The Tree of Life

The great church is gone. Its forty thousand seats belong to the new order now, and the faithful have scattered to the prayer mountains above Seoul — tarps over old prayer cells, barley tea in scavenged bowls, thirty voices crying out in prayer at dawn.

Here, everything Lee Seo-yeon was is turned inside out. The gift she spent a lifetime using to prosecute the false, she must now use to guard the true. Her husband, who once kept a great machine running, carries bread down the mountain to the sick and the hunted. And a family broken by being right is remade, slowly, in the cold and the poverty and the shared bowl.

Below them, the city of light is going out in patches. The last judgments are falling on the order the church once blessed.

And something is coming that no city could ever switch off.