The End

by Justin Chiang

  the end.

  Copyright © 2014 by Justin Chiang

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Author's Note

  When I was a teenager I wrote a story called Angel Haven. I thought it would be cool if witches were the good guys and angels were the bad guys. There were a lot of religious undertones woven in as well since it was written around the time when a lot of rapture movies and books were coming out. As a play on that storyline, I asked the question, what if the Rapture event was really caused by some evil being rather than God calling home his flock?

  At the end of the day the entire story was marred by poor grammar (this is not to say that I got any better over the last decade), weak immature dialogue, and forgettable characters. On top of that it was self-published and very expensive, so fortunately, very few people actually read it. A few years after I wrote it I discontinued it and had the print-on-demand companies take it out of their catalogs. Last year I decided to make it available for $0.99 on amazon.com/kindle so that it still existed but at a much better price point. In addition to that, I continually make it free to download as well. The first time I made it free over 2,000 people downloaded it in less than 3 days. This inspired me to rewrite the story.

  For those of you reading this now and who read Angel Haven, what you hold in your hand (or see on your screen... or whatever), can be considered Book 3 in the Angel Haven story as it ties indirectly to the events of the previous books... (more on that in a minute.)

  For those that have not read Angel Haven... I might re-edit it one day but for now, I wouldn't bother reading it. Here's all you need to know from the original.... the story took place on Earth in the 20th century. A regular guy finds out he is actually a magical being and travels to Angel Haven to find out more. He gets there, he finds others like him, and he has minimal training before he has to fight his enemy. The enemy uses their power to eliminate all human life from the planet (the magical beings not being considered human, but a different species, remain.) There's a battle and a temporary solution is put in place to hold off the enemy.

  Seventeen years passes. The world is unbalanced and magic has infused itself into everything. The world is very strange now. Children from Book 1 are now main characters and are gathering forces to take care of the enemy (that is of course back and stronger than before) once and for all. I think I went a little nuts with the fantasy element and might have tried a little too hard on the sci-fi element, but it is what it is. At the end there's an epic battle. The good guys lose... but they use their magical power to go back in time to the very beginning of their kind so that they can prevent the events that destroyed the world. That's pretty much it.

  At the end of the prologue of the original story I wrote "You’ll see; it'll all come together in the end." It's this line that inspired the title of the following story. As book 3, we now get to find out what happens to the world now that Sam and his friends went back in time to change things... as a standalone story, well, let’s just pretend this is what I meant to write the first time around. Some of the characters might be familiar to those that read the first two stories but a lot can change when you alter the past so you never know what will happen. I’ll make no apologies for this one. Love it or hate it, I had fun writing it. But if you still don’t like it, hopefully you downloaded it for free!

  xi (intro 1)

  In the beginning... or at least since the beginning of recorded time, people have been trying to predict the end of the world.

  About 30 CE (Common Era) the New Testament and specifically Yeshua of Nazareth (when interpreted literally) states that "God's Kingdom" would arrive quickly "...This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." Given that the life expectancy in those days was little over 30 years, Jesus appears to have predicted his own second coming sometime during the 1st century. It didn't happen.

  Around 60 CE, when interpreting the Epistles of Paul of Tarsus literally, his writings seem to imply that Jesus would return and usher in a rapture during the lifetime of anyone living in the middle of the 1st century. Maybe it came and went?

  During 2nd Century CE Prophets of the Montanist movement predicted that Jesus would return sometime during their lifetime and establish the New Jerusalem in the city of Pepuza in Asia Minor. I guess they should've just established it themselves.

  By 365 CE a man by the name of Hilary of Poitiers announced that the end would happen that year. Wrong again.

  500 CE marked the first year-with-a-nice-round-number-panic. The antipope Hippolytus and an earlier Christian academic Sextus Julius Africanus had predicted Armageddon at about this year.

  992... Good Friday coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation; long believed to be the event that would bring forth the Antichrist, and with it the end-times events foretold in the book of Revelation. Maybe the Antichrist had food poisoning that day.

  1000-JAN-1: European Christians predicted the end of the world would fall on this date. As the date approached, Christian armies waged war against many Pagan countries in order to convert them all to Christianity before Christ returned. Many Christians gave their possessions to the Church in anticipation of the end. Unfortunately, when Jesus didn't show, the church did not return the gifts. Serious criticism of the Church followed. The Church reacted by exterminating the heretics (and keeping their stuff).

  1179: John of Toledo predicted 1186 would end the world based on the alignment of many planets at that time. The planets did align so he was only half wrong.

  1284: Exactly 666 years after Islam was founded, Pope Innocent III decided the world would end... but it didn't.

