The stranger pointed the way with a slender white finger. He pointed out my window into the darkness of night. Although I could not see him, hidden underneath his voyager’s garb of plain cotton robes, the path was clearly lit by the soft light of his lantern.

        His mere presence was unnerving, but it was necessary that I bear it. The stranger said that he would show me things to come.

        “What kind of things?” I asked.

        Terrible things were his only response. The stranger’s voice was chilling and breathless. It whispered in obscene voices of life and death, pleasure and pain, and worst of all was the cold nothing of eternity.

        The stranger first came to me in a dream turned nightmare. A pleasant butterfly dream of sunny fields soon turned violent and I found myself in a sea of darkness. Fiends too horrible to describe spawned from the cold nothing surrounding me.

        I was frightened beyond reason, clinging to the very edge of my sanity. The twisted visions took hideous shapes and soon I felt many colored eyes upon me. At first I thought the fiends would simply devour me, but instead they spoke to me.

        The unknown language confused me. Symbol-like words bore into my mind, a thousand voices screaming at me. Hideous tendrils of fleshy insanity picked at my brain. I was ready to gouge out my very eyes to get at the monsters inside my head. That is when the stranger came.

        The stranger emerged from the bleak nothing waving his antique lantern before him. The golden beacon broke the gloomy darkness and ended my pain. That was my first experience with the breathless stranger.

        I continued to see him in the same dream turned nightmares. Every time he rescued me. The last time was different. The last time the stranger saved me, but instead of vanishing in the mist of my waking he guided me from the darkness of sleep to stand before me as I awakened.

        The stranger silently stood at the foot of my bed. A light breeze from the open window brushed his robes, but he remained silent and unmoved. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and pinched myself to see if I was still in the deep embrace of slumber.

He remained. His ghostly visage was horrible, even though I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t know whether or not he was a guardian angel or infernal deviant. But I did know he saved me from the horrid spawns and for that I was grateful.

        After I aroused myself from bed I stood face to face with the stranger. A dark cowl hung closely to the shadows surrounding his face. I found it hard to be close to the stranger, but to know the future was an urge that I could not resist. I buried the idea of fleeing, and followed the morbid visitor of my dreams.

        I followed him from my home into the moonlit night. Silvery mist rose up from off the ground and dew covered leaves clung to my feet. It felt like I was still asleep walking through the misty landscape of my mind. Everything was surreal and peaceful.

        I continued walking in the stranger’s silent steps. He led me across the cool field. The ancient forest behind my home rose up like silent guardians to an ancient treasure. Twisted branches and gnarled roots formed a path into its shadowy heart.

The forest was silent. Not even an owl dare make a sound in the presence of my guide. I was lost in my own thoughts when shapes from out of the corner of my eye writhed from out of the shadows.

        I stopped.

        The stranger turned to me. Illumination from his lantern chased away the surrounding shadows, but I knew they were just beyond the light. I knew those unspeakable monstrosities were waiting for me to leave the safety of the light. By this time I could hear them. Their alien language was accompanied by the wet sounds of slavering tongues washing up against razor filled maws.

        The stranger was quiet. His deathly white face was mostly hidden in the shadows. He said nothing, yet I could feel his mind pulling me and urging me to follow.

        I hesitated, looking beyond the protective light, but I followed anyway. I knew the monsters would kill me as soon as the stranger turned, but instead they withered into the silvery mist. We walked through the ever-darkening forest for what seemed like hours. I never knew the forest was this big and I didn’t care. The stranger was with me and the alien voices left me in peace. Suddenly the stranger stopped and beckoned me forward. I walked into the bright circle and what I saw amazed me.

        We stood upon the precipice of a jagged cliff overlooking nothing. There was only black. Everywhere I looked it was dark except the occasional burst of lightning in the bleak distance. The moon had vanished and the stars had fled with it. The darkness of night swallowed everything, but it wasn’t the night that did this. Something insidious was at work.

