How long does obedience take?

How many minutes or hours or days does a guess to the divine require?

Could it be a matter of weeks or years? And what if one gets interrupted along the way?

This is a story about a god of ambitious, relentless vision, who is strangely patient.

It's a story about the price of obedience and the charisma of place and the answer to fear.

And it's a story about what happens when someone trying to obey admits interruption and begins again.

I'm Justin Gerhardt. Welcome to Holy Ghost Stories. The

The An enormous ziggurat soaks up the brutal noonday sun, a brick mountain punching up from the flat landscape of Mesopotamia.

Plastered with bitumen, it is a black tar behemoth,

clawing at the clouds and bellowing a message of greatness to the world.

Fortress, civic nerve center,

temple to the moon god scene, patron deity of the great city of Orr.

210 feet long, 148 feet wide, and 98 feet tall. The ziggurat can be seen from every part of the

city, the brothel district where men grope and grind and revel in 30-minute

stints of slave ownership. The stockyards where animals are kept and fattened for mass sacrifice to the

fickle gods. The prison camps where abducted children sweat and bleed, and of course the residential neighborhoods,

including the quarter where a gray-haired man tightens the ropes,

lashing his every possession onto a series of camels.

The animals shift under the weight of it all, cooking pots and utensils, clothing, tents, woolen blankets, mohair tarps, jewelry, musical instruments,

aloam, sacks of barley and wheat, dried apricots and figs, jars of honey and oil,

casks of wine and beer, jugs of water.

The old man's son, waiting by the gate with strong hands and patient eyes,

...