Chapter 7: Visions and Vigilance

Darren stumbled into his apartment shortly after 7 PM, the IGO interview having drained him of whatever energy remained after his whirlwind trip to New York. He hadn't slept properly in days. The constant ping of notifications, the barrage of news alerts, the weight of being simultaneously villain and victim in a global controversy—it had all taken its toll.

He collapsed onto his couch, not bothering to turn on the lights. Through his window, Geneva's evening skyline glittered against the darkening sky, a stark contrast to the turmoil within him. His phone buzzed. Again. He ignored it. Then it buzzed again, more insistently this time.

With a groan, he pulled it from his pocket. Three new messages from unknown numbers:

"HERETIC. GOD SEES YOUR SINS."

"We know where you live, Melvik. Sleep tight."

"Your time is running out. The faithful are watching."

Darren felt a chill run through him. These weren't like the other angry messages he'd received—there was something more targeted, more menacing about them. He got up to check that his door was locked, then drew the curtains closed. As he did, he thought he saw a figure standing in the shadows across the street, watching his window.

Paranoia, he told himself. Just paranoia.

His laptop chimed with a new email notification. Despite his exhaustion, he opened it, half-expecting more threats. Instead, it was from Zara:

"Darren,

OpUNleaks just pushed back their disclosure timeline by 24 hours. Something about verifying some explosive new information. Whatever's coming is bigger than we thought. Meanwhile, I've been looking into those messages you've been receiving. They're coming from multiple sources, but there's a pattern—many originate from servers in the same small cluster of locations. This isn't random hate mail; it's coordinated.

Be careful. I've heard rumors of people asking about your address around the office.

/ Z"

Darren closed the laptop, his mind racing despite his fatigue. He thought of the figure across the street. Not paranoia after all.

He poured himself a glass of wine, hoping it might help him sleep, but as he raised it to his lips, his hand trembled so violently that red liquid sloshed over the rim. He set the glass down, untouched.

Instead, he found himself pulling out a notebook. Without fully understanding why, he began to write, the words flowing as if from some external source:

"What does it mean to illuminate? To cast light where darkness has reigned? Is destruction always wrong if what's destroyed has caused suffering? These are the questions I can't escape..."

He wrote until his eyes grew heavy, the notebook eventually slipping from his grasp as he drifted into an uneasy sleep right there on the couch.

In his dream, Darren found himself in an ancient stone church. Candles provided the only illumination, casting long shadows that seemed to move of their own accord. The air smelled of incense and old books. He was not alone.

A figure sat in the front pew, face illuminated by candlelight. It took Darren a moment to recognize him: Martin Luther, the great reformer himself, dressed in simple monk's robes.

"You seem troubled, young man," Luther said, his German accent thick but his words perfectly understandable. "You have challenged the Church, as I once did."

"I didn't mean to," Darren found himself responding. "It was just a post, a moment of frustration."

Luther laughed, a hearty sound that echoed through the empty church. "Do you think I meant to split Christianity when I nailed my theses to that church door? Intentions matter less than we imagine. It is what comes after that defines us."

"What comes after for me? My career is ruined. I'm receiving threats. People are watching my apartment."

"Ah." Luther nodded soberly. "The price of challenging power. I spent years in hiding after the Diet of Worms, with a price on my head. But tell me, what was it you truly meant to say with your burning church?"

Darren considered the question. "That institutions can become corrupted. That sometimes the structures built to protect faith can actually obscure its essence."

"Then say that," Luther replied simply. "Not with memes or clever jokes, but with clarity and conviction. The printing press was my social media, young Darren. I used it to speak directly to the people, bypassing the gatekeepers of knowledge."

Darren's surroundings shifted. The church walls dissolved, replaced by white marble columns. Luther was gone, and in his place sat a stern-looking man in plain clothes, with intense eyes that seemed to bore into Darren's soul.

"John Calvin," the man introduced himself. "You speak of illumination through burning. A dangerous metaphor in my time. We burned heretics in Geneva, you know."

"I know," Darren said, uncomfortable under Calvin's penetrating gaze. "I never meant literal burning."

