A long time ago in a land called Texas there was a bar folks called the Crossroad. No sign or anything, that was just where you could find it. A ramshackle roadhouse on the side of a forgotten desert road, the kind of place where the special was chicken-fried steak and the beer was warm as it was cheap, but the music was always live. Traveling musicians, cowboys and cons of every stripe came to the Crossroad to worship at this church of song. Rumor had it even the Lord God Almighty and the Devil Himself would share the bar on occasion, politely ignoring each other while the bands played. While they might steal disapproving glares at each other, they never came to blows, or even words. There was no longer any point to either. Their differences weren’t the kind that could be settled, and so they had been forced to agree to disagree.

God and the Devil, and thus the whole of Creation, had fallen into a rut. Good and Evil had finally fought each other to a stalemate, and as a result the cosmos was more or less balanced and stayed that way. The Powers That Be watched the unfolding of eternity with increasing boredom as the ceaseless cruelties of Man were always tempered by his cliché kindnesses. Any tip of the scale seemed to immediately right itself. A bus full of nuns would get hit by a train the same day a boat full of refugees arrived safely on free soil. A poor man was beaten to death in front of his family for stealing bread to feed them, while on the other side of world a dog rescued a young girl from a burning orphanage. Somewhere a child died alone and hungry so that a plague could end somewhere else. Ever did the world of Man burn, and ever did it rebuild.

The Lord God Almighty appointed a Sacred Congress of Angels to oversee Creation and declared His retirement begun. The Throne sat empty in favor of an old wicker rocking chair stationed outside the pearly gates, where He liked to shoot the breeze with St. Peter as He rocked and smoked His pipe and whittled holy abstractions from blocks of wood. The Lord loved to personally welcome new immigrants from the mortal coil, sometimes with a small cedar bird, or a mahogany flower. The smiles of the meek and innocent as they gazed upon their final reward always set God to whistling as He coaxed new shapes from the wood.

The Devil Himself did not take to idleness. He paced his keep in the mountains of Dis while enslaved souls endlessly buffed the angry hoof-marks from the obsidian floors. At first the Devil had rebelled against the harmony, sending diseases, wars, famine and madness to plague the world of Man. Despite all His efforts to break the scale, balance was always restored. He was furious to see evil rendered mundane, even acceptable. What was the point in being the Prince of Darkness if no one was afraid?

Disgusted, Satan turned his back on the mortal realm and all the circles of Hell howled with despair as his fury rained down in unrelenting torrents of fire, sulfur and blood. The infernal landscape was ripped asunder as legions of the damned murdered each other over countless eons of endless war, all for the glorification of Him. An ambitious Demon Major had even been allowed to usurp Hell’s throne simply to provide Satan with the challenge of taking it back. But slaughtering a city full of His subordinates was not as satisfying as He remembered. Even with a million still screaming traitors’ heads hanging from hooks above the throne room His bloodlust could not be slaked. The Devil smoked a black cigar rolled from the souls of unrepentant rapists as He gazed across blistering, burning vistas of His realm, longing for a new war, a worthy opponent, something worth destroying. Something even the Lord couldn’t ignore. The crown of flames flared brightly above His horns as a new scheme began to twist into shape. The Devil would teach the absent Father a lesson, even if He had to tear down all of Creation to do it.

The Lord was as much All-Knowing as He was Almighty, and thus was aware of the plot from the moment it hatched. God scratched His whiskers as He watched the Devil design the most unholy weapon either of them could fathom. It was made of blood ore mined from the blackest veins in Hell. Forged by Azazel, Prince of Power, in the Lake of Fire and cooled in the pus-stained waters of the Acheron. Through the clouds of steamed blood appeared a long-barreled forty-five caliber six-shooter. It had grips of polished grey soul stone, inlaid with a golden glyph of the Name the Mortal May Not Know. God stood in stunned witness as all the Lords of Damnation and each of the Seven Arch-Demons assembled to curse the weapon, scarring the metal with their blasphemous sigils. When Azazel began to fashion bullets from the flaming shards of Lucifer’s shattered sword, the Lord God Almighty recalled the one and only time He had ever been wounded, which led Him to wonder if the Devil’s Iron could truly end Him. For the first time, He had no answers. Those Almighty hands absently whittled a chunk of pine into a reflection of the nightmare forged in Hell. With a sigh the Lord tossed it aside and resumed rocking as He reached for a new piece of wood.

When the Sacred Congress learned of the Devil’s Iron, they wasted no time wondering. God’s lack of concern in turn concerned them. The Devil Himself had threatened their Lord, so the angels did what they thought was right and commissioned the Wrath of God. 

