I’ve been hiding out in this shed for six days. My water went dry two days ago, and I ate my last can of chili last night. I’ve been using the watering can as a toilet. It’s starting to fill, and the smell is only getting worse.

The Trinity won’t leave. It’s still out there, clicking around the rubble with its three giant arms. At night I see its holy light peeking through the holes in the shed, like it knows I’m here, just waiting for me to open the door so it can smite me.

The choice is mine to reveal myself. Free will is a part of the equation, a requirement for judgement. It has always been like that because that’s how you designed it, Lord.

* * *

The cultists called them demons, Nanny Fran called them angels, and the rest of the world called them triskeles. But I just call them Trinities. Whatever they’re called, the day they came down to Earth, I had my lips on the pipe for the first time. Thanks to you, Lord, it was also the last.

I was at my friend Aaron’s place outside of town, or I should say his mom’s place. As for the drugs, I’m pretty sure it was his mom’s boyfriend’s stash.

Aaron had been glued to his phone all evening, scrolling until suddenly he read something that turned his face as pale as the powder I was about to light. He reached out and snapped the pipe from my mouth right before I lit the torch. At first I figured he was just being his usual tweaked out self, but there was something different that time, like he was shaking from actual fear instead of just the fentanyl. He started screaming about how he needed to save his supply, told me I could walk home, and showed me the door.

And that was the last I ever saw of my best friend.

I was upset, but not surprised. Aaron had lost his way months earlier, shunned his friends, stole from his family, tried to get me to steal from mine. He even shunned you, God, as I’ve done before myself. The only god he cared about anymore was his fix.

His mom saw me walking on the road as she was returning home from her kitchen job at the old folks’ home. Candy was a kind woman, a functioning junkie whose love for Jesus and her son overpowered her addiction, but I never talked to her much about that.

She rolled down her window to ask what was wrong. When I told her what happened, she started bawling on the steering wheel.

Eventually she collected herself enough to apologize and ask if I wanted a ride home. I told her I’d walk.

With all the times I’ve doubted you, God, thank you for having mercy on me that night. Thank you for taking that pipe out of my mouth.

* * *

I cut through the woods behind the tannery to get home. When I got into town, the roads were busier than usual, and the gas stations and stores were packed with people hoarding bottled water and toilet paper. I checked my phone and saw talk of attacks, explosions, shattered windows, but only in cities. Reports claimed people were dying by the millions. Some said it was World War Three, but others said that was impossible since every city in the world was under attack.

Other people said it was aliens.

I wasn’t so sure about that one. The Bible never mentioned anything about you creating subjects on other worlds, Lord, and your only son didn’t die on a cross to save creatures not made in your image.

When I finally got back to the apartment, Nanny Fran was sitting in her chair with the news on and grandpa’s Remington in her lap, loading it with shells. Judging by the can of grease and the oily paper towels lying around, she’d just cleaned it, too.

On TV, people all over the world were screaming and crying about giant monsters. There was still no footage of the attackers, and no one could describe what they looked like. They knew they were big, though.

There was also plenty of talk of the sounds they made, recordings of the clacking of metal up and down skyscrapers, the whooshing through the sky and breaking the sound barrier, the shattering of windows and eardrums. In most videos I couldn’t hear anything people were saying, with the nonstop sonic booms and background screams drowning out the audio. It all sounded so powerful. Divine.

Nanny Fran was thinking the same thing. She called it a reckoning. She said you had sent your angels to punish humanity for losing its way. That was why it was happening in the cities, because that was where most of the deviants dwelt, and it was only a matter of time before you unleashed your angels on the rest of the world. After all, trespassers had infiltrated our town, same as all the others.

But that left me wondering. Why, Lord? Why would you kill everyone on Earth just to cleanse the unfaithful? Didn’t you promise Noah you’d never do that again after the flood? If you wanted us all killed, wouldn’t you smite us outright? The invasion couldn’t have been a straight punishment, and it wasn’t a cleansing either. No, this was a trial of faith. A test to see who truly loved you, and who was worthy of heaven.

