The Tale of Nathaniel Ravendrake

by Ljubo Popovich

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

February 18th

Still there are a few impressions that cause a lingering numbness as I lie awake at night.

I think the creature I hit, that took my car into itself, did not simply return to its world. Its presence has never fully receded from my mind, and we are intimately connected now.

Sometimes I feel a warm gel slide over my senses. At these moments, flashes of light carry images of the familiar blobs of ball lightning. Also, I get the sensation of being shrunk to molecular size as the presence of the superior being supersedes my consciousness.

Now I drive nervously back to my apartment along that same road and, when I get home, I lock all the doors. When I close my eyes, I’m fraught with images. I see again the cloaked figures, but every now and then they dismantle their robes and uncover their translucent bodies. They have antlered limbs and glowing blood, and a devouring pit for a mouth that creates a vacuum in their wake.

Soon they will be traversing every boulevard, transforming into electrical currents and passing through walls. Among unsuspecting humanity, touching them briefly, and then passing on. Meanwhile I try to go about my business. But how can I with the burden of this knowledge?

Cowering, I watch them from my window. All at once they are called up to the sky, and the innocent bystanders notice only a subtle breeze. Countless arcs of lightning, marking the intersection of realms.

March 14th

Today I noticed that the sight and presence of human beings no longer comforts me. In a way, I feel only distantly related to other men and women now. It is too easy to imagine the strange light of their souls leaking into the air. I do not know if there is something wrong with my mind or if I will come to treasure my memories of that sojourn... Will I ever stop feeling them calling me back?

Through the conduit of my dreams, they communicate their will to me. I see the microadjustments they make to the world, their imperceptible influence. It’s as if every object in the world is attached to an invisible string. I mean the true nature of things on our planet is that we are all inanimate, held in place by the administration of their energies, imbued with an iota of self-awareness and restricted by the frailty of our forms. I have come to realize this by degrees, as the vestiges of my prior understanding dropped away...

In my dreams, the sky fills up with that electric incandescence of ball lightning. Its radiation blots out my senses and beams momentary flashes of that higher world. That glowing orb swallows the sun and all the stars in the cosmos, leaving behind it an emptiness that is absolute...

April 6th

I regard stop signs with suspicion now. I’ve come across strange vibrant symbols that blaze for an instant on the reflective metal. They’re too fast to photograph and too complex to remember. I don a pair of sunglasses whenever I venture outdoors, not that it’ll do any good.

The past few months have been difficult. In the fog on my window, the shape of the octagon appears periodically. When I wiped it off with my sleeve, the shape was etched into the glass.

In the midst of my terror, I feel the latent presence that invaded me on that night respond to the signs, and I am calmed. Each time I feel the tugging of their domination as they lay claim to a little more of my soul, as if they are relieving me of the responsibility of carrying it.

Recently, I’ve caught glimpses of them when I first enter a room, and momentarily among crowds of people when I’m driving. Once, one of them was in the driver’s seat of a van across from me at an intersection with four stop signs. For almost a minute it refused to budge, until the person behind me honked, and I had to drive past.

Ball lightning tumbles through the sky. Uselessly, I snap a few pictures. This journal may one day serve as a warning to my fellow human beings. But the only way to believe it is to see the fruit of what we are all working for. I can convey nothing of its true significance.

I am no longer troubled by the presence of ball lightning, whether it is waiting outside my front door or sinking down through the ceiling. Powerlessly, I wait. I now know why people on their deathbeds claim to see a vast light beckoning them from beyond. And I remember the tall patient figures watching as the mountains of people rise up to fill that tremendous star!

It is a mercy that people enact their roles swaddled in blissful ignorance. It would only trouble them to know the truth.

April 17th

I am plagued by whispers in the still hours of the morning. Attempting to shave in the mirror with trembling hands, I have to look away. I no longer see my own reflection but the semi-transparent flesh of the angel. There is a dark outline of blackness around it. And I stare into the glass and deep into that pit of a face and it saps my mind.

I live amid tendrils of lightning now. Our two worlds are inextricable. Slowly, I feel my flesh metamorphosing just as I have come to regard them as elders...

Perhaps I am wrong to feel fear. Yet they remind me how small is my awareness and how flawed is my soul. Like a child on the playground that is terrified of the real world of grownups that awaits him, I cannot help but cling to what I know. I think only of that inevitable moment when my soul is ripened, when my body will join the void and flow out of this existence into that density that once was mankind; I will ascend into that star that stares back at Earth with the building brightness of its perfection.