Inspired by the wooden outline, Samael, Angel of Death, designed a gun. From the melted down halos of martyred angels he made a silver revolver, a holy reflection of the Devil’s Iron. It was forged in the Light of Creation and left to cool in the Waters of Life. The weapon received a grip carved from white oak sanctified with saint’s tears, bearing a humble bronze crucifix made in good faith by a blind and dying Templar of the Last Crusade. Then it was born on the backs of cherubs through all the Spheres of Heaven so that it could be engraved with the celestial names of all Seven Archangels, blessed by the Choir of Seraphs, and warded against evil by the Erelim, Protectors of the Throne. When it was finished, the chambers were loaded with nails from the True Cross, and the warrior Michael was chosen to test fire the gun for the first time. All of the heavenly hosts rejoiced when their Father’s Champion declared it a weapon without equal, capable of felling even the Devil Himself.

At first the Lord dismissed the angels’ gift as absurd and refused to wear it, for what use had God for firearms? But Michael persisted. Of course Satan could not reach God in His Kingdom, he said, but the Prince of Darkness was nothing if not crafty, and would not have made the Devil’s Iron if he had not already devised a use for it. The Lord finally agreed to wear the gun on his next trip Earthward as a personal favor to Saint Peter.

It just so happened one night that a twister stranded two traveling bands at the Crossroad. Each was favored by one of the bar’s most famous patrons. 

Uncle Spunky’s Jug Band was a family act made up of rag-clad rivermen and their sons playing everything from the banjo to the washtub. They played simple folk songs about growing up in the country and the many beauties of nature. A rolling, rambling ditty named “Water Jazz” was the Lord’s favorite song. He was often overheard humming it during the ages he spent sequestered in the Great Library of the First Sphere. 

The other band was a gang of roadmen that wandered Texas playing songs about sin, sex and savage violence, broken dreams and hard time. They called themselves the Damned Bastards, and their frontman Ricky Zero had sold his soul for that razor-on-glass voice that could wake the dead. When he howled at the end of “Graveyard Blues,” it damn near made your ears bleed. The Devil couldn’t help but tap his hoof.

As the drinks flowed the musicians began to take up their instruments and start to play, each band trying to outdo the other. The Damned Bastards sang “Lucifer” and all the demons gave an unholy holler. Uncle Spunky’s Jug Band replied with “Spirit in the Sky” and the angels joined in with a heavenly chorus. Back and forth the bands battled, until the whole house was rocking loud enough to be heard over the highest walls of Heaven and in the deepest pits of Hell.

And so it came to pass that the Lord God Almighty and the Devil Himself were seated at the same bar, not ten feet apart. After many beers and songs, forced to endure each other’s company while their favorite bands played, there was eventually talk between Them. After all, who else could speak to Them as equals? 

The Devil listened with visible disdain as the Lord spoke of the joys of retirement, and God’s disappointment was plain as Satan told of all the new atrocities He had taught Man. Like all fathers, it wasn’t long before They were trading boasts about their sons. Satan beamed about the countless noble souls tempted to ruination by Asmodeus, while God could not hide a smile as He talked of the many mortal artists inspired by the works of Jophiel. The Devil patted the iron on His hip and commenced to brag about the fine weapon Azazel and his minions had forged. The Lord was unimpressed with this token of Satan’s vanity, and doubted the gun could even harm Him. To the Almighty’s surprise, the Devil agreed. He confessed that the Wrath of God was clearly the superior gun.

The Lord looked toward the stage as the Damned Bastards broke into a ballad called “Junkie Jesus” and heaved an Almighty sigh. “Really, Nick?”

“You know me, Gram,” the Devil chuckled. “No trespass is too petty.”

Now what happened next is a matter of considerable debate. Of course there are those who say Satan threw down and the Lord God Almighty smote Him with six holes to the head before the Devil’s Iron ever cleared leather. And after that everybody lived happily ever after. It’s a nice ending for the kids.

Some storytellers even allow the Devil to fire a futile shot or two that bounce harmlessly off the robes of God before being vanquished. Another version has the standoff explode into an epic gunfight between angels and demons that only ends when the primary combatants declare a draw across a river of blood and retreat with their dead.

But in the most popular finale, the Devil gets the drop on God. He throws a beer in the Lord’s face and grabs the Wrath of God from its holster. The Devil bellows in agony as the sanctified white oak sears His unholy flesh, but He holds fast and pulls the trigger. Golden gore splashes across the bar before evaporating into an ethereal mist and the Father of Creation is no more. The Wrath of God falls smoking from the Satan’s hand and the demons howl in victory as the world tumbles into darkness.

Regardless of which version you believe, the Crossroad burned to the ground one night. There were no mortal survivors or witnesses, and no one knows why it happened. Folks around there say it was like the place was simply struck from the Earth. Some of the locals claim to hear phantom banjos playing at night, or see ghosts dancing under the full moon. There’s nothing left of the Crossroad but a few red-stained wood posts full of bullet holes whistling with the wind. No one has ever tried to build there again, and not so much as a blade of grass grows upon the cursed land.

What happened to the weapons, everyone wants to know. If you like happy endings, then of course the Lord God Almighty destroyed them, or locked them up in Heaven’s Vault. That’s an answer for kids and tourguides. The better storytellers, they say the Devil had no more need of the guns. Left them on Earth for the eternal torment of Man. The bloody path the weapons blazed through Texas history is all the proof they need…

Follow these legendary guns through the history of Texas in the novel.