The Bible 2: Return of the Savior

Book I'm working on. A sequel to The Bible. This is what I have so far

The Bible 2
Return of the Savior




The Book of God

Chapter One

In the beginning, there was God.

And God was alone, for there was nothing else—no stars, no time, not even the thought of time. There was no darkness, for darkness is a thing, and there were no things. There was only God, and not even that quite yet.

Then God said unto the nothing, “Let Me be.” And He was.

God beheld Himself, and saw that He was confusing. For He had no shape, nor name, nor place to stand. He did not know if He was before or after, for before and after had not been invented.

So God created Beginning, and set it at the start of things. And lo, the Beginning was very beginning-like.

And God said, “Let there be Me, properly this time,” and He fashioned Himself with care and a small flourish, as a painter signs their name upon a blank canvas that does not yet exist.

And God saw Himself, and He saw that He was good—and said, with no small pride, “Now that is something.”

Being Himself and none other, God found that He was excellent company. But He was alone, and having no audience for His brilliance, no ear to hear His jokes nor eye to marvel at His splendor, He became most ineffably, eternally, divine-beyond-divinely bored.

So God said, “Let there be Spectacle,” and there was. He flung out stars like seeds, spun galaxies like tops, folded time into neat layers, and unfolded it again just to watch what might fall out.

God saw the heavens above the heavens, and the realms that have no names, for they had always been—unmade and unmaking, outside the tick of any clock. These were not created, for they cannot be. They simply are, as a circle is round and a joke is funny before it is told.

Seeing all this, God declared it good—but not in a quiet, satisfied way. He laughed. For it was strange and shimmering and made no sense at all. And God delights in nonsense, when it dances.

Then God looked upon the world and said, “Let it be lively.” And the world teemed with creatures of every sort, and humans, who immediately began building things and misunderstanding everything.

And God said unto the humans, “Do as you like, but know that I am watching, and I might interfere—sometimes for justice, sometimes for jest, and sometimes because I simply feel like it.”

For the world was not a machine, but a story. And the story was not written, but told, again and again, by tongues that had not yet been born.

Thus began the days of the world, which are also nights. Thus began the telling, which never ends.

Far below, the dust began to stir.

Chapter Two

For a while, the world was good, and God was amused. Many stories were told, many books were written, and many ridiculous rituals were invented in His honor. And God delighted in these—especially the ones where people wore absurd hats, draped themselves in long robes, and pretended to understand the deeper meaning of it all. The more ridiculous, the better. After all, what was the point of creating a universe if not for a bit of entertainment?

But there was one thing God did not find amusing—Moloch.

Moloch was a problem. He never listened to anything God said. He’d show up to the Kingdom of Heaven, sure, but only to wander around aimlessly, poking at the stars and doing his own thing. As though he hadn’t just been invited to participate in the grandest of divine projects. He’d spend all his time fiddling with cosmic trinkets and ignore the important stuff, like, oh, I don’t know, helping God run the universe?

And so, after some time, God had had enough. “Thou shalt not worship Moloch,” He declared. “For Moloch is kind of a dick.” There. That should clear things up.

Now, it had long been said that the Lord is a jealous God. But He never liked that. It sounded needy. God wasn’t jealous—He just really didn’t like Moloch, because Moloch was an incessant pain in the divine backside. That’s all there was to it.

In those days, God was everywhere. After all, He was omnipotent. But even omnipotence has its limits. Though He was perfect, infinite, and unfathomably wise, God was not the type to just sit around. Eventually, He became disenchanted with His creation. He decided to take a break and focus on other projects. After all, creating the universe was only the beginning. He had a long list of unfinished business, and frankly, it was a little more pressing than answering prayers about lost car keys. Plus, He still had the Kingdom of Heaven to manage.

And beyond that, He also had a Son to raise.

It is not widely known—because God likes to keep His personal life to Himself—but the Lord is a single Father. Thus, the Son sits at the right hand of God’s throne in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Mostly, God liked to think of Himself as a cool dad. He didn’t expect too much. He was always there when His Son needed Him. But it wasn’t easy. Running the universe, ruling the Kingdom of Heaven, and raising a child alone? That’s a lot, even for a deity. Still, it was to be known that His word was law. It was, after all, the Word of God.

Eventually, though, even fatherhood and cosmic administration couldn’t stave off the boredom.

So, God did what any sensible being would do—He sent His Son into the world. The plan was simple: the Son would incarnate, sprinkle divine grace around like confetti, and teach the humans how to fix things for themselves.

But as usual, the humans didn’t quite get it.

