Seven bowls, carried level.Not one drop spilled by accident.

After these things I looked, and the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened. It opens — and then it fills. Smoke comes in between the pillars, thick as cream and lit from within, and rises until the deep chamber at the far end is only a glow behind it. By the time it reaches the threshold it is standing there like a curtain-wall, moving slowly, letting nothing past. Not because heaven has locked its door. Because this hour belongs to God alone, and glory has drawn its own curtain across it. Revelation 15 : 5, 8

The seven angels who had the seven plagues came out, clothed with pure, bright linen, and wearing golden sashes around their breasts. They come out of the smoke walking in step, and to meet them comes one of the four living creatures — the patient bronze ox — carrying a tray of light with the golden bowls set on it in a ring, each one brim-full of something that moves like weather. Each angel takes his own and carries it level. Nothing here is flung. Not one drop goes over a rim. Whatever else this is, it is not a temper. Revelation 15 : 6–7 · 16 : 1

The first went, and poured out his bowl into the earth… The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea. The first is tipped at the rim of heaven and comes down over a city like a fine glitter, and down in the streets people simply stop. A man draws his marked right hand up against his chest. Along a colonnade, hands go into sleeves, under arms, cradled — a whole street suddenly minding the very hands that bought their belonging. Then the second goes out over the water, and the sea — the loudest thing God ever made — goes quiet. Sails hang like dropped laundry. And the gulls stand along the mooring posts and do not call, watching the still water like mourners at a rail. Revelation 16 : 2–3

The third poured out his bowl into the rivers and springs of water. It starts at the sources, high in the hills — one pool going dark, then the next — and then it travels, channel by channel, valley after valley, until the whole silver network of the land has been rewritten in ink. And then the story does something most retellings leave out. The angel who keeps the waters walks down into one of them. He stands ankle-deep in the ruined spring with his wings mirrored on the black surface, looks at it the way a physician looks at a wound, and lifts his face and says that God was right to judge it. He does not gloat. He agrees, and he grieves, and both are true at once — and from somewhere far above, the altar answers him. Revelation 16 : 4–7

The fourth poured out his bowl on the sun. Up it goes, into the disc, and the sun steps up like a lamp given too much oil. Down in the town the shadows go hard-edged and the light bleaches the lanes white, and people crowd into the strips of dark under the awnings while the cloth above them smokes gently at its sunward edge. A dog runs the street in stages. And here is the strangest thing in the chapter: in the square, faces come up and fists shake at the sky — and then the same hands go back to polishing the little gods on their pedestals. Rag, spit, rub. Burned, warned, and busier than ever at the wrong altar. Revelation 16 : 8–9

The fifth poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom was darkened. Not nightfall. A lid. The blackness comes down over the whole capital at once and stops exactly at its edge, while the countryside around it goes on having an ordinary dusk. Inside, torches gutter and light nothing but their own small pools. Cart-wheels stop. Voices call in the wrong directions. The empire that stamped its mark on every hand in the world cannot find its own walls — one city-shaped hole in the map, sitting squarely on a throne that was only ever borrowing its light. Revelation 16 : 10

The sixth poured out his bowl on the great river, the Euphrates. Its water was dried up, that the way might be prepared for the kings that come from the sunrise. The river shrinks back from both its banks at once. Sandbars surface like the backs of whales; the channels thin, and braid, and stop. What is left, steaming gently in the thin dawn, is a highway of cracked clay running arrow-straight at the eastern horizon, with the reeds standing in dry ranks and a fishing boat sitting on its keel in the middle of the road. The oldest moat in the world, quietly turned into a marching route. This is the plague that is also an invitation. Revelation 16 : 12

I saw coming out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits, something like frogs. The three powers of the dark stand together on a headland with their heads inclined, the way people stand when a meeting is finishing — and then, out of each mouth, something hops. Glistening, wrong in the joints, faintly ridiculous and horrid at the same time, which is exactly what a lie is. They right themselves, turn their lamp-yellow eyes to the horizon together, and go off into the dark in long low arcs. Miles away, out on the night plains, war-camps are sleeping with one royal tent lit in the middle of each — and at the foot of a glowing flap, in the grass, something small and green sits and waits. Revelation 16 : 13–14

They are spirits of demons, performing signs; which go out to the kings of the whole inhabited earth, to gather them together. Inside the tent there is a camp table, a war-dented crown, an unrolled map, and a hard face gone slack with sleep. The small shape at the flap never approaches the cot. It does not need to. A whisper moves through the dark — no words, only the hangings shivering and the brazier burning for one breath the wrong colour — and on the sleeping face something begins to assemble itself: the brow creasing, the jaw setting. Then his eyes open, and they are not sleepy at all, and they are looking straight at the crown. This is how a world war begins. One whisper. One open eye. Revelation 16 : 14

He gathered them together into the place which is called in Hebrew, Megiddo. By the next night the map itself is moving. Columns pour out of the camps and out of cities beyond them and out of horizons beyond those, and from high up they are rivers — rivers made of torches, thousands of small lights with dark figures marching between them. One of them flows straight down the cracked bed where the river used to run, using it like a paved royal road. And every one of them bends the same way, toward one valley ringed by dark hills, filling it from every slope like a basin under many taps. The name of it arrives quietly, like a low bell. Revelation 16 : 16

"Behold, I come like a thief. Blessed is he who watches." And then, right in the middle of the largest gathering in the history of the world — dropped in between two thunderclaps, where you would least expect it — everything stops to look at a farmhouse. One hill. Mud brick. Everybody asleep except one window, where a lamp has been trimmed and is burning steady, and a man sits at the sill with a blanket round his shoulders. He is not afraid. He is awake. Beyond him the horizon is stained with torchlight and the thunder keeps rolling, and the little flame does not flinch, and neither does he. The world is gathering armies. The King is looking for lamps. Revelation 16 : 15

The seventh poured out his bowl into the air. A loud voice came out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, "It is done!" He does not aim the last one at land or sea or river. He lifts it high and pours it into the air itself, and the light leaves the rim upward and dissolves into the sky like dye into water — and then the whole sky inhales. Everything draws inward. Nothing comes back out. And when it does, the ground moves: the greatest earthquake since there have been people to feel one. Islands settle under the water like whales sounding. Whole ranges kneel into their own dust. Hail the size of houses comes down slow through the dark and chalks it with long pale streaks. It is done — two words a builder says when the work is finished, not two words a man says when he has lost his temper. Revelation 16 : 17–21