* * *

The internet worked a while longer, and survivors all over the world used it to share intel. Rumor was the monster could spot their victims from miles and miles away like hawks, but way bigger and faster. They’d swoop on anything that moved, from dogs to deer, from cars to drones. If a person so much as peeked around a corner from across the city, the beast would see them and crash into them like a meteor from space.

I saw a viral post from some guy in the desert outside Dubai talking about how he used telescopes to watch the creatures from a safe distance. He counted the seconds it took for them to leap from building to building, and did the math to figure out the monsters could fly nine times the speed of sound. That explained why there were no good clips of the beasts online, since if the creature saw so much as a glimpse of a camera, whether on a phone or a drone or a spy plane, then boom. Instant destruction.

As far as what they looked like, an Australian man supposedly found a way to record one on his phone before it killed him. There was also some aerial footage that went viral before the satellites got destroyed. These photos supposedly showed the monsters bunched together on the tops of skyscrapers, but I didn’t dare look at the photos with my own eyes. It seemed obvious to me you did not intend for humans to gaze upon these entities.

I read descriptions of them, though. People described the monsters as thin, pale starfishes the size of jumbo jets, with three long arms spinning outward in counterclockwise spirals. Some said they had three eyes in their core that shined like little suns. Rumor was those three suns were the last thing a person saw before they died.

Descriptions like that fueled Nanny Fran’s idea that the monsters were angels. I could see where she was coming from, what with the awe these creatures inspired with their very presence on our world. Angels in the Bible took plenty of forms, sometimes with two wings, sometimes four, and other times six. But never three.

People online started talking about how the monsters’ shape was identical to an old pagan symbol called a triskele, a representation of death, rebirth, and continuation. I guess the name stuck, because most people started calling them triskeles.

But I have no interest in giving credit to pagan symbols and false deities. Angels or not, these creatures were sent by you, so it seems clear those three arms are an incarnation of the only three things people should care about, and that’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

* * *

Nanny Fran’s prediction proved true, and the Trinities eventually expanded from the cities to the rest of the world. They did this by building their own towers, taller than anything ever built, then they perched atop these towers to expand their view. First they built inside the cities, then they expanded to the countryside when there was no one left in the city to kill. People online called these towers blood spires.

Word was, a single Trinity could construct a blood spire in just a few minutes, which meant Nanny Fran and I didn’t have long until the Trinities from Indy came down south. Sure enough, three days later, sonic booms and screams started filling the streets of my town. I didn’t dare look at my town’s blood spire, but I could tell from the direction of the sonic booms that the Trinities had built the spire somewhere downtown.

My test had begun.

That was around the time the internet went out. Probably for the best. I’d read rumors about how the Trinities had started to find people by detecting radio signals like cell phones and walkie talkies. Some folks, the same ones who said the Trinities were aliens, said this was how the creatures found Earth in the first place, that they detected our radio signals from light years away.

Nonsense. Since the Trinities were an extension of your will, you probably made the them attack radio signals because you were angry about how your subjects have taken to idolizing the false deities of technology. We worshipped screens instead of our own creator. That’s why I destroyed our cell phones, smashed Nanny Fran’s radio, and unplugged our TV. This was a display of loyalty, Lord. I kept all the windows in the apartment covered so that we might resist temptation to look out at the blood spire, and I made certain Nanny Fran and I stayed indoors while we waited for your trial to pass.

Next day, the power went out for good. The sonic booms had mostly stopped, meaning the Trinities had cleansed most of the town, my neighbors among them. Someone in the trailer park across the road must have slipped up and tried to use a cell phone or radio, because around one in the morning I woke to the sound of their lot getting caved in like a bomb. Debris rained down on the neighborhood as the sound of the Trinity’s three arms swept the ruins for victims, and the sky-shattering sonic boom came seconds later. Then the Trinity zoomed off, a rocket nine times the speed of sound, and that was the boom that shattered the apartment windows.

