He sang a song, horribly out of tune, bragging that he’d destroyed the Sovereign’s most treasured works of art—earth and man and the Prince himself. He gloated as an enemy of da Vinci might gloat if he had torched his house, burnt his Mona Lisa, and murdered his only son.

The Impostor, his face contorted, seemed oblivious to the collar around his neck and the chain leash that grew taut even as I watched.

The sun was blood red in a smoking haze. Mount Hagias surged and throbbed above the dark city and billowed a canopy of white and black smoke that separated Babel from the light of heaven. I looked at Babel’s shelter, where forgotten winters had gnawed and carved the sunless stone.

Then, through the mountain’s black skin of long-cooled lava, streams of red-hot molten rock broke through. Hagias spewed up a bright red river of heat and light that burned, through trees and stone, a new path down the mountainside. The devouring river headed straight down to Babel, great city of the east, where the screaming inhabitants only now realized the full measure of the volcano’s descending doom.

Then earthquakes and tidal waves and floods assaulted the city writhing on its deathbed, as if a tormented earth could finally exact revenge on the fallen stewards who had caused its ruin. What was once a beautiful blue-green planet turned black and white with soot and ash. I looked back across the countryside I’d traveled—hills and lowlands, marshes and bogs, mountains and rock spires, plains and valleys, woods and rivers, cities and towns. I watched as they quaked and trembled on the verge of destruction—or was it childbirth?

Then came four horses and their riders—war, famine, sickness, and death. I saw a land numb with pain, sick with its own wickedness, tired of being what it was never meant to be. Earth—yes, it was Earth—strip-mined of hope, a hollow cavern of broken promises and abandoned dreams. The rebel planet awaited its last battle, its final defeat, its day of doom … and deliverance.

The King held up both his scarred hands. In one he held a writ of pardon, in the other a sword of justice.

“Every man must accept the pardon or be devoured by the sword,” Marcus explained from atop the steed beside me. “There is no third option. Bow to him now in repentance and service, or bow to him later in judgment and condemnation. In either case every knee will bow to him.”

“Come deliver us,” I heard aliens and strangers and pilgrims cry from the red road. “Take us home!” they pleaded.

“Stay away,” countered the citizens of the dark city. “Don’t trespass on our turf, or we’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget!”

They reminded me of junior-high boys armed with slingshots and threatening a police SWAT team armed with assault rifles.