When God’s only Son arrived to save the world He so loved, the humans, in their infinite wisdom, mocked Him, nailed Him to a cross, laughed about it, and then went back to their petty squabbles.

And so, the Son had to leave.

With His departure, the world was left to fend for itself. Things went downhill fast. People became obsessed with the most trivial details of God’s words, arguing endlessly about what exactly “the Lord’s Prayer” meant, while somehow missing the fact that it was about, you know, love and forgiveness.

Others gave up entirely, turning away from the divine altogether—perhaps because they hadn’t received an immediate return on their investment in faith.

But all hope was not lost. For the Son would return, just as He had promised.

There was just one small problem: God’s house has strict rules. And a rigorously enforced curfew.

As it turns out, the Lord’s schedule is very tight, and the divine bureaucracy is a little more complicated than the average human might expect.

So, before His Son could come back and save the day, He needed a covenant—a new divine mandate. Not just permission, but an agreement of purpose.

But God didn’t do that anymore.

So, seeing His Son’s dilemma, God said only this: “Go speak to My brother Bob.” And thus it was so.

Chapter Three

The Son of God went by many names: The Lamb, The Light of the World, the Christ. But the name He chose for Himself was I Am—a name older than time, born from the fire that once spoke from a bush, a name that meant not just “I exist,” but “I am what is.” It was the name that echoed through the ages, and the name that would return.

Long ago, I Am walked the Earth as the man called Jesus. He came not to destroy, but to fulfill. He healed the sick, lifted the lowly, and spoke truth in parables no one quite understood.

This was the Second Covenant—a promise not written in stone, but carried in the heart, not enforced through wrath, but offered in love. It was grace for the unworthy, and forgiveness for the foolish.

And what did humanity do with it? They laughed. They mocked. They nailed Him to a cross and watched Him die.

After that, He became a Buddhist, then returned to the Kingdom of Heaven and resumed His seat at the right hand of His Father. And the Earth—bruised but unbroken—carried on, the way Earth always does.

God, for His part, was done. He had tried twice now: first with laws, then with love. The people heard neither. And so the Lord God, eternal and perfect, renounced His title as Lord of All That Exists in the World. He retreated from human affairs, for their prayers rang hollow, and their rituals were louder than their hearts. The spirit of God had been lost amidst incense smoke and theological debate. So God turned away.

But there was another. I Am had never forgotten the world. Though He sat in glory, He looked upon Earth with sorrow. He wanted to return, to walk again among the people. But there was a problem: He needed a covenant. An official mandate. Divine authorization. In short—He needed the Lord.

And God? God didn’t do that anymore. Without His Father beside Him, I Am had no covenant. And without a covenant, there would be no return. No redemption. No salvation.

Seeing His Son’s dilemma, God said only this: “Go speak to My brother Bob.” And thus it was so.

Bob was, to put it simply, not what most expected of a deity. He wasn’t exactly majestic. He didn’t speak in thunder or burn with glory. But he was technically divine, fully authorized, and next in line for the throne. God’s brother. Uncle to I Am. And now, thanks to the resignation of God the Father—Lord of Heaven and Earth.

So I Am came to him, not as a beggar but as an advocate. He spoke of the world’s decay, its wandering, its desperate need for a new way.

Bob considered this, sipping from a heavenly mug. “You want a covenant?” he asked.

“I want the world to live,” said I Am.

And Bob, after a long pause, nodded. “Alright,” he said. “But this time… we do it my way.”

And so began the Third Covenant.

No trumpets. No burning bushes. Just two figures stepping into the wind.

I Am would return—not as the Lamb, not as the lesson, not as a sermon wrapped in flesh—but as the reckoning.

He remembered.

The laughter. The betrayal. The long nails. The longer silence.

He remembered mercy met with mockery, love turned spectacle. He would not forget.

This time, there would be no parables.

This time, the stories would bleed.

Beside Him walked Bob—the Uncle, the last deity left standing. He wore a cracked leather jacket and carried a clipboard stamped with divine clearance, sipping holy coffee from a thermos labeled “#1 Godbro.”

He was not majestic, but he got the job done.

As they descended, clouds coiled and parted. The sky made way. Heaven didn’t roar—it muttered, low and dangerous, like the fuse of a firework that knows exactly when it will burn.

The Third Covenant was not carved into stone, nor handed down on tablets.

It was written in footsteps across scorched earth.

The new rule was simple: If you want Heaven, you go through Him.

And He is not in the mood to forgive.

The meek had their time.

Now comes the reckoning.



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In the middle, the world continued on. Things were happening. Even more things were about to happen. Everything was as it was.

