The day after Christmas, a horrific tsunami hit Southeast Asia, creating a natural and human disaster of biblical proportions. Disease and destruction lay in the wake of the giant wave, flooding and taking lives in eleven countries to the scale of Noah's time. But the animals sensed it was coming and were mysteriously saved. Ancient tribesmen, observant of nature's force, also strangely avoided destruction. But the cities... the tourists, all lay in ruins.
Humanity is now studying the instinctual nature of the animal kingdom. Tribal elders were asked how they knew, but their simplistic answers baffled scientists until debunked.
People in the fishing villages feared to eat the sea's yield, even while starving... so many bodies were in the water, and they reasoned that the fish had feasted upon that which the waters took.
Beyond the human suffering of more than a hundred and fifty thousand known dead, thousands missing, and millions left homeless and destitute with food shortages and tainted water, the power of the event actually shifted the planet--the Earth's poles moved to the east by a full inch, and time stopped for several milliseconds. It moved to the east... to the east... the east... perhaps east of Eden.
We do not yet know how this will influence the Earth's position amongst its planetary brethren. What we do know, however, is that everything in the universe is a fragile balance, like that of an immaculately designed Swiss watch. Move one part and misalign one gear and then what? Astrologers have yet to weigh in on this matter, nor has the traditional scientific community. They simply have no answers.
All this while in the United States, Southern California has been deluged by unrelenting rains and the normally arid region was also covered by a blanket of snow... over one hundred and fifty inches has fallen on the Sierra Mountains... snow has even covered the desert region-- Nevada... Texas and the Midwest experienced driving snowstorms... the Ohio Valley was covered in ice and floodwaters, forcing evacuations... this after four back-to-back hurricanes just devastated Florida's coast and the Caribbean, then one came that virtually wiped New Orleans off the map. Still there were more hurricanes, floods, tornados... forces of nature, also known by insurance companies as acts of God. And, yet the world is still at war. Not even these cataclysmic events were enough to give mankind pause. In the ongoing human conflict, no one seemed to remember that even time stood still. The planet was rocked off its axis for milliseconds, but warring factions around the globe didn't seem to give a damn. They just kept on fighting, shooting, and blowing each other up. The stern warning is not being heeded. Dormant volcanoes around the world have awakened and threaten populated regions. Aftershocks from the tsunami and rippling earthquakes can still be felt. Floods are claiming lives in Europe, while wildfires burn in Australia as day temperatures crest and exceed one hundred degrees in the shade.
Now, scientists say that this is all rather normal, to be expected. After all, they claim, the Earth is a living organism that is shifting and evolving, and these things are not new to natural, geological, and thermodynamic patterns. But all at once?
Yet there are those within the spiritual communities who say this has all been prophesized, and it is a signal that we are, indeed, in the end of days. Time stood still.
THE REALIGNMENT
To beg her husband to relent was futile. His rage knew no bounds. Lilith huddled on the searing floor of his pit and waited for the stomping to begin again. Her eyes had been ripped from their sockets and only oozed a warm jelly of torn tissue. Angry flies crowded into the openings on her face. Her nose was crushed, her mouth was a bloodied, gaping hole, her fangs gone. There was only blood-slicked pulp where her beauty once reigned.
She could feel her entrails quivering beneath her torso as she lay prone, breathing in sips, her back filleted by his massive, spaded tail. Snakes wound around the exposed bones, snapping at bits of flesh and pulling at her veins. Her legs were gone, lying in a heap across his chamber. Beetles and maggots had already begun to feed within the ragged, gruesome wounds. A month of enduring his merciless wrath and he was still inconsolable.
"You allowed my son to be baited to his death by a Neteru! My son?" he bellowed, causing a thunderous wind to sweep across her exposed vertebrae and ignite them in flames.