Page Two.

The Storm moved in darkly. The rain-pregnant clouds hung so low that as I lifted my hand to see if I could touch them, an icy darkness enveloped them. The air around me twisted and contorted to my trembling frame. The darkness cut through my cold skin. Freezing my hot blood into scabbed and oozing slashes. I tried to breath in heavily and cold dark tar filled my lungs. The dark of the Storm was eating me alive. 

December faded away into nothing but a whisper of days gone by. As January approached I wanted, dreamed, ached to change the world. I had read of things that tore open the very epitome of my soul. It had peeled back the naïve scabs that covered my eyes and revealed the bloody truth of this life I had chosen. I wanted to wear the shackles of the oppressed and feel the hot embers of torture and martyrdom for the Sun. I walked day by day with Him and had seen things that He revealed only to me. I wept with the chained. I smelled their dungeons and felt through the lies of their captors. I wanted that life…more than anything.

The Storm covered every inch of the land. It tore through the flowers, strangling the very life from their petals, turning them to ash and dirt. The trees that once breathed and stretched, stood splintered and stranded in their own personal hell. They stood no chance against the Storm. The grass became brittle and hard. Everything died in the wake of the Storm. I watched as it approached me and fell to my knees in submission.

The Sun saw my potential and as the days went by and the Storm grew closer and closer, He asked again and again if I was ready.

I thought I was. 

"A man really believes not what he recites in his creed, but only the things he is ready to die for." - Tortured for Christ