[Book.]

Is it a(nother) cruel trick? Is this a fiendish imagination of the invisible angels, that I be frozen in fear without a cloud in the sky, without a worry in the horizon, without any hint of cataclysmic resolution? Am I a mute Cassandra, only able to know the future, not even to speak it to be disbelieved; and even then, that the instantaneous prophecy prove false, after all? Jeremiah complained to his God that He had made him like unto “a drunken man, a man full of wine” — so what has my God made me? I am a frozen man, a man stopped in time, who has never heard the voice from above assuage his madness. Surely the mercy from on high shall merely let me go, trouble me no more with the deeper thoughts, the thoughts too heavy to form into words. At least release me from the gravity, when nothing wicked this way comes.

And it is just then that the ground shakes violently, where I am thrown to my knees.

[UPDATE: This concludes Chapter 2. The whole of what I have so far is here.]