Tonight, the world ends. Billions will die, and I am the cause of it all.

Every living thing, every human, will cry to the heavens - helpless, hopeless, doomed - and I am the cause of it all. To know why, you have to go back to another, simpler time.

I was a boy. I remember my father, my mother and my sister, hanging helplessly from the eaves of the porch of our ranch. And I remember the Preacher, Jacob, slipping the noose around my neck. He was searching for a woman, the last of her kind. He’d been hunting her for longer than he could remember, and her death would end a war that had raged for thousands of years.

It was supposed to be the final battle but she was clever and unpredictable, and had eluded him again. Instead of finding her, he found us. He found me, and even though he didn’t realise it at the time, I had made it a whole new war; one that would rage for centuries, unseen, unknown, until tonight.

My name is Gabriel Armstrong, and I am immortal.