It is no small thing to be used by God.
Particularly not when he uses you to annihilate an entire city.
Powerful, scenic, and lush, the volcano had graced the Sodomic plain since time immemorial. Placed there by God himself, its main purpose was beauty—a part of the geography intended to elevate people’s understanding of the divine, and inspire them to seek communion with the Lord.
Death and destruction had never been part of the plan.
The volcano had enjoyed its quiet existence on the plain, and had watched with interest as various civilizations rose and fell. Each was unique and beautiful in its own way, and each had special ways of worshipping Creator. The volcano loved watching what each coming civilization would do, what resources it would use to support itself, and how its culture and personality would develop.
Millennia passed, and it never used its volcanic capabilities. It became so dormant and peaceful, it almost forgot it had them.
Things might’ve continued peacefully forever, had it not been for one small problem: a war in Heaven. The Fallen One, as he was referred to, was cast down to earth. From the moment he took ownership of that domain, people began to have problems.
Everything had come to a head once before, a few centuries ago. Mankind had become so horrible that God had opened the wellsprings of the deep, flooding everything.
Few had survived. The volcano had been relieved to see the waters recede. It had missed watching humanity learn and grow.
But things had been different this time.
With the Fallen One on earth, dark beings began to mate with humans. The result were great beasts with the mortality of men, but the strength of demigods. Such creatures were called the nephilim.
Some looked as though humans had crossed with saber tooth tigers, buffaloes, bears, and the like. Their paws contained talons that could kill a man with one swipe. Others more closely resembled birds. They had feathers and wings, and some had beaks, while others had the heads of men and animals.
Some had tails, others not. Some were various types of centaurs, with the head of a man but the body of a beast. Others reversed the trend, and had the head of a beast but the body of a man. These would be memorialized in murals and cave paintings, much to the confusion of future archaeologists.
Because of their spiritual nature, each nephal was a demigod over a specific area of expertise. Had they stayed in heaven, this would’ve become part of a divine plan to teach and save humanity. Because they did not, it instead became part of a satanic plan to destroy them. Each had a great propensity for violence, and each had a deep-seated inner sense that at some point in their distant collective past, they had been disenfranchised. Each and every one of them had an inner yearning for a glorious destiny in the spirit realm.
Bereft of God’s light, a caste system developed. Due to their divine ancestry, nephilim were considered superior to humans, and held all positions of authority within the system. These were the politicians, bankers, scientists, and artists. They made the rules, had the breakthroughs, and created society as they wished it to be.
The humans, for their part, were the farmers, merchants, and shepherds. They lived their lives at the whim of the higher-ups, following the laws they implemented, and being the workers on whose backs the civilization were built. They didn’t fraternize often with the nephilim, but kept to themselves in pubs and alleyways, accepting their bleak existence, and doing what they could with their paltry lives, until they met their inevitable end.
In the midst of this madness, humanity struggled to retain the gift of God’s light it had once so powerfully and simply worshipped. It forgot the goodness of God, and settled instead for the goodness of man—a force that was fleeting, inflexible, unreliable, and not worth anything in the spiritual realms at all.
Dismayed by the path humanity had chosen, the volcano looked up to God for answers. God spoke to it, as he does to all his creation, and told it he had a special assignment for it. “The day will come when I will bring justice to this land,” he said. “I will wipe out its sin, and humanity will come back to me once more.”
“When will this happen?” Asked the volcano.
“No one knows the day or the hour,” said the Lord. “When the time comes, I will speak to you. You will know what to do.”
The volcano smiled. It had complete trust in its Creator. Then it went back to being a peaceful sunny volcano on an innocent, fertile, plain. It watched as more people came to make their lives there. They didn’t seem as happy, caring, or carefree as they had been in the past. But it trusted God and waited. Grieved though it was to know the eventual fate of the cities, it knew that when it was time, God would move, and everything would work itself out, exactly as God had said it would.
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