As for the rest of the neighbors on my street, most of them must have tried to escape. The apartments were quiet, the parking lot empty. This was good news for me and Nanny Fran, since I could scrounge the vacant residences for food after ours had run out. While scavenging I took every precaution to stay out of view of the blood spire. I never looked at it, never even got within line of sight of downtown. Even though the skies had gone mostly quiet, there was always a chance of some leftover Trinities waiting at the top, scanning the landscape, waiting for someone to slip out into the open so they could deal your judgement. The spire represented your power over us, an ever-present reminder of our unworthiness in your presence. Just because I was loyal didn’t mean I was immune to your wrath.

But no matter how respectful I was, no matter the precautions I took, none of it was enough to stop the cultists.

* * *

Sometime after the sewer pipes backed up and flooded the streets, I heard a knock at the door.

Through the peephole I saw a middle-aged woman with two men behind her, one short, one tall, standing around like they were selling cookies. I tried to stay quiet, hoping they’d go away, but she just spoke through the door saying she knew I was there.

I spoke back, told them they were going to get us all killed.

“We all die eventually,” she said.

At that point, I made the mistake of cracking open the door, enough to see that the short man had taken out a handheld radio and was hovering his thumb over the talk button.

I asked what they wanted.

The woman said their goal was to help humanity follow the natural flow of the universe, and the Trinities (she called them triskeles) were representative of that order, the closest thing the universe has to a creator, preserver, and destroyer. I told her I was following the one true creator just fine, and that was when the tall man jammed his boot in the doorway.

As I felt his strength on the other side of the door, I realized he was built like a linebacker. He could have crashed through at any second, but he froze, awaiting the command.

“God is dead,” the woman said. Her voice made her sound like she was someone important before the apocalypse. A lawyer, a manager. Pastor, maybe.

She said she used to be like me. “I worshipped God, trusted in his plan. But when the demons attacked, I realized God was weak. That was why he abandoned us, allowed the forces of Satan and the Antichrist to invade his realm. No god worth loving would allow this to happen to his subjects, would you agree?”

I did not.

She said we we’d all die one way or another, so our only choice was to utilize our free will and acknowledge the inevitability of it all, to accept that the universe would continue without us after we’re gone, to embrace the cycle of finality. Forget the past. Accept the present. Make way for the future. “A future without God.”

I froze and thought hard about her words. I leaned closer to the cracked door with half a mind to spit in her face. Instead, I lowered to her level, told her she didn’t know a damn thing about the meaning of free will. She was just a denier. She and people like her were the whole reason the Trinities were sent here in the first place.

Realizing she wouldn’t be able to corrupt me, her smile wiped away to reveal her true demonic self. Lips curled in wrath, she asked how many people were in the apartment.

I told her it was just me.

The woman took a step backward and nodded to the tall man. With a roar and an explosion of strength, the linebacker crashed the door open with enough force to put me on my back. He stepped inside, put his hulking boot on my chest. The woman entered after him, followed by the short man with the radio whose thumb was still floating over the button.

As the brute’s heel moved up my chest and closer to my throat, the woman offered me two choices. One, to accept the inevitable and live to join them in spreading their “truth” to other survivors. Or two, to refuse their request and die a meaningless death right then and there.

I chose neither. I told the woman it wasn’t too late for her to trust in God, reminding her stooges that if they pressed that radio, all three of them would die, too.

The woman just smiled and said, “That’s the plan. And when that happens, there are always more of us.”

An ear-shattering blast exploded through the apartment. At first I thought a Trinity had seen us, or maybe the short man had activated his radio. But as I felt the tall man’s weight leave my throat, I realized the blast could only be Nanny Fran’s Remington opening a hole in the man’s ribcage. The tall man collapsed sideways, slumping against the doorway as he gasped like a fish. Confusion pulsed in his big eyes as he failed to comprehend what was happening to him. I guess he was scared of death, after all.

Nanny Fran pumped the shotgun and aimed it at her next target, the woman in charge.

The cultist leader screamed to the short man as she fled out the doorway. “SUMMON THE TRISKELES!” She might have escaped, too, if she hadn’t stumbled over the tall man’s body. Nanny Fran shot her as she tripped, and the woman’s body quickly turned rigid.

