“I am royalty,” he screamed hoarsely. “I was chief of all creation before your kind was made!”

“The King is Lord of the cosmos,” I cried. “You are lord of the flies!”

At that moment I heard distant cheering, as if some crowd was rooting for me.

“I will drink your blood and skewer you like meat, miserable image-bearer!” He shrieked the words, veins in his temples bulging. “I brought civil war to Charis itself. I turned Thuros into Skia! What mighty works have you done?”

“None. You are a fallen titan; I am but a reclaimed man. What you were makes what you are all the worse.”

The Impostor lunged at me, and I braced myself for certain death. But he stopped in midair, as if he’d hit a cement wall. He clutched at his throat. I saw what I’d never seen before—a tight collar around his neck. Something dangled from it, hung horizontally and disappearing into space. I couldn’t see the other end. Suddenly I realized what it was.

“When I first came to Thuros, you pursued me, Pretender. You ripped into my neck. And just as you were about to carry me off to your lair, your head jerked violently. Now I see why. You’re on a leash!”

I stepped into the opening and pointed to the sky.

“All your flying reptiles, they’re on leashes too, aren’t they? They’re held by an unseen hand. But now I know the one who holds the other end of your leash, Pretender. I’ve heard his roar. I’ve met him. I crossed the chasm in his scarred hands. You can’t move an inch farther than he permits!”

He screamed in rage and lunged at me again from the dugout. His outstretched hands were but a foot from my throat. I was frozen with fear yet determined to hold my ground. His fingernails stopped within an inch of me, his head jerking back on his neck. Whiplash. He raised his fists and glared at Charis on the mountainside, screaming and cursing. He looked like a rabid marionette trying to loosen itself from its strings.

The one I’d known first as Joshua and then as Gabriel—that intelligent, charming, thoughtful being who sang so beautifully and spoke so eloquently—was a ranting, raving lunatic, a mass murderer, a great impostor, a miserable wannabe.

I despised myself as I contemplated how this beast, patient and skilled as a fly fisherman, had waded out into the river of my blindness and pride and lured me in. He was an operator, a flatterer, with millennia of experience in sweet-talking ignorant children to their destruction.

“You are a miserable fool, child of Adam,” he cried, quieter now, gasping for breath. “I could kill you with one squeeze of my hand.”