams of others (which helps stabilize Sam’s visions to a coherent level), and the ability to find objects through clairvoyance.  In the possible future post-Apocalypse, his title is Consort, and he sits at the foot of Sam’s throne.

• Oz Lightworth, Horseman of Pestilence: a perfectly human twenty-one-year-old guy, Oz basically raised Sam because the loss of their mother shattered their father.  He’s four years older than her, and he’s much…softer than she is, I guess. He cares about people because they’re people, it’s just that Sam takes major priority.  Oz also has a much more normal response to daily violence and terror than Sam, who’s grown up on it to the extent where she barely recognizes trauma when it punches her in the nose.  His coping mechanism of choice—most hunters have one—is sex, because it’s something that he enjoys and doesn’t hurt anyone and gets him out of his own head for a little while—he has ex-partners, men, women, and everything in between, in almost every city and they’re all on good terms with him.  Sam is his entire world, a fixation, almost—he can and has murdered people in absolute ice cold blood for even suggesting a threat to her.  He would literally rather be shot in the chest than see Sam unhappy, which means…well.  He’d end the world in a heartbeat if it kept her safe and with him.  In the possible future post-Apocalypse, he’s Sam’s Guardian, her right hand man.

• Kit Broome, Horseman of Famine: Sam’s best friend, and to a certain extent her only friend, because Sam’s never known anyone else who was willing to overlook all her oddities except for Oz.  Kit was normal when Sam met her (and believed that Sam’s name was Samantha Worthington), but she took the announcement that demons et al were real remarkably well and insisted on going with Sam and Oz.  Her parents died in a car crash some year before she met Sam, which helped with overlooking Sam’s prickly, paranoid nature—Kit was a mess too, although she’s had some time to cope now.  Kit…I dunno. Kit is loyal, dangerously loyal, because Sam is hers and therefore Kit would go to the gates of Hell for her. Kit is like Hufflepuff House taken to a terrible extreme: she has people she loves, she has a moral code that the hunters barely comprehend, and she’d still end the world if Sam asked, because it was Sam asking, and Sam has a peculiar way of making herself into the sun that someone’s life orbits around.  (At least, she does for the Horsemen.)  Kit’s title post-Apocalypse would be Lieutenant, Sam’s left hand.

• Oh, also: Sam is Death because she’s the be all and end all, the one that all of the others lead to, Michael is War because of his polar opposition to Sam in nature, divine against infernal, Kit is Famine because Sam and the other Horsemen are all she has, the rest of her life is empty, and Oz is Pestilence because everyone around him has fallen to the life, he and the Horsemen are the last men standing.

• This is also related to the almost-plot (I almost killed Sam in stopping the Apocalypse and then had an epilogue of the three others doing a perfectly serviceable job at ending the world through perfectly mundane means).  Sam is Death, because she’s dead.  Michael is War because he kills people the same way an army without an enemy does—rampant, wanton, completely without plan or scheme.  Kit is Famine because she kills quietly, almost tidily.  Oz is Pestilence because he sweeps through the land and leaves fields of the dead in his wake, like a plague—he’s the most dangerous, for the record.

• Also Billy and Colin exist, the two Witnesses (although that doesn’t come up).  They’re Sam and Oz’s sorta-dads, the two major fixtures in the American hunting community, Billy the archivist (he knows all the things) and Colin the preacher (he knows all the people).  They would be super married (literally, they’re really in love and it’s terrible) if they hadn’t met four months after Colin took his vows as a priest.  As it stands: Billy and Colin both know that if Billy asked, Colin would leave the priesthood.  But they also both know Billy will never ask because he knows that Colin loves his work.  @twistedangelsays punched me for this.
  

This is a 350 page monster that I’m currently in the process of editing down, so this is like…a very cursory overview, if you want more information hit me up.