Only the short man was left. He crawled backward down the hallway like a crab, eyes big as peppermint patties, one hand still clutching the radio. I screamed at my grandma to shoot him, but by the time Nanny Fran had pumped the firearm a second time, he was already holding down the button, yelling something in another language before he was cut off by a blast to his chest.

The radio had been activated. The Trinities were coming.

I had precious moments to make a decision. I spent them looking at my grandma, knowing it was the last time I’d ever see her on Earth.

Was I wrong to run, Lord? Was I a coward to scamper out the front door and sprint for cover while my only blood relative and the only home I ever knew was destroyed by an agent of your will?

* * *

I wondered if the woman was speaking the truth. About oblivion being inevitable.

Thoughts of the cultists bounced in the back of my brain a while longer. Though I saw fear in the short man’s face as he pressed that radio button, dooming himself, I also saw faith. Conviction rang in the woman’s voice as she spewed her blasphemy, “God is dead.”

There’s no sense in trying to hide it, Lord. After Nanny Fran died, I doubted you. What if you had nothing to do with the Trinities? What if it was true that the Devil had overpowered you, sent his demons, and you were forced to abandon us as the ungrateful wretches we are? Or worse, what if the Trinities really were just machines made by space aliens, and you never existed at all?

Those were the thoughts going through my head. As you know, Lord, this was not the first time I have lost faith in you.

On the streets I stayed behind cover, always making sure there was a building or car or tree between me and the spire. Eventually I reached the woods on the west side of town. I kept going west for about a mile, deeper into the woods until the sun vanished behind something to cast a deep, long shadow upon the landscape.

I looked up. The unearthly gray needle was jutting from the distance, piercing the clouds like an elevator to heaven, twice as tall as any structure built by man. Its broad base was like a wall on the horizon, tapering to a point past the clouds to easily eclipse the mid-afternoon sun. This was not my town’s blood spire, but of the next town over.

I gasped, hid my gaze immediately, and fled behind a grove of trees. I had glimpsed the spire for half a second before I realized what I was looking at, but that half second was the most awe-filled experience of my life.

Thank you, Lord, for your mercy. Thank you for sparing me the wrath of the Trinities in that moment of clumsiness. Had there been a single Trinity perched on that blood spire, I would have died.

Closer to town, I settled at a plot of woods where the curvature of the hills and cover of the trees kept me out of view of any blood spires, and these dozen acres were my home for a few months. I was blessed with berries, mushrooms, and plenty of crawfish in a nearby creek. Thanks to your guidance, I even managed to hunt a rabbit with nothing but a knife.

Every few days, I heard some gun shots in the distance, or some sonic booms from downtown or echoing from one of the next towns over, but none of those threats came near my piece of paradise. Sometimes, a sonic boom came right after the gunshots, and I wondered if the incidents were connected.

As for me, I didn’t use guns, but not to avoid the Trinities. I’m pretty sure the Trinities can’t hear.

No, it was the humans who I didn’t want to attract.

* * *

Autumn brought colder air, shorter days, and less food. If I was going to survive the winter, I’d need proper shelter, so I had no choice but to wander from my wooded safe haven and look for buildings in the woods that hadn’t yet been demolished by a Trinity.

I started with the old compound in the woods behind the storage yard. Prior to the apocalypse, I’d heard rumors that house was used as a puppy mill. Judging from the cages filled with rotting dog corpses, I guess those rumors were true.

Later, I tried going to the Church up by the cemetery, the same church where Aaron and I used to go for Sunday school. I could see the building was occupied, but not by worshippers of Jesus.

The cultist woman was right. There were more of them, after all. They painted triskele symbols on the Church’s roof, built three-armed abominations out of scrap metal in the yard. They’d turned your house into an abomination, Lord, a base of operations for their perverted mission. Chaos and metal, I could barely recognize it.

