Chapter 11 – The Trials of the Thunder Disciple

--- Chapter 11 – The Trials of the Thunder Disciple The Gospel According to Zeus > They call him Paul. But once he was Saul, a hunter of men, teeth bared against my name, his hands red with the cries of my servants. So I chose a road, a strip of dust and stone beneath a pitiless sun, and I clothed it in my fire. A light split the sky, brighter than a thousand dawns, and I hurled it into his eyes. He fell, groping like a child in the dark, the dust of the earth choking his lungs. “Who speaks?” he gasped. And I thundered — not as Zeus, but as the Lord he thought he served: “Why do you kick against the storm? Why do you strike at me, when it is I who gives your arm its strength?” Blindness was my seal upon him. For three days he staggered, a lion humbled to a lamb, until I loosed his sight again with a spark of my own lightning. Then his tongue was no longer his. Every letter he wrote, every sermon he shouted, was inked with thunder hidden in its veins. He thought himself a disciple, but he was my herald — the echo of my storm across the empire. Remember this: the fiercest enemies make the loudest disciples, when struck by lightning on the road.