  1346: The black plague spread across Europe killing a third of the population. This was seen as one of the signs that the end of the world was immanent. Unfortunately, the Christians had been killing all of the cats fearing that they were the familiars of Witches and the fewer the cats, the more the rats (and it was the rat fleas that spread the black plague).

  1669: Believers in Russia predicted the end of the world would occur this year. Between 1669 and 1690 over 20,000 of them burned themselves to death in order to protect themselves from the Antichrist... who was a no show.

  1843-MAR-21: The founder of the Millerite movement predicted that Jesus would come on this date. A very large number of Christians accepted his prophecy. When Jesus did not return, Miller predicted 1844-OCT-22 which is now called "The Great Disappointment," many Christians sold their property and possessions, quit their jobs and prepared themselves for the second coming. Nothing happened.

  1914 was one of the more important estimates of the start of the war of Armageddon by the Jehovah's Witnesses. When that didn't pan out they predicted 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. Their current prediction is exactly 6,000 years after the creation of Eve and since we don't know when that happened that could be any minute now.

  1919: Meteorologist Albert Porta predicted that the conjunction of 6 planets would generate a magnetic current that would cause the sun to explode and engulf the earth on DEC-17. Must have been some other Earth.

  1999: The world was going to end due to nuclear disaster caused by a computer glitch in old COBOL and FORTRAN systems. Etchings in a cave under the town of Abbey Downs prophesied a significant number of events correctly, all but the end of world event of 1999 that is...

  2011: Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster, predicted Jesus would return on May 21, 2011. Again some Christians sold their belongings, quit their jobs, and said their go
odbyes. On May 22, 2011 he predicted Jesus would return on October 21, 2011. He retired as a broadcaster on October 16, 2011. The world did not.

  2012: December 21, 2012 11:11 UTC marks the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar, or maybe a collision with a planet called Nibiru, or the Earth will be destroyed by some solar flares and shit.

  2013: No current predictions exist and *SPOILER ALERT* Jesus isn't coming to your New Years party this year either.

  Here's how it really went down...

  xii (intro 2)

  A girl stares into a crystal shard and all at once sees a young boy, a man, a baby, a rebellious teen, a father with his children and then nothing. Not many people but many versions of the same person. She's taken to calling him Jacob because he reminds her of her father who was taken from her so long ago. But this is not his name. She stares again into the depths of the shard and focuses on the young man. He's in his twenties now and the shard locks onto this version of him. His dark hair is matted to his forehead by rain and his face is stricken with grief. He's surrounded by gray. He is alone. Before him stands a mahogany coffin and inside it, the girl knows, lies his Mother.

  The girl empathizes with the young man but she doesn't understand, not truly. She is just a child and while she too has lost a parent she doesn't yet fathom the existence of death. She is sad not because of his loss but because he looks sad. She swipes her finger down the crystals face and it begins its familiar kaleidoscopic slideshow. The young man turns away from the coffin and begins to walk away. The clarity of the moving images dissolves for just a moment before he reappears. He is a boy again and he is smiling. He is surrounded by people. His mother is there and she's smiling back at him but this is not what the girl is focused on. Her eyes are affixed to the man behind them, his own smile obscured by a beard. Now he's clapping his hands, everyone is clapping their hands.

  The shard glows, the clapping stops and the images blur for a moment and then the boy’s mother is there. She is very pregnant and the boy is nowhere to be seen. She is not alone. Several others are with her, women and men. The bearded man is there but he is younger and he has no beard. He is shaking hands with another man. The young boy’s father. The boy’s father looks overjoyed. The images blur and the boy appears again. He looks distraught. His mother is throwing things into a bag, clothes and such. Now the boy looks scared. His mother is crying. The bearded man is there again but he is no longer smiling. There is no more clapping. There is no longer joy in his eyes. The bearded man picks up a ring that the boy’s mother has thrown violently into the street. It is silver and has a dark red jewel in the center of its base. He puts the ring in his pocket.

  The boy is now a man again. He is standing amid the trees in a park of some sort. The sky around him is tinged green and his hair is blowing wildly in the wind. He is not alone. The girl notices he is wearing his mother’s ring. The woman behind him grasps his hand in hers and the images blur once more.

  "Tessa!" calls a voice from below.

  "Coming!" the girl calls back. She places the crystal shard inside a velvet lined box as if it were just another trinket and not a window into the boundless tapestry of someone's life and shuts the box. Tessa's long hair billows behind her as she runs downstairs to greet her mother. The shard continues to glow inside the box. If the young blonde girl were still looking upon it she would see a burning building on its surface. The bearded man is there. His name was Jacob. He is yelling something to the boy's father who is also there. But the boy's father isn't listening. He is entering the building and no matter who looks upon its surface the shard will never show him coming out again. His name was Samael.