After that, I headed to the DeWitt place to find the home reduced to a pile of rubble. I didn’t find any food or supplies in that mess, but I did find Mr. DeWitt’s corpse with a hole in his head and a .45 in his hand. I’m guessing the sound of the shot must have attracted the cultists, because the bodies of his wife and four kids were nowhere to be found. The Trinities didn’t leave bodies.

Eventually I stumbled on a run-down house I didn’t recognize. The home looked more abandoned than most, its faded wood and decayed walls overgrown with weeds. I staked it out until nightfall to be sure no one was sheltering there, then I approached from the west side toward the house’s back yard, putting the building between me and the local blood spire to provide extra cover.

The house’s wooden porch was riddled with rot. Piles of broken yard tools and weathered furniture mixed with empty chemical containers, stained glassware, and plastic pipes. Tattered tarps barely hung around the porch’s perimeter. At some point those tarps might have protected from prying human eyes, but even after the apocalypse they might have served to cover from any Trinities that happened to fly overhead.

I stood by the screen door to listen for anyone stirring inside. With hunger overpowering my judgement, I reached for the door only to find myself staring down the barrel of a hunting rifle on the other side of the screen.

A pair of quaking, bony arms barely upheld the rifle, attached to a ghoul of a woman whose age was difficult to make out due to her brittle hair and sores that scoured her shadowed face.

I told her I was only looking for food. In a raspy voice, she said she had none to spare.

That was the moment I realized the shell of a human I was speaking to was Aaron’s mom, Candy, seventy pounds skinnier than I remembered.

I looked down the barrel to make eye contact with her. I asked what she was doing there, and if Aaron was with her. Her eyes turned sad, and I could tell in that sadness she recognized me as her son’s childhood friend.

Another voice growled from the shadows behind her, the voice of a man who sounded like he’d either just woke up or was coming down from a high. He mumbled for Candy to shoot, insisting I was with the cult. Candy glanced over her shoulder to tell him the cult only travels in bands of three, and if she shot me, then the only thing bringing the cult to their door would be their own stupidity. The man, pained, said there was nothing for them there, anyway.

I held up my hands, pleading her not to shoot. I could see her thoughts warring in her mind, debating whether or not to squeeze that trigger and be done with me. That was when a sonic boom sounded off to the east, from the local spire, probably. We all jumped. The man cussed from the shadows. For a second, I swore we were all dead.

Somewhere, someone had been judged. But not us.

Candy’s arms began to give in to the weight of the rifle, lowering it so it was pointed somewhere at my lower torso instead of my face. This allowed me to look her properly in the eyes and explain how the cult was responsible for killing my grandma.

I asked if that was how Aaron died, too.

She lowered the rifle. With apathy in her voice, she said it wasn’t the Trinities that killed her son.

Before I could take the conversation any further, the man shambled from the hallway like a ghost, appearing as frail as his grating voice suggested. It was her boyfriend, even more ghoulish than the few times I’d seen him before. He pushed her against the wall, groping for the gun with his skeletal limbs, saying if she wouldn’t kill me, then he would. Candy protested, shouted for me to run away, so that was exactly what I did.

I turned tail, leapt off the porch and sprinted back into the woods, anticipating the gunshot that rang out behind me.

The bullet whizzed past my ear.

Looking after me again, Lord.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out the drugs had gotten their filthy claws into Candy and her boyfriend. With their fentanyl supply cut off, they’d turned back to meth, and judging by all the trash on their porch, they’d been cooking up a homemade supply. My guess is that supply ran dry, and I’d caught them in the middle of some hard withdrawals.

I guess I wasn’t too surprised people cooked even in the end times. In the world before, folks needed release from their meaningless lives, common in towns like mine where there wasn’t much to do, no direction to go. The collapse of society only created less meaning in the world, more reason to light up and forget it all.

I’ve been in that place of darkness myself, Lord. I’ve given in to petty substances that separated me from you because that was how I thought I could find comfort.

But it was never too late for me. And it wasn’t too late for Candy.

She could have killed me. She could have pulled that trigger and blown my head off, and not a soul in this empty world would have cared. But she didn’t. That’s how I knew there was still something good in her, a belief in something greater.

