Then a cry from the heart of Charis sounded: “How long, O Lord, before you bring judgment upon the dark world for what they have done to your children?”

I looked at the man on the great white stallion, the man with the face of the lion. My eyebrows were singed by the awful heat of his anger.

“No longer,” was the reply I read in his fire-hot eyes. He thrust up his hand to the sky, and the battle cry of millions of warriors erupted from one end of the heavens to the other.

There was war in Charis. War in Erebus. War in the narrow isthmus between them called Earth.

I was in the middle of it, inside the soldier I would one day be, riding on a great spirited thoroughbred beside an army of comrades, my sword raised to the sky. So quickly did we descend on Babel that within moments I could smell the rottenness of that city so long infected by the cancer of Erebus.

Suddenly the air was filled with clashing weapons and the cries of marauding warriors and flying reptiles. I felt my sword land upon the enemy and heard the din of war—the wails of oppressors being slain and the joyous celebrations of the oppressed that at long last we, their liberators, had arrived.

Some of the warriors sang as they slew, swinging a sword with one arm and with the other pulling victims up onto their horses. I too sang as I drew up a bloody little girl onto my horse and then with my sword cleaved the vile man who’d hurt her. I gazed into her wide eyes and saw her wondrous grateful smile. I felt a warm flood down my cheeks when I promised her she would never suffer again—knowing one greater than I would keep that promise.

I felt I was not just singing a song, or listening to one, but was inside a great song being sung by another.

The long arm of the King moved with swiftness and power. The hope of reward that kept the sufferers sane was now vindicated before my eyes.

It was a rout. This time none of Charis’s blood was spilled. It was as if the universe could not tolerate the shedding of even one more drop of righteous blood.

The flames and shrapnel of combat scourged the Earth with burning debris. The ground exploded. The air itself was consumed in flames.

Charis released fury, and Earth bled fear. I beheld the world’s last night.

Then I saw something very strange. Even as he conquered the twisted planet and made it his footstool, the Commander on the white stallion wept. I rode near to him, set down the little girl at his feet, and saw the tears myself.

The remaining rebels cried out to the King, “Withdraw from us. Give us a place all our own, where we need never see you.”