It sweeps across the lands, this darkness. Like an ocean wave on the shore or as if someone had cast a spell upon the land. It is as a thick fog, a great blanket, making people blind as it falls upon their unsuspecting heads. I stand upon the brink, on the edge of a great cliff with hundreds upon hundreds of feet of empty air before me, and at the bottom in the distance, jagged rocks, smiling angrily and baring their teeth. It is ready to eat me. It wants my blood, my life, my soul.
I cannot move.
My
toes are precariously perched over the edge, and I see it coming. It’s coming. My breathing quickens.
Heart races. Cold.
The failing light before my sight is grey.
Not grey like the warm ash of a fading fire or the majestic silver-grey of
birch-bark, but a harsh grey. The life-ending grey of the ocean during a storm,
terrible, fierce, or the last color a drowning victim sees in the water
stretching out before them, just before their heart stops, their brain ceases,
and they can see no more. It was a forbidding grey. A hated grey. Dismal.
Death. And it continued to pour across the land.
It was not black. Black is better. One
cannot see a thing in complete darkness, but in the fading light of an ending
world, the color is grey. Sight is only useful enough for barely visible
shapes, fuzzy outlines, ghosts of their concrete existence. Grey is where the
spirits reside, the demons play, where the lines between the worlds blur, and
one is no longer certain which realm is reality, dream, or ethereal. Grey is the
place between waking and sleeping. Uncertainty. It pervades everything. Eating,
breathing, sleeping, living in the grayness.
I can smell the despair as it rolls toward
me. The hopelessness grips me with its smoky tendrils, wrapping around my
ankles and pulling at me to fall off the ledge. It wants me.
I cannot move…
I cannot move…
Dear
God, I cannot move!
All I can do is watch it devour the land
like the prowling lion that it is. There are screams that echo off the rock
faces and reach my ears. They are the sounds of terror. Sheer terror and horror
mixed with despair and grief. I feel my heart begin to shatter, and see a grey
shape latch itself to my feet.
I am tipping…
I am slipping…
I am falling...
No.
No.
There is a light behind me. I can barely
make it out before it drags me forward off the rock side. My heart stops as I
stare into that grinning mouth. It is the end. There are no more words to
write. No more emotions to record other than the sense of utter emptiness of my
being.
No!
His
hand saves me.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“…the
darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining.” 1 John 2:8
