Sometimes he’ll just amble the trade roads for weeks, watching peasants die. Pus bubbling on their necks and genitals, the backs of their hands, their heads: it’s marking their sins for convenience in later sorting.

He helps desperate men tear down and burn plague houses, and they value him, because he’ll walk into fire to make sure the walls collapse properly inward. Actually, all he wants is a last chance to see the bodies blister and burst to black.

Longinus lost the capacity for sickness so long ago; now he’s exultant. Finally, finally, the old bastard’s getting around to ending the world.