        “The fiends swallowed everything!” I cried.

        We were in the belly of some horrid beast never to see the light of day again. Before I had time to turn upon the hooded wretch that lured me into this abysmal hell his cold hand was upon my back. The chilling clutch of death ran up my spine. I was frozen in place, unable to even scream out.

He pushed me over the rocky edge. The bastard actually saved my life to kill me here, a sacrifice to some infernal beast.

        I fell into the void of the beast’s never-ending stomach and floated helplessly for an eternity, watching the lightning, and trying to determine what was up and what was down. It was hopeless. All was lost until the bottom found me.

        I never heard the splash, but the water of some long forgotten lake absorbed me into its obscuring depths. I tried to swim to the surface, but something had wrapped itself around me. Sinewy tentacles squeezed the life from me as they pulled me back under.

        The alien voices were back. I could see the horrible faces of another age staring at me. The twisted demonic images laughed and taunted me as the sea creature pulled me toward certain death.

        I fought with nothing more than the pure will to live and the resolve to once again see the light of day before I die. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. I smashed the tentacles with all my strength until they reluctantly set me free. I fought hard to reach the surface. My lungs were ready to burst. When I finally broke the surface I inhaled deeply and thanked all that’s good and just for the life giving air.

        Of course I didn’t take the time to gather my thoughts, knowing that whatever was down there would soon be searching for its lost meal. The land I desired quickly made itself known and I ran upon its rocky shore. I quickly got away from the water before I finally let myself collapse.

        The air felt good, but being home would have been better. That didn’t happen. I was alone in the cold darkness of an alien world, lost in my thoughts I teetered on the pinhead of sanity.

        Throughout my entire life I had always prided myself as a solid individual, having no need of anyone’s charity. I knew right from wrong, and reality from fantasy. But something went wrong somewhere. I went from a normal life of research to being trapped inside the dark stomach of some hideous devourer of worlds.

        Would I ever see the sun again? Was there even a sun remaining in the world I once had taken for granted or is this it? Am I to live the rest of my life in darkness? And if I am to live am I to live alone? Depressing thoughts overwhelmed me. There was nothing for me in this desolate hell except my thoughts, the overbearing darkness, and the occasional flashes of lightning.

        My thoughts continued eventually becoming a blur. It all ended when the stranger’s obscene voice released me from the well of my despair. The anger and accusations were quickly forgotten when I glimpsed the familiar, yet frightening figure before me.

        The stranger bade me to follow as he pointed the light ahead. I was thankful for the dark breaking light and did as he wished. This journey was shorter, but much more terrifying than the previous one before the fall. Lightning burst overhead and thunder shattered my ears. I thought that I had gone deaf until the next ground-shaking boom.

        The quick flashes of white light gladdened my heart, but I was distraught by what met my eyes. Nothing. When the flash of white blanketed the landscape there was nothing to be seen. There was nothing except flat rocky ground. No trees, no animals, just nothing.

        I wasn’t in the belly of some alien beast. I was dead. Dead to the world and my old life, and the stranger was death’s handmaiden. Our journey was going to hell. There was no heaven. At that moment of clarity I knew heaven never existed. It was merely a humanitarian pipe dream to cushion those with soft hearts and simple minds.

        I continued to follow, never doubting my destination. The stranger was leading me to a place of eternal darkness. The occasional flashes of light would illuminate the fiends too awful to describe as they dismembered and devoured my body continuously until the end of time.

        I was resolved to except the fate given me. If there was a god he was nothing more than a tyrant and I a mere puppet bound to his heartless hands. Someone or something so cruel to condemn humanity to an eternity of torturous dwelling could be nothing more. A guilty sentence without a trial was handed to me, but I would be damned if I cried for mercy to only give the bastard satisfaction.

        Amidst a bright flash, the landscape changed. The ground was still rocky, and foliage was still nonexistent, but standing before us was the ruins of some long abandoned temple. The gods were unknown, but the worshipers I knew all too well.

