“It is done,” the King said, sweeping them away in answer to their own ignorant prayers—away to the one place in the universe in which the Lord of the Cosmos would never again set foot.

As I watched, the melting city of darkness slid down the river of lava into the abyss. Michael, the general, looked at his King, asking an unspoken question. The King nodded and said, “Yes.”

Michael raised his great sword and brought it down upon the flying reptile. He was decimated by the blow, his head split and crushed, or rather his already crushed head shown to be what it was. The Impostor looked like a large spider—stepped on, then crumpled to a fraction of its original size. By the power of his commander, Michael—his muscles bulging at the strain—picked up his evil twin and cast the writhing beast into the chasm, all the way down to the fiery waters of Erebus. The vast army of warriors around me cheered, and I with them.

“And now, you shall reign with your King!” Michael shouted to us. I looked over my shoulder. Surely he couldn’t be talking to me. I still couldn’t believe I would walk the same ground as the King, much less share in his rule. The thought was too vast, too fantastic for me to absorb.

I gazed down to where Mount Peirasmos had been. The ground was leveled—Peirasmos was gone. So was the broad mountain with the great cavern and tunnels. I searched for the land that had been Mr. Bartholomew’s estate—nothing but scorched soil. I looked carefully about the decimated face of Thuros. Nothing had survived the fires of this holocaust of things.

Nothing but the followers of the King and the stones they had picked up during the world’s long night.

Suddenly I was yanked back to the present, where I stood outside the great city. I had seen beyond the moment to a time and place yet to come.

Warriors who appeared to be palace guards ushered us into a courtyard fifty feet from the gates of Charis.

“What’s this about?” I asked one of them. “Why can’t we enter Charis now? That’s why we’ve come, isn’t it?”

No one answered me. A warrior sat me down—I could hardly bear it when we were so close to our destination.

My chair, like the others around me, had in front of it a portal, almost like a television screen. When the program began, it showed the events of my life on Earth, seemingly happening in real time. It was unedited—every choice, every incident intact. Yet somehow it moved very swiftly, and I was able to assimilate it all. I viewed it, fascinated, with the objectivity of an outsider, yet the feelings of an insider.