  The year is 1996, the east coast is just getting over one of the worst blizzards in American history. Bill Clinton is campaigning for a second term as President of the United States. Slash is still part of Guns N' Roses, Tupac is still releasing albums, and the Steelers fall to the Cowboys in Super Bowl XXX. Osama bin Laden is penning "The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places," a call for the removal of American military forces from Saudi Arabia. There is no ground zero in New York City. Facebook does not exist because Mark Zuckerberg is only twelve years old. Two Stanford students have just begun a research project called Google. GPS is being introduced to the general public. Pluto is still a planet and somewhere in the central United States, where a vast forest of majestic trees surrounds the town of Abbey Downs, sits a little girl named Tessa Dunham. She is seven years old and just moments ago she was gazing into a magical shard of crystal at the life of Evan Thomas.

  Through the magical powers of narration we look upon her now in a field of green grass as her mother spreads a red and white checked blanket on the ground next to her for a picnic. And through those same powers we will leave Tessa and her mother to their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to explore the town of Abbey Downs where she and many generations of her family have lived for a very long time.

  To an outsider, Abbey Downs is just like any other small mid-western town in America. There are homes, there are farms, and there are people. There is a strong sense of community amid the townsfolk. If we were to soar over Abbey Downs to get an aerial view of its boundaries we would see a vast patch of forest cut down the middle by a stream of water and encircled in unusually large stones for the area. At the heart of it all is the local center of commerce. If we zoom in now we can see there is a stone statue of the founder in the center of a plush park.

  To the west of the park is a strip of buildings containing Barney's Alehouse, the Shop N Ride, and the post office. To the east you will find the brand new library and next to that is Stacked, a combination bookstore and coffee house. On one corner is the Gas N Go, sister company to the Shop N Ride, both venues aptly named based on the subtle feelings towards out-of-towners. To the north is City Hall, the local Police Station, and a paved road out of town. East of that are two school buildings, K-8 and 9-12.

  To the south are the many homes of the residents of Abbey Downs and on the top of the tallest hill overlooking it all stands Dunham Manor. This is where Tessa and her mother were when we left them. At the edge of their property where the field meets the forest there's a small graveyard of Dunham's past. Among the scattered stones is an epitaph for Jacob Dunham, Tessa's father. It reads simply, "Until we meet again." above the markings of 1952-1994. Tessa is kneeling here now. She places a ring of woven flowers on the ground in front of the stone before walking back towards the large white house. The flowers she left are still glowing as she enters the back door, their life force not yet departed.

  Today marks the day that Tessa first learns the truth about Abbey Downs. We've traveled back in time in a fashion using our own crystal shard to peer into Tessa's life one significant moment at a time so that we can learn alongside her. We watch now as she and her mother, Annabelle, descend the stairs into the cellar. Unlike normal cellars this one doesn't end at the boundaries of the foundation of their house but instead continues on into a cavern. The cavern is illuminated by natural light, fire mostly, but occasionally one will find wisps of light that lead you deeper still into the otherwise dark abyss.

  Tessa is no stranger to this place, in fact she's had many lessons here in her short life. Lessons about the world. How things are and how things are thought to be. In her world, mystical forces are as common a thing as Play-doh or the internet. Her mother calls it catalysis and explains it as the force upon the energy that binds all things. The truth about Abbey Downs is that it isn't just a small town in the state of Missouri but has in fact been there since the beginning of time. The way Annabelle explains it is like this:

  In the beginning there were as many Gods in the universe as there are stars but they grew old. They were dying. As with any creature great or small, in an attempt to prevent their own extinction, the remaining Gods banded together to create life. They formed the planets to create an orbital balance around their life force bound together by the dark matter of the universe. The Gods
each chose a star as their own and joined the orbit that would keep them alive forever. But it wasn't enough. They couldn't thrive this way. Life for them was hollow. Their stars barren. So they came together again as one.

  When the Gods came to Earth, they brought life in all forms with them, scattering themselves across land, sea, and sky in all shapes and sizes. Throughout the ages, the Gods fed on one another. Mated with one another. Evolved together. This was natural, not good nor evil. There was balance. Everything on the planet was integrated. If one God's force was physicality another God's force was sentience. They thrived together until they found that the more they fed the more powerful they became. That the balance wasn't entirely necessary for eternal life as long as you were willing to sacrifice everything to obtain it.

  The Gods sought to destroy the evil force that elicited these thoughts, these cravings... but it was impossible for they would destroy with it the balance of all they had created and cause the very downfall they were trying to prevent. Instead they found a way to contain it. The containment would remain intact as long as the balance was present... but if that balance were to ever shift, one way or the other, the containment would cease and the darkness would be released. The containment of that force has had many names over time and has taken many forms but its current name is Abbey Downs.