        The stranger sat down and bade me to do the same. I sat down on the hard ground in the protective light watching and waiting.

        The convulsing shadows of my most hideous nightmares swam in and out of the crumbling temple. Twisting shapes contorted and blended together. The monsters formed into a black mass of humming energy.

        The stranger watched in silence. What he did next would have struck me as strange, but after my other experiences it was nothing more than another passing moment. From the inner folds of the plain gray robe the stranger produced a flute.

        The flute was no ordinary flute. It was as obscene as the one bearing it. The instrument of death was carved from bloodstained bone. Crimson stains slid around the finger holes of the flute. The dark white flute looked as if it came from the femur bone of a recently butchered man.

        The stranger gently placed the flute to his pale lips.

        I knew this was it. The stranger was going to pipe his deathly melody and the kings of hell would ride down from the lightning and toss me to their slavering pets. Doom was upon me and I knew it, but I was wrong.

        The serene tune filled the bleak land, and the twisting shadows heeded its call. They danced and swayed with the piping, covering the entire temple. The stranger finished his melody and pointed to the shadow.

        I looked from his bony finger to the shadowy mass. Underneath another flash the shadows radiated a mirror-like sheen. I was awestruck by the transformation.

        The stranger told me that knowledge of things to come would be known through the looking glass. He said the portal spied into a realm beyond the watch of mortal man and their false creations. It’s a realm of neither time nor law. A place of the great primordial, where things best left alone are stirring from their long, dream-filled slumber.

        I was frightened, but my curiosity was peeked. Before the stranger could stand I found myself racing to the looking glass. He tried to say something, but I didn’t hear him.

        The mirror was larger up close than I had imagined. Shadows churned around the black surface. A thousand gleaming eyes stared at me, and the hum of their confounding language rang in my ears. I waited for something to lash out from the moving shadows, but it never did.

        This felt so right to me. To look into the eyes of madness and see those things never meant to be seen by man felt good. The power emanating from the other side of the mirror was terrible, but the way it reverberated through my blood felt good. It tingled, making me feel power beyond that of anything ever imagined.

        I summed up all of my courage and looked through. What I saw was amazing. The mist-enshrouded landscape was constantly changing. One moment it was an airless moonscape and the next it was a land of ever flowing waterfalls. It was everything and nothing at the same time.

        That was just the beginning of my wonderment. Disembodied eyes of many colors flew through the ever-changing sky. Gray stalks, hanging loosely, trailed behind them and in their wake bloody tears gingerly fell on the heads of the sleepers.

        The sleepers were the terrible fate the stranger spoke of. I knew at first glance the nameless ones, great and terrible beyond any of our petty words, were the creators of our past and the destroyers of our future. There were many, great and small, sleeping in the primordial chaos of all creation’s beginning. Dreams of pleasure and pain took form. These new creations took flight into the realms of time and law to take their place amongst the mortals of creation.

        The bedlam was peace to the nameless ones, but all was not right in the primal waters. Somehow I knew that one was missing. I don’t remember if the sleeper’s minds were connected to me then, but I knew the worst of their kind was awake.

        Before I could witness anymore the vision was gone. Everything except the dark mist before my eyes was gone. I was alone except for the stranger’s voice.

        His obscene voice told me that I had seen enough. The stranger said that I was to become a beacon of release for all those still clinging to the false security of sanity.

        I awoke that night in a cold sweat. I was unsure of my purpose and myself but now I stand in my right mind. I now know that I am the light in the darkness. I am one of the chosen of the nameless ones, those beyond the realm of time and law. I am here to pave the way for the great awakening.

        The time of nothing is upon us. Darkness will blot out the sun. They will devour your gods descending upon humanity with the final breath in their terrible maws. Then and only then will I laugh, for I am the stranger and only the stranger will survive.