"Yet you posted an image of actual flames consuming a cathedral," Calvin observed. "Images have power. Words have power. Did you consider the consequences?"

"Clearly not enough," Darren admitted.

"The doctrine of predestination teaches that God knows the outcomes of all actions before they occur," Calvin said. "But this does not absolve us of responsibility for those actions. Your post was predestined, perhaps. Its consequences, too. But how you respond now—that defines your character."

"How should I respond? There are people threatening me, tracking me."

"With courage and conviction," Calvin replied. "But also with wisdom. Martin was right about one thing—clarity is essential. Speak plainly about what you believe and why. Let your critics argue with your actual ideas, not with their distortions of them."

The scene shifted again. Now Darren sat in what appeared to be a desert cave, illuminated by a single oil lamp. Beside him was a bearded man in tattered robes.

"They called me the heretic of Alexandria," the man said by way of introduction. "Origen is my name."

"The early church father?" Darren asked, surprised.

Origen nodded. "I proposed that even Satan might eventually be redeemed. The Church declared this heretical three centuries after my death." He smiled wryly. "The politics of religion often move slower than the theologies themselves."

"But they burned your writings, didn't they? They tried to erase you from history."

"Yet here I am, in your dream," Origen replied. "Ideas cannot be truly extinguished once released into the world. Your burning church post—it lives now beyond your control, being interpreted and reinterpreted by millions."

"That's what scares me," Darren confessed. "I've lost control of my own words."

"You never had control," Origen said gently. "That is the nature of communication. We cast our thoughts into the world like seeds, never fully knowing where they will take root or what they will grow into."

"Then what's the point of trying to explain myself now?"

"To add context. To plant new seeds alongside the old. The conversation continues, even when our original words are distorted."

Darren felt the cave dissolving around him. "Wait," he called to Origen. "How do I face the people who are threatening me now, in the real world?"

"With the courage of your convictions and the humility to recognize their humanity," Origen's voice echoed as he faded from view. "Even those who persecute you are caught in systems larger than themselves..."

Darren awoke with a start, his notebook fallen to the floor, sunlight streaming through a gap in the curtains. His neck ached from the awkward sleeping position on the couch. For a moment, the vivid conversations from his dream remained so clear that he half-expected to find Martin Luther sitting across from him.

Instead, he found himself alone in his apartment, the only sound the distant hum of Geneva's morning traffic. He retrieved his notebook, surprised to find several pages filled with writing—notes from his dream conversations, fragments of theological arguments, questions about institutional power and individual conscience.

His phone showed seventeen missed calls and dozens of new messages. But one stood out—an email from Thomas:

"Darren,

I think someone's been following me since the IGO interview. Twice now I've seen the same man outside my apartment. Yesterday he followed me to a café and sat nearby, pretending to read a newspaper but watching me the whole time. I took a photo without him noticing (attached). Do you recognize him? Have you experienced anything similar?

Stay safe, Thomas"

Darren opened the attachment. The photo showed a middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and an expressionless face, wearing an unremarkable gray suit. Something about him seemed vaguely familiar, but Darren couldn't place him.

As he pondered the image, a notification popped up on his screen—a news alert:

"Vatican Official Found Dead in Apparent Suicide; Had Connections to Melvik Controversy"

Darren's blood ran cold as he clicked on the article. Father Giorgio Rossi, a mid-level Vatican communications official, had been found dead in his Rome apartment. Initial reports suggested suicide, but the article noted that Rossi had recently been involved in discussions about how the Vatican should respond to Darren's controversial post.

The article also mentioned that Rossi had been known for his progressive views within the Church and had allegedly expressed concern to colleagues about how the controversy was being handled by more conservative elements. One anonymous source claimed Rossi had been troubled by "coordination between certain Church officials and external entities" in response to the Melvik situation.

Darren's phone rang. It was Zara.

"Have you seen the news?" she asked without preamble.

"About Father Rossi? Just now. What's going on, Zara?"

