A woman clothed with the sun.And a dragon, waiting.

A great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Act Three opens with a picture rather than a person. Half the night sky is given to one figure — a mother at constellation scale, robed in moving daylight, standing on the moon, stars circling her head. She is the people of the promise, and every waiting mother inside it. And she is in labour: one hand pressed to the fullness of her, her cry travelling out across the dark not as sound but as light. Revelation 12 : 1–2

Another sign was seen in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns. First the stars along the low horizon begin to flicker — the way candles do when a door opens somewhere else in the house. Then an ember-red glow hauls itself up over the rim of heaven, and constellation by constellation the sky goes dark behind it. What comes up is the size of a mountain range that learned to move: ridged ember plate, coal-fire eyes, horns — and crowns that sit slightly askew on every head. Stolen ones never do fit. Revelation 12 : 3

His tail drew one third of the stars of the sky, and threw them to the earth. The tail lifts into the star-field and sweeps once — a single casual arc, the way a hand is dragged through a row of banked candles. A third of heaven's lights come loose in that one stroke. They fall in long thin fire-lines and go out as they land, small light after small light dying on the dark ground below. Then the plates settle with a clink, and one head glances at the emptied third of the sky and is already bored with it. Stars are small change to him. The Child is what he came for. Revelation 12 : 4

The dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. He does not rush her. He coils — the whole mountain length of him winding into position, ember plate stacking on ember plate like a fortress assembling itself in the sky — and then the heads come down low, chins near the dark, crowns tilted, every coal-fire eye fixed upward on her light. This is the oldest ambush there is: the serpent, settled in at the door of a promise. And she does not look away from him. Neither does she stop. Revelation 12 : 4

She gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. Her child was caught up to God, and to his throne. Her light crests, and he is simply there in her arms — a bundle of morning wrapped in swaddling, small and blinding. One heartbeat of a mother's joy. Then the jaws come down out of the coil all at once and close on empty night, and a ring of shocked sparks goes out around them. He is already climbing: a long laughing line of gold going up past the raked stars into a brightness that opens to take him in. Below, the heads untangle and stare at a height that has shut. Heaven was one heartbeat faster. Revelation 12 : 5

The woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God… Two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place. His roar cracks the sky into thin red fractures. And then she moves: great eagle's wings spread from her shoulders like a second dawn, and she banks away down the dark with her hair and her robe streaming light behind her. Below the sky's edge a desert rises to meet her — pale dunes under starlight, and far out among them one small fold of rock with a lamp already burning inside it. Nobody had to find her a shelter. It was standing ready before she ran. Revelation 12 : 6, 14

There was war in the sky. Michael and his angels made war on the dragon. The ranks of heaven draw aside like curtains of dawn, and down through them comes Michael — gold-armoured, wings of white flame, descending without hurry, the way a verdict arrives. His hand goes to his side and draws a blade that is not metal but morning: the first edge of sunrise, given a hilt. There is nothing furious in his face. He looks like a man who has read the end of the book. Behind him the legions wheel into formation and the shields lock edge to edge — a wall of white-gold light running left and right past seeing, and another behind it, and another. A fortress made of morning, hanging in the sky. Revelation 12 : 7

The dragon and his angels made war. They didn't prevail, neither was a place found for them any more in heaven. What rises off his coils is not an army but weather — ragged dark wings by the thousand, ember eyes in the swirl of it, a storm-front building against the light. Then the two weathers close. It is fought entirely in brightness: wedges of blazing angels punching tunnels through the shadow, shield-walls flaring white where the black waves break on them, and the dark simply coming apart wherever the light touches it — not wounded, unmade, going to pieces like burnt paper on the wind. There is nothing in this battle you need to look away from. Shadow has no substance that morning has to respect. Revelation 12 : 7–8

The whole war wheels slowly around one fixed bright point, with galaxies drifting beyond it for a floor — and the wheel is uneven. Everywhere, the dark is losing: fronts thinning, ember eyes fewer with each turn, the walls of dawn advancing in slow unstoppable rotation until the entire night's worth of shadow is crowded against the sky's last rim. And there he makes his stand, coils stacked, heads fanned wide, filling the frame like a red cliff. Against all of it: one bright figure, dropping calmly toward him with the sword still low at his side. And it is the dragon who moves. Head after crowned head pulls back, and the coils shuffle away along the rim — the whole mountain range, retreating from a lantern. Revelation 12 : 8

The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. The rim brightens under him, and he goes over it. He falls like lightning — end over end down the whole height of the dark, ember plate trailing smoke in a long ragged spiral, crowns coming loose and tumbling after him, his shadow-angels raining around him like sparks when a log breaks. Down through the cloud-layers of the world below. And then a crater of darkness blooms in a quiet green country, and a column of smoke stands slowly up out of it and leans, and drifts. The accuser: out of heaven. For good. Revelation 12 : 9

Now the salvation, the power, and the Kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ has come; for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down… They overcame him because of the Lamb's blood, and because of the word of their testimony. The raked sky heals. The stolen third comes back on, constellation after constellation switching on in running sweeps of silver fire until all of heaven stands brighter than it was before the war. The shield-walls lift in a horizon-long salute. And then the picture notices one more thing, small and low: a single grey thread of crater-smoke, still climbing out of the world below. Joy above — and underneath it, a short-tempered guest who knows exactly how little time he has. Revelation 12 : 10–12

The serpent spewed water out of his mouth after the woman like a river, that he might cause her to be carried away by the stream. The earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the river. He finds her in the desert at dusk — she skimming the dune-crests on her great wings, laying a fleeing gold road along the sand; he surging behind in mountain-sized bounds, going through the dunes rather than round them. When teeth will not reach her he brakes, rears, and spews a river: a valley-wide flood born airborne, rolling after her across sand that has never held water. And then the ground takes her side. The desert floor cracks open directly across the flood's path — one clean geological yawn, deep and dark and exactly where it needs to be — and drinks the whole torrent in a thundering curtain. Gone. He skids to the rim and hangs every head over the edge, dripping, steaming, robbed by geography. Even the dirt is on her side. Revelation 12 : 15–16

The dragon grew angry with the woman, and went away to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep God's commandments and hold Jesus' testimony. The steam of his defeat drifts past him at the canyon rim, and the heads begin to turn — slowly, one and then the next — away from the woman, toward the horizon. What they are looking at is the darkened map of the world, and scattered all over it, small and warm: lights. Lamplit windows. Little gatherings. Every small place that keeps the story. Her Child is out of reach; her other children are not. Then he walks down to the sea and stands at the tide-line, crowns doubled in the black water, waiting on something the ocean knows about. And the picture holds — the same dusk, the same horizon — but the figure on the sand is an old man in a patched cloak, and the boy behind him is holding a writing board. Teacher… something is coming up out of the water. Am I writing that down? John does not turn. Write everything down. Revelation 12 : 17