In those times, before the land was settled, before the wilderness was tamed, before life was manufactured, packaged, and sold on a department store shelf, many tales were told around campfires of the Savior’s return, many songs were sung across the plains. One which was popular on the Western Frontier was this:

The Ballad of Cowboy Jesus

The day was hot.

The sun was orange.

The blood dripped from his crown of thorns,

As he trekked his trail on down the dusty tracks.

He was dressed in black.

He was dressed to kill.

He would shoot his six-guns just for thrills,

Point `em up at the heavens

Yellin’, “Yeeeeeehaw!

The Savior is back!”

Well, he rode into town at about high noon,

And he walked inside of the ol’ saloon,

Spit in the spittoon,

Looked the barman in the eye,

Said, “I’m feelin’ mighty thirsty, and my mouth is real dry.”

Then the barman said back,

“I got no whiskey or wine,

Just a dirty old rag soaked in vinegar brine.”

But the Savior didn’t mind.

He just smiled and tipped his hat,

Walked back over to the doors,

By the spittoon where he spat,

Said, “If you’d please, Mr. Barkeep,

Can I have an empty glass?”

Then he dunked it down inside

Of that spittoon made of brass.

When he pulled it out again

It was full,

But not of spit.

That old glass was full of whiskey.

No one knew just how he did it.

The Book of the Disciples
Chapter One
The Zealots

In the days of the Dust and the Drift, when the world groaned beneath the bootheel of the Federal Legion, there were men who remembered freedom—not as a doctrine, but as a breath.

And among these men were the Zealots.

They did not preach. They did not wait. They moved like whispers in the canyons and struck like serpents from the stone. They were few, but they were fierce. And they answered to no flag but the one painted in blood across the stars.

On a sun-split hillside, crouched in the shade of broken granite and gnarled shrubs, Jude the Watcher waited.

He was silent. Always silent. His breath slow, his heartbeat steady, his eye fixed like prophecy on the barracks down below.

Two Centurions kept guard at the outpost gate—not the common dust-walkers of the Legion, but marked men, decorated in iron and pride. Men who had done terrible things in the name of order. If they were here, then there was something beneath that roof other than paperwork and rations. Jude knew it. He could feel it in the way the ground refused to settle.

Simon, his brother in cause and chaos, was on his way.

They were only two, but they moved like a dozen. Trained not in academies but in fire—disciples of the Fourth Philosophy, forged in the wilderness beyond the edges of the Federal maps. A lineage born of Judas the Galilean, who taught that no man should bow to kings or pay coin to tyrants.

Judas’s name was beginning to stir in whispered circles—traders, shepherds, rabbis murmuring it like a curse or a prayer.

Jude and Simon met just once beneath the cracked hush of twilight.

“You know what to do,” Simon whispered, voice like gravel over gospel.

Then they parted.

Each one vanishing into the rocks, into the cacti, into the very spine of the land.

They laid their snares—planted misdirections, caches of stolen arms, triggers tied to broken branches and prayer beads. And when the dust rose and the Legion came to reckon with it, they would not find men. They would find ghosts.

For in those days, the West was not yet tamed. The Federal lines stretched farther each year, like cancer creeping toward the sacred heart of the earth. But it had not yet claimed the badlands. And out there, under burning sky and bone-dry wind, men like Jude and Simon did not ask permission to fight.

They were not soldiers.

They were not citizens.

They were harbingers of the End Times.

And they had come to make war.

Chapter Two

Before their plan could take breath, the ground itself began to shudder. Not with thunder, but with the rhythm of boots—many, countless, a full detachment on approach.

Simon saw it first. Cresting the ridge: the eagle-standard, the black-plumed helms, the cold silence of a marching Legion.

They would have to retreat.

The thought was not spoken, but shared between the disciples like a pulse. The trap was too thin. The risk too great.

Yet even as they moved to vanish again, Jude caught a flicker below—a cloaked figure darting through the long shadows of dusk.

Not one of theirs.

A Sicarii.

Jude's breath hitched.

Was he mad?

A frontal assault on a garrisoned legion was suicide, even by Sicarii standards. The figure moved with wild purpose, as if gripped by something darker than desperation.

Jude's gut twisted.

Simon raised his hand to signal—to stop him, to do something—but froze halfway.

There, emerging from the carriage, flanked by guards and cast in the glow of a torch—

Tiberius Alexander.

Simon recognized him from the whispered warnings passed along the Zealot network. A name passed through broken camps and rebel cells, a Roman-aligned Jew with blood in his ledger and ambition in his eyes.

The dagger flashed once in the dying light.

Then chaos bloomed.

Gunfire. Screams. Fire licking up the side of the barracks.

And in the midst of it all, the mission burned away, replaced by the raw howl of battle.