"I don't know exactly, but I've been digging into those threatening messages you've been receiving. Many of them trace back to a server farm in Eastern Europe, but with sophisticated routing to mask their true origin. This isn't just angry religious people, Darren. This is organized."

Darren moved to the window and cautiously peered through the curtains. The street appeared normal, people hurrying to work, a delivery van parked across the way. Nothing obviously suspicious, yet he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.

"And now someone connected to the Vatican side of this controversy turns up dead?" Darren said. "That can't be coincidence."

"I don't think it is," Zara agreed. "The OpUNleaks disclosure was delayed because they received new information from inside the Vatican—information Rossi might have provided."

Darren thought about his dream conversations, about Luther hiding after challenging the Church, about Calvin's Geneva where heretics were burned. The past and present seemed to be collapsing into one another.

"I need to go public," he said suddenly. "Not with apologies or explanations about my post, but with what's happening now. The threats, the surveillance, Rossi's death."

"That could be dangerous," Zara warned. "We don't know who we're dealing with."

"Exactly why it needs to be public," Darren insisted. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

After hanging up, Darren returned to his notebook, reviewing what he'd written during his dreamlike state. The theological arguments were sophisticated, the historical references precise—details he couldn't possibly have invented from his limited knowledge of Church history.

He opened his laptop and created a new blog. He titled it "The Thirteenth Apostle: Conversations from the Burning Church." In the first post, he wrote with a clarity and conviction that surprised even himself:

"My name is Darren Melvik. You may know me as the UN official who posted about burning churches. What began as a provocative social media post has evolved into something far more complex. I am being surveilled and threatened. A Vatican official connected to my case has died under suspicious circumstances. And in the midst of this very real danger, I have begun having extraordinary conversations—dreams, visions, call them what you will—with historical religious figures.

I cannot explain these experiences. I can only share them, alongside the very real and troubling developments surrounding my case. This blog will document both: the external threats from those who seek to silence me, and the internal journey that has, unexpectedly, deepened my understanding of faith, doubt, and institutional power.

To those monitoring me: I know you're watching. Your threats have been documented and shared with trusted allies. If anything happens to me, everything I know will be released.

To everyone else: What follows is my truth, as strange and complex as it may be."

Darren hit "Publish" before he could second-guess himself. Then he forwarded the link to Zara, Thomas, and, after a moment's hesitation, to Cardinal Sarah. As he closed his laptop, he noticed movement outside his window—a different figure this time, standing in plain view, not even attempting to hide their surveillance.

His phone buzzed with a new message from an unknown number:

"The blog was a mistake, Melvik. Not everyone who visited the church of your dreams was a friend."

Darren stared at the message in shock. How could anyone know about his dreams? Unless...

He thought of Origen's words from his dream: "Ideas cannot be truly extinguished once released into the world." Somewhere in the swirling controversy, the line between metaphor and reality, between the political and the spiritual, had blurred. The burning church was no longer just an image on Facebook—it had become something more profound, a symbol in a battle that transcended institutional politics.

Darren grabbed his notebook and began to write again, this time fully conscious of every word:

"To whoever is monitoring me: I don't know if you're from the Church, from the UN, or from some other entity altogether. But I know this—you cannot threaten a person's physical safety without also endangering their soul. And perhaps that's what this has always been about—not just institutional reputation or political influence, but the very nature of faith itself."

As he wrote, Darren felt a strange sense of calm descend upon him. The fear remained, but alongside it grew a clarity of purpose. Whatever forces had aligned against him—bureaucratic, religious, or something more sinister—he would face them with both courage and humility, as Origen had advised.

His phone rang again. An unknown number.

"Mr. Melvik," a deep, familiar voice said when he answered. "This is Cardinal Sarah. I've read your blog post. We need to meet immediately. Not at the UN, not at any Church property. Somewhere public, but discreet. There are things you need to know."

"About Father Rossi?" Darren asked.

There was a pause. "About him, yes. But also about the dreams you described. You're not the only one having them, Mr. Melvik. And that, I'm afraid, is what frightens them most of all."

As Darren hung up, his laptop chimed with a notification. His blog, just minutes old, had already been shared thousands of times.