Prologue:

Wheel of Anathoth

Dekker's Dozen #000B

569 B.C.E....

Ezekiel reeled and staggered as the ground shook below his feet.

Booming explosions cracked the nearby planetary crust, spewing vents of hot, sulfuric air. The swirling portal of light ripped open behind him, bleeding celestial light into the Earth realm as its rippling edges swirled and spun like ghostly gears and Ezekiel's clouded, white eyes shivered back and forth with REM movement. He screamed as pain blossomed in his mind, just as it did whenever he experienced divine visions; blood trickled down his chin, leaking from his right nostril.

"I see it, Yahweh! I see it all!" The vision consumed his brain, threatening to melt his mind; his heart raced at unsafe speeds even as he realized his lips spoke the ineffable name—the penalty for which was death.

It didn't matter, he understood, as his teary eyes unclouded and he beheld the boiling environment. The sky had broken and the horizon burned. Chunks distant mountain splintered, erupting skyward. The nearby hills melted like wax and trees detonated in flame. Ezekiel stood and looked over the valley near his home in Anathoth. Steam leaked from the vineyards, rising heavenward as the vines curled and blackened.

Terror gripped the prophet's heart which silently cried out to his God. "This was not foretold! This is not that ordained, terrible Day of the Lord!" He shouted his disbelief even as creation began disintegrating around him. This must be another vision!

As if in response to his incredulous doubt, the pergola which shaded him burst into flames; waves of intense, dry heat wafted towards him. Ezekiel panicked and toppled to the hard-packed dirt just outside; the ground rumbled with evil vibrations.

Fear radiated from his heart and Ezekiel shielded his eyes from the churning wheel of light. The portal was unbearable to look at and so he bowed before it, face to the ground, and tore his clothes.

A dread noise split the sky and reverberated across the atmosphere. It echoed from the singular point ahead: the dimensional gate seemed to cry with pain.

With a metallic, belching groan, the air nearby burst into a puff of smog which smelled of ozone and evaporating water. Ezekiel reeled backwards; the tainted air had produced a human form: lying on the dirt was... himself?

Ezekiel stared. The man was truly him! He wore the same bedraggled beard and hair. He recognized the sandals, made by an artisan who lived down this very road; he even wore the same clothing—although this man's garments were tattered and soiled with soot and blood. A series of buckled, leather straps held a burnished cylindrical contraption to his back. The belts were much thicker than the hide thong which hung a familiar religious medallion around his neck.

Stepping forward, Ezekiel spotted viscous gore leaking from the man's torso; it stained the ground and bubbled up to his lips. A large section of his chest had been blasted away, exposing torn skin and bone—an entire lung even burned away by some nefarious means! Only partly cauterized, the ichorous flow pulsed with each slowing heartbeat, spilling blood onto the dry soil.

The man who had appeared out of nowhere, a bleeding copy of Ezekiel, locked eyes with Israel's Prophet of Anathoth. His eyes beckoned to him and he vainly reached for his duplicate. His arms trembled with the onset of death throes.

He waved him closer, calling for the prophet. Ezekiel sank to his knees at the injured one's side. His dying copy groaned one word. "Nehushtan."

With a trembling hand, the dying one removed Moses's brazen serpent from around his neck where it had been slung as a necklace. He stuffed it into Ezekiel's hand and coughed a death rattle.

As Ezekiel touched the body of his doppelganger, the revelation he'd just experienced reclaimed the prophet in full force. His vision isolated the rogue line of reality which had corrupted the whole. The future broke: the divine machine seized in some forthcoming existence. Feedback reverberations of the ruptured line washed backwards, flowing into every other dimension, cracking the elemental lines and peeling back the boundaries of reality, unmaking all of creation with a grinding, shrieking song of torment.

In the span of one heartbeat he saw the course of human history through spiritual eyes: the wars and conflicts of mankind and all his terrible instruments of war and destruction. His eldritch pupils dilated, taking in the far-off Intergalactic Singularity War, the Mechnar Contra, and the failure of mankind to stop a creeping enemy that stalked him since the spawn of sin. The surge of destruction washed backward through time, eroding the engines of reality and stopped with this very moment: Ezekiel making contact with himself.

He gasped and withdrew the hand from his shallowly-breathing duplicate. "The weed of Eden," he whispered, looking into the eyes of his dying self.

The version of himself who wore the contraption pointed to the spinning portal even as he shuddered and gurgled. He wheezed as his remaining lung filled with blood; his eyes dimmed and then he shuddered spasmodically before finally falling still.

Ezekiel quickly unfettered his counterpart from the harness. The pained cry from the rent sky called his heart to action. He had to find the hero! He had seen everything from the birth of time through its ultimate demise—but there was a man who could stand in the way of the demon that had caused this thing—and it was not Ezekiel. Ezekiel was merely the herald.

The prophet strapped the device onto his body. He did not know exactly how to operate it, but instead moved with pure instinct. He dangled the bronze serpent in front of his eyes. Nehushtan it had been named.

He knew that the serpent had no special power. It symbolized his peoples' faith in a grand, cosmic plan and the divine planner.

Hanging the artifact around his neck, he knew that he needed all the faith he could muster for this mission. Ezekiel kissed the serpent, and then sprinted into the blazing, spinning portal just as his plane of reality erupted—disintegrating into ethereal void, becoming one with the vast nothingness.