* * *

Before then, I never knew what it meant to be hungry. The places my mind could go to, the things a person would be willing to do for food.

Thank you, God, for that priceless test of faith, one out of many. Thank you for letting me know the true value of the gift of nourishment, and thank you for granting me the wisdom to investigate the tannery where I not only found six unopened cans of chili in a pantry, but also the traps I could use to catch some possums, and a leather jacket and gloves to help me bear the October air.

But that was not the only wisdom you showed me that day. After all, the tannery was just a mile down the road from Aaron’s old home.

When I went to go see his place again, there were ruins where a house was supposed to be. A caved-in roof, not a single wall standing. At first I thought I might have been at the wrong place.

But then I saw the willow in the front yard, the one with the swing we used to play on. That willow was in the middle of the field where we used to catch fireflies. At the side of the building I could see the log lean-to where we snuck our first cigarette, and near there was the opening in the wood line where Candy’s ex-husband took the family dog out to shoot it. Out back was the fire pit where we used to smoke weed and talk about girls, and behind that fire pit was something I hadn’t seen before.

A flimsy piece of rectangular plywood jutted from the forest floor. Something was written across the middle of it, and it wasn’t until I crouched down that I saw it was Aaron’s name carved in thin, barely-legible lettering, along with a poorly aligned scrawling of Corinthians 5:7.

At the foot of the tombstone rested a faded red Bible. The exact same Bible Aaron carried around back when we went to Sunday School together. I’d lost mine years ago, but Candy must have held on to his.

I wonder if his mom ever came to terms with how much her son’s faith had waned over the years.

I remember Aaron blowing smoke around the fire, swearing he wasn’t an atheist. He said he believed you existed, Lord, just not in our lifetimes. “God left us a long time ago,” Aaron said. “Anyone can come to that conclusion just by looking at the state of the world.”

I never really fought him on that. Often times, I agreed with him.

The Trinities didn’t kill Aaron. The fact that there was a body to bury was proof of that. The fentanyl took Aaron’s life. Despair.

No matter how he died, though, if he died without accepting Jesus as his Lord and Savior, if he willfully rejected you until the very end . . . did that mean you sent his spirit to Hell? I couldn’t help but wonder, did my friend fail your test, Lord? Or did I fail my friend?

* * *

The next morning, I returned to the house where I’d encountered Candy. She was still there, standing on the porch outside the tarp, monitoring my approach. No gun this time.

I stopped maybe thirty feet out and raised Aaron’s Bible. I could see in her face she knew what it was.

The boyfriend appeared from under the tarp, looking much calmer this time, as if the withdrawals had stopped entirely. Behind him emerged a third person, a bearded man I didn’t recognize. Though I did recognize the conviction in his eyes.

That was when Candy showed me the walkie-talkie in her hand. She extended it outwards with a locked arm, then yelled across the yard. “Just give in. No point in fighting it.”

I told her there was still light in her. She believed in a greater force. That was why she buried Aaron, put a Bible on his resting place, and inscribed that passage into his tombstone. That was why she had spared me before, just like she was sparing me again.

Candy was still holding out the walkie-talkie, but her arm began to falter as certainty left her face. The only sound was the wet autumn leaves squishing under my boots as I took a few steps closer.

The bearded man took a step forward, too, to let me see he was holding the hunting rifle from before, trying to intimidate me. But I knew it was a ruse. If he wanted to shoot me, he’d have done it already. For their suicide cult, killing people any way other than through the Trinities was against the rules.

I stopped my advance when Candy raised the walkie-talkie again and raised her voice. She claimed a God worth worshipping couldn’t exist in a world filled with so much evil and pain and death. “The Devil’s won,” she said, “and if God wanted his subjects to love him, then now’s the time to show himself and save his children from the forces of evil.” I felt the pain in her voice, Lord. I wanted to cry for her, and that was just what I did. I mourned.

I told her the Devil existed long before the apocalypse. So did evil. Pain. And same as how we faced that pain before, the only thing we could do in this new world was rationalize it with our faith, to believe there was something greater than us, and that we live for a reason.

