The Three Days of Darkness: Babylon’s Fall

August 23, 2025, Lake Jesup, Florida

The air felt wrong that morning.

A heavy haze hung over the water. The sun struggled to rise, reduced to a pale smudge behind a jaundiced sky. Sarah pulled her jacket tighter though the summer heat still clung to the earth. She met Mike at the dock, her steady, grounded husband, the kind of man who could rebuild anything with his bare hands.

Mike frowned at his phone.

“No signal. No nothing. Like the whole world just… stopped.”

Sarah’s stomach tightened.

Then came Dave.

He pulled up in his beat-up truck, notebook in hand. A thoughtful, solitary writer, Dave was known for disappearing to his lakeside cabin to chase old stories and silence the world’s noise.

But today was different.

Dave felt it in his bones.

“This isn’t right,” he muttered, glancing at the thickening sky.

The three of them moved quickly to Dave’s cabin as the air grew thick and metallic. At 12:06 p.m., the sky turned to absolute blackness.

Not nightfall.

Not an eclipse.

A crushing, unnatural darkness.

The wind died. Phones died. Engines stalled. The air tasted bitter, like sulfur and old earth.

And then came the voices.

Soft, familiar, coaxing. Whispers from the dark calling their names in tones too perfect, too practiced.

Sarah struck a match and lit a tall candle from her grandmother’s hurricane kit. It was the only flame that held against the dark.

Mike bolted the doors.

And Dave, moved by something ancient in his blood, turned to the bookshelf by the window, to the place where his grandmother’s old Bible had rested for years. He’d kept it there while writing, more for sentiment than faith.

But as darkness devoured the world, he reached for it instinctively.

A Judgment Foretold

He opened it at random, and his breath caught.

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great… For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”

Passage after passage, all underlined in his grandmother’s delicate script, spoke of darkness, judgment, and a harvest of the wicked. Words he’d dismissed for years as old-world superstition now struck like lightning in his chest.

“This was always meant for now,” Dave whispered.

Mike’s face paled as the truth settled over them.

“This isn’t random,” Sarah said. “This is a reckoning.”

Modern America, proud, violent, decadent, unrepentant, had become Babylon.

And now Judgment had come.

But this time it would not claim the innocent.

It would harvest the wicked.

The Darkness Moves

For three days and nights, darkness blanketed the earth.

Voices outside offered false promises, loved ones’ voices, old enemies pretending to be friends. The air thickened with things unseen. Windows rattled with soft, steady scratching.

Dave read aloud from his grandmother’s Bible as though the ink itself were alive, the passages speaking not of a faraway land, but of them, of now.

“Come out of her, my people, lest ye partake of her sins.”

Each word fortified them.

The candle burned, unyielding.

Mike stood guard. Sarah prayed.

And the world outside fell silent.

The Note in the Cover

On the morning of the fourth day, a gray, colorless light bled through the windows.

The darkness had lifted.

Dave, his hands shaking, closed the old Bible, and for the first time in years, noticed the inside front cover. There, in faded blue ink, his grandmother had written:

“To my grandson, David, If these pages find you in the days when darkness covers the earth, know this: God’s word is true. Babylon will fall, but a remnant will endure. Do not fear the harvest. Stand in the light.

I have prayed for you and those you love.

You were born for such a time as this.”

The words struck like thunder in his soul.

It had always been meant for him.

For this moment.

The Gathering of the Remnant

In the days that followed, the air remained still. Ash covered the roads. The world was quiet in a way it had never been before.

Those who had mocked God, who delighted in cruelty, deception, and perversion, were gone. Not a body. Not a grave. Simply vanished.

And then, slowly, others emerged.

From distant farms, from darkened towns. Men and women who, though flawed, had clung to goodness in a world that had abandoned it.

They gathered by the lake, a ragged, quiet remnant.

Sarah and Mike greeted them with what little food they had. Dave brought the Bible, placing it in the center of their gathering. The underlined passages were read aloud, tears filling eyes hardened by grief.

They shared stories of the voices they’d heard in the darkness. Of doors rattling and promises whispered. And of the steady candle flame that never died.

A preacher’s widow.

A farmer’s son.

A teenage girl with a broken hand but unshaken faith.

One by one, they came.

They were few. But they were enough.

Together, they understood.

Babylon had fallen.

The proud, the wicked, the violent, harvested from the earth.

The faithful, the humble, the repentant, spared, to rebuild.

In the distance, they saw no planes, no lights, no cities.

But overhead, for the first time in years, the stars burned clean and bright.

The remnant gathered by the fire that night. Dave read from his grandmother’s Bible. They sang old hymns none of them had thought to remember.

And though the world was changed, and much was lost, there was peace.

Because Judgment had passed.

And now, at last, they would begin again.

Final Journal Entry-David Calloway

August 31, 2025

I don’t know if anyone else will ever read this.

Maybe it’s for me. Maybe it’s for whoever finds this cabin long after I’m gone. But the weight of what happened deserves to be recorded, not in history books, because there may be no historians left, but in the quiet pages of a man’s thoughts.

The darkness came, just like the old stories said it would.

But it wasn’t meant for the innocent this time. It was meant for those who had poisoned this earth with their pride, their cruelty, and their denial of God. Babylon wasn’t a city, it was us, it was this nation, this world. And Judgment, long delayed, came swiftly.

I saw friends vanish. Towns emptied. The proud toppled.

But in the silence that followed, a remnant emerged.

Simple people. Not perfect, but not given over to evil. People with faith flickering like a candle’s stubborn flame. And somehow, against every expectation, I was counted among them.

I keep thinking about my grandmother’s Bible.

How it sat on that shelf for years while I chased stories, never realizing the greatest one was waiting between its pages. Her words, scrawled inside the cover, carried me through the worst night this world has known.

I can’t pretend to understand why we were spared.

But I know this: the days ahead will be hard.

There’s no more Babylon.

Only a new beginning.

And if I have any purpose now, it’s to bear witness. To write what happened. To remember those lost, and to remind those who remain why mercy found them.

We’ll gather again by the fire tonight.

We’ll sing.

We’ll pray.

We’ll begin again.

The stars are brighter now.

And for the first time in my life, I believe they always meant something.

~D. Calloway