The problem with “the end” of the Bible is that Revelation aka The Apocalypse of John is that the manuscript kind of leaves us with a bunch of loose, loose, loose threads that nobody wants to deal with on a theological basis because it would put everything else leading up to the story’s “conclusion”/the return of Christ, into question. But anyway, I had to figure out what sort of world I was creating by ending The Blessed & Possessed with the final book in the trilogy, The Saints Come Marching.

The conclusion to the second novel in the series, The Delver of Purgatory, brought about a big challenge: how would the return of a literary version of Jesus Christ affect the world space presented in those novels? I discuss that in this blog over here, but one aspect that is unique to itself is understanding that the world goes on in literature. This is true with Tolkien, or McCarthy, or Le Guin. The world goes onward, moves past the present, and continues long past the end credits.

 And Biblically speaking, this is what is predicted at the end of Revelation. The defeat of Satan by a returning Christ and his angels brings about “a thousand years of peace” where the selected few will live in glory with Christ while…

Wait.

A thousand years of peace?

That’s not a lot if you think about it. In fact, if you keep reading, there’s another war because the Dragon gets loose again. And then everything is burnt. But then there is a new heaven and earth.

That’s a lot of conflict for one thousand years of measly peace followed by a clearly symbolic version that John believes what a “new” heaven and earth will be. And honestly, it’s very short.

Humanity innovated (or perhaps even reinvented) agriculture at least ten thousand years ago, and recently archeologist unearthed a human jawbone that may go back a million years. A thousand years, if you think about it on a cosmic scale, is a very, very, very short and small amount of time.

Billions of people dead, the earth destroyed, and every civilization shaken to dust at their foundations—for a thousand years of peace?

Even if we’re being generous with a celestial timescale that elongates every year into a millennia, that’s still a very raw deal.

It may have sounded really good to people living during the worse parts of the Roman Empire, where the idea of living past an imperial behemoth seemed a miraculous thought to itself in the face of discrimination, displacement, and persecution before Constantine came along and used Christ’s ever-popularizing movement to confirm his rule, but this isn’t then, this is now, and we deserve to be treated like we have a base-level of intelligence/i.e. do some math.

(Also, one thing that John warned in Revelation was that church should never assimilate to Rome in any form, which makes Constantine really interesting if you stop and think about everything that follows…)

The truth is, Revelation is a book of symbols, narrative framings, and allusions to the time when it was written, and I think if Christ were to walk around in the real world today he would face a lot of complications in terms of getting us all together and bringing about peace on earth. It’s not going to be all dancing Ewoks and Force ghosts smiling in the background.

But what fertile ground for storytelling.

I’ve already mentioned previously about my Synth Wizards project, which is looking more and more like it will become something called Sorcery Vice, and there is a pair of Urban Fantasy novellas that star a certain Hound of Ulster I’m currently outlining that will take us on a southern-fried Celtic romance that I’m having a lot of fun working out the particulars in the outline. It will require a lot of fun research that won’t be as intense to undertake as The Blessed & Possessed was.

But where else might I go? What does a world full of angels and demons living alongside humans look like? It’s fun to think about an angel making your macchiato down at the café, but what happens when your son brings home his infernal girlfriend who literally has horns and tail? Where do things settle when we realize there really isn’t an end to the story? How does a world adjust to a Messiah in a world of over a billion people believe we are blessed by Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet, and in the works of Moses, or the enlightenment of Buddhas? What if there is someone who might just have all their numbers in ways people can’t even begin to imagine? What would happen if he ran into Krisna?

What if the biggest bad out there wasn’t God or Satan, but something darker? Weirder? What are the bounds of reality? How would a Messiah see us through politics or space exploration or mineral rights or Wall Street? How would he explain the mysteries? How would he explain his infiniteness and his bounds?

How would we deal with it?

I have fields and fields of storytelling to plant, and an entire Blessed & Possessed Universe (perhaps a “DeeviVerse”) to cultivate that honestly excites me more than Patrick’s story ever could. There are stories I want to tell with Deevi akin to Superman, but who is the Batman in this sort of universe? I think Red Son got a lot of things right in many ways…

But the only way those stories get written is if I get writing, so off I go! Please check out The Blessed & Possessed, which includes The Driver of Serpents, The Delver of Purgatory, and The Saints Come Marching, and if you enjoy them, leave a rating or review at your favorite online bookstore! Bother them about it!