The first sparks of the coming war.

Chapter 3

The ground shook as the Sicarii charged headlong into the storm.

They were not many—half a dozen at most—but they moved with reckless fury, wielding machetes, hatchets, and makeshift rifles. They screamed invocations of vengeance, prayers that sounded like curses. They moved not with strategy but with mania, darting between mounted soldiers, striking from the blind spots, vanishing into smoke.

Jude and Simon pressed themselves low behind a rockfall as a molotov arced overhead. The sky lit orange, then black with smoke. The barracks was half-engulfed, and still the Legion held formation.

“They’ll be slaughtered,” Simon muttered, voice tight with both awe and alarm.

Jude didn’t answer. His eyes were scanning—always scanning. Not the battle, but the cracks in it.
“We need to get out,” he said at last.

“Not just out,” Simon growled. “We have to warn the others. If Tiberius is here—”
“—then this isn’t a skirmish,” Jude finished. “It’s the first page.”

They moved, not toward safety, but through the battle.

They stayed low, weaving between burning wagons and fallen bodies. A Sicarii spun past them, blood on his face, laughing like a child lit on fire.

A Federal officer barked orders in clipped tones. Rifles raised. Boots stomped. The company began to press inward, forming a steel maw.

Jude and Simon darted through the opening left in the chaos, ducking under bullets, shoving aside debris, until they reached the far ridge.

Behind them, the battle shrieked. The Sicarii were being driven back, but not cleanly. They left wounds in their wake—deep, psychological wounds the Legion didn’t yet know how to treat.

From the crest, Jude turned once to watch.

“Remember this,” he said.
Simon nodded.

“They’ll write songs about this night,” Jude added.

“They’ll write warnings,” Simon replied.

Then they vanished into the rocks, bearing news that would set the hills aflame.

Chapter 4
The Rider

He came riding slow through a narrow canyon at high sun, horse hooves soft on dust-cracked stone. No forks to choose from. Just the one way forward. Each step taken like a prayer—measured, deliberate. Toward the open flats that shimmered at the canyon’s end.
The desert beyond was better crossed by night. Day burned too hot, and the empty open drew eyes from miles around. Trouble stood out in the daylight. And these folks out here, they could sniff out trouble like coyotes on wind.

But the man riding wasn’t looking for a fight. Not today.

He needed a hole to hide in. Some forgotten corner of a backwater town where names didn’t mean much and a bed came with a bottle. Just for a while. Just long enough to fade.

He stopped where the canyon cracked into wider ground and waited for the sun to sink behind the rocks. When dusk crawled in and darkness laid its veil, he rode out again—quiet, cloaked in shadow, the road whispering under hoof.

The trail was long, but most of it lay behind him now.

Ahead, a town flickered—Cana.

Some prospectors had pitched camp on the outskirts, near a dry creekbed full of tumble and thorn. Smoke curled from a firepit. Cans rattled. Someone strummed the bones of a tune.

He approached slow.

A voice called out, sharp as a snapped twig: “Who goes there in the dark?”

“It is I,” the rider said, calm and clean. “Do not be afraid.”

Another voice, more gruff: “Don’t know you. Don’t care to. Ain’t nothing for you here but emptiness. Best keep movin’.”

“I am He,” the man said. “I have come in the name of the Father. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

A pause.

Then: “Well you won’t be havin’ it here, stranger. You best ride on.”

The rider didn’t argue. He just said, “I am going away, and I will come to you.”

No more was spoken. The rider melted back into the night, leaving behind only hoofprints and silence.

The land was still, save for the wind sneaking through the brush now and again like it had secrets to tell. He rode without thought, without memory. Just being. Neither rushing toward anything nor running from it. The time for questions would come. But this wasn’t that time.

The lights of Cana shimmered like fireflies over the rooftops, glowing against the black velvet sky. As he got closer, he saw movement in the square—dancers, drunkards, tradesmen closing up, shadows leaning on each other in laughter or lust.

They didn’t see him. Or if they did, they didn’t care.

That was fine.

He skirted the town’s edge, found the old stable where the horses knew the scent of gunpowder and sorrow. Behind it, a house of women. Quiet, tucked into the stone like a secret. The kind of place that didn’t ask questions if you paid up front and left your noise at the door.

He tied his horse and stepped inside.

He didn’t come for flesh. That never held him. But he liked them—these women who bore their names like burdens and smiled like saints. They didn’t lie about what they were. No false cloth. No empty ritual.

They were sinners. Openly. And he preferred their honesty to all the righteous men with hidden knives.

He found a room, a cot, and a bottle. That would do for now.

Tomorrow, maybe the world would wake again