I promised Candy it was not too late to reach out to you, to redeem herself, to refocus her life toward love as she’d always done before. I told her I believed Aaron did the same in his final moments, and I believed this with all my heart.

I saw the tears shining in her eyes. The boyfriend mumbled something, took a step forward and held out his hand, probably asking for the radio. The bearded man took another step forward, brandishing his firearm.

“Run,” she told me.

Her face illuminated as she smiled, the most wonderful smile I’d seen in my life, eyes still red but her face bright as heaven and flowing with tears of joy. I smiled too, for the first time in a long time.

She repeated. “Run! Run and hide!” She said she’d give me a head start, but I would have to be fast.

The boyfriend cursed. The cultist with the rifle stood stunned, not knowing what to do.

My eyes drew to an open tool shed maybe a hundred feet off the south side of the house. With no time to think, I sprinted for it, cradling Aaron’s Bible like a football. A shot went off, probably a trigger-happy reaction on the part of the bearded man. In the corner of my eye, both men were dogpiling on Candy to try and control the walkie-talkie, and the last thing I saw was Candy’s hand raising the walkie-talkie up like a torch, pushing her thumb down on the button.

The second I closed the shed, the Trinity made its landing, and the muffled screams of the two men were replaced by the sound of an exploding house.

The earth quaked. Debris and dirt launched into the shed while the force of the impact tore several panels from the shed’s roof like a massive gale of wind, but the shed’s walls remained barely intact.

Only after the dirt settled did the sonic boom finally arrive. After that, all I heard were the mechanical motions of the three-armed giant atop the ruins, squirming around, settling into the rubble.

And there the Trinity remained.

* * *

I am blessed to finish writing this under the light of a full moon shining through the tattered roof, and under the illumination of the Trinity as it continues to scan the area with its sun-like eyes, waiting.

At first, I was confused about why you continued to spare me.

You permitted me to gaze upon a blood spire and walk away unharmed. I was present when your Trinities were summoned, not once, but twice, and both times you allowed me to escape. I wondered, why me, Lord? Why did I deserve these mercies?

But the more I think about Candy’s moment of salvation, her beaming smile of enlightenment and truth, the more I realize the reason you let me get this far was so I could help Candy see her son again.

I’ll get there soon, myself.

In the six nights I’ve sheltered in this shed, I’ve read Aaron’s Bible, cover to cover. It’s been the first time I’ve ever read the entire book, and I’ve learned a lot. There were many preconceptions I had about the Bible that were not true, words and phrases I was expecting to see that I did not. One of those things was a mention of the Holy Trinity.

Yes, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each mentioned by themselves, but there is no named force uniting the three as one. Turns out, the word “Trinity” is just another invention by man, something to help us make sense of it all.

This goes to prove, you don’t send us symbols, God. You don’t send us tests. Everything in this world is already a symbol, everything is already a test, because everything is made and decided by you.

There was one more thing I noticed wasn’t in the Bible, a certain phrase: “God never gives us things we cannot bear.”

Those words are nowhere to be found. Nothing even close. Maybe the saying was just something people told themselves so they could cope with the weight of the world, a made-up mantra to give an illusion of hope in the face of suffering.

It makes sense that it’s not true. After all, why should the difficulty of our challenges have any bearing on our faith? You create our path, and the only choice we tiny creatures have is how we choose how we walk it. I’m choosing to trust in my faith, to trust in love, and this choice fills my heart even as my stomach goes empty.

I have made mistakes. I have sinned. I have doubted. But those transgressions led me here, where no matter what happens, no matter the hardships I face or the death that ensues, my love for you is greater than it ever has been, and I can say with overpowering warmth in my heart my life is complete. There’s no more reason to fight the inevitable.

Inevitable. I guess the cultists were right about that part.

The radiance from your angel overpowers the moonlight, peeking through the wood panels, beckoning me to step outside. What I write here in the margins of this Bible are my final words and thoughts, as they were Nanny Fran’s, as they were Candy’s, as they were Aaron’s.

I am going now to enter your light, God.