And I’m going to find out what that purpose was, even if I have to burn down everything else to do it.

Michael laughs until he weeps. He doesn’t know if Silas survived, if the girl is a hallucination, or if Heaven and Hell are just two sides of the same catastrophic coin. He picks up his rusted dog tags, touches the crude cross he carved from a burnt pew, and whispers the first prayer he’s meant in years:

Michael pulls the trigger on the St. Jude bomb. The explosion levels the mill, destroys the Throne of Echoes, and vaporizes Silas—but also obliterates the last anchor holding the town’s dead souls in limbo. They vanish forever.

The fire didn’t have a source. It didn’t have a cause. It had a purpose .

That something is , a fallen Watcher who was imprisoned beneath the church two thousand years ago. The fire wasn’t an accident. It was a prison break. And Michael’s parishioners? They were the blood sacrifice needed to fuel Azaziel’s resurrection.

Not because God died. Because forever is a long time to be silent. And on November 12th, at 7:43 p.m., when the roof of St. Agatha’s caved in like a kicked anthill, God had nothing to say.

But here’s the catastrophe: God allowed it. Or worse—God wasn’t there to stop it.

I’ve been worse. CATASTROPHIC PRIEST (100,000 words) combines the theological horror of Midnight Mass with the grim, propulsive violence of Hellboy and the psychological ruin of First Reformed . It asks: What does a holy man do when he realizes that holiness is a lie, but love is not?