Setting

At the same time, all over the world, people - housewives, particle physicists, welders, guerrilla fighters, lobbyists - have had visions of the future. One sees a world in which science and alchemy have created the Resurrection Body and made man perfect and immortal; another, the collapse of civilization and a return to savage innocence. Still a third envisions the return of the Nephilim to lead humanity to their true destiny among the stars, and one sees a timeless nothingness, an eternal absence so utter and complete that the mere word "oblivion" can't describe it. All of these prophets' visions have only two things in common: They are all absolutely true (and register as such even to seraphic resonance), and in all of them, every single other prophet is dead.

Armed with such rarefied visions of the future, the Prophecy Cults (one for each prophet, of course - at least one) are racing across the planet like wildfire, expanding their influence and numbers enormously. The religious mainstream has rejected the cults, but the wilder fringes have written the prophets' revelations into their doctrine and embraced this new-found proof. National leaders waffle on whether the cults are a legitimate threat or merely new religious minorities. The cults themselves disdain politics, keeping their eyes on each other - After all, the truth of their prophecies requires that the other prophets die. While some are willing to trust that inevitability will resolve the situation, most are preparing for an all-out war for tomorrow.

In Heaven and Hell, it's pandemonium. Gabriel, the Archangel of Prophecy, is gone, her servitors struggling to find her while fending off her rival Belial. The creation of so many new religions at once would be alarming enough; that each has their own, mutually exclusive capital-T Truth, and can make this clear to their followers, upsets a number of previously understood 'facts' about the Symphony and even God himself. But even this is not as distressing as the total lack of symphonic disturbance. Whatever happened was not the result of intervention by either side, but seemingly entirely natural. This was meant to happen.

And the implications of that make a global war between prophecy cults look like small potatoes.