We stand before a storm; a great darkness, slowly spreading over the vast, desert plains, thunders with deep and abiding echoes of unfathomable magnitude. The terrible flashes, hidden in its high, rolling billows tinted with the deep color of royalty, seem to reveal a shape in the spreading clouds.
And upon his ancient mountain, the old man waits. The storm gathers and darkens the day into a premature night. All below flee into whatever holes or burrows they can and cover their faces while the old man sits upon his stone. He spies the dreaded beast slithering through the tenebrous sky.
A thing of forgetfulness, no pen may record its shape in the trembling mind of man and so no man may record, in picture or word, that thing which came through its uncoiling flight to encircle the old man and his mountain.
But I was there. It was my time to serve him who sits upon the mountain, and I trembled and cried in the madness of fear as that thing revealed itself in heaven’s angry flashes. That grinning beast was all teeth, teeth and emptiness, mouths consuming each other in an impossible cascade of distorted violence.
When the old man saw that I was fallen prone as though slain by my dread of the thing, I remember his soft voice under the whipping howls of the storm commanding me to stand, and I tried. I fought with all my might, but could barely climb to my knees. I could no longer tell if the mountain were a mountain, if I was at a great height or depth, if there was anything above or below. As I struggled in the swirling vortex, I remember the thing spoke in tones and voices I cannot imitate or set down.
The thing in the purple cloud challenged the old man, and the old man did not answer. The old man’s hand came under my arm then, and he lead me back to my place and set my feet under me again.
Then I watched his dim form walk away into the blackness of the conquered sky. In only a few steps, he had become nothing more than a shadow in my sight. I stared hard after him, for the only sanity was with him. Just as I feared that I had lost him, that I should again be swept into that nonexistence that was the storm, he whispered these words, and as though his voice were in my mind, I heard him through that ever mounting gale:
“Be still.”
That was his only answer to the spirit of madness which had enslaved the land. At his command, a great deluge fell and rained upon the earth. The clouds emptied themselves and were not. The sun returned, and in its light my mind was restored. I felt as though I had awakened from some dreadful dream. The old man still sat upon his rock as the sky was filled with the glistening rainbows of a defeated chaos.
No one remembers, unless prompted, of that day, and then only with a shudder; but I, I remember it differently, for in the darkness, I found hope.
Tale Told 