How can what transpired be described? Tumult, chaos, a living darkness sweeping across the land, till it seemed that the watchtower stood alone in a seething, black ocean. Even to myself, as a dispassionate observer, the images are confused though I attempted to recall them as best I could upon waking. In this strange dream of times past, the end came with the terrible allusion that it had come many times before. I heard the screams of uncounted multitudes, throats raw from giving voice to the horror that crept, mountainous, upon the dying civilization. My dream-self screamed as well, of this I am sure, for who could witness such and remain silent?
And that horror, oh, that dreadful
shape! Though my dream-self suffered terribly from this sight, somehow a clear image eluded me. I recall a multitude of legs, or perhaps tentacles, though they were strangely jointed and moved with a terrifying precision utterly abhorrent for something so large. The rest, however, was visible to me in unutterable clarity. The seas foamed at its passage, waves topping fifty feet and more, tinged with foully red phophorescence. The roiling black clouds that had descended upon the previously clear sky tore and parted before it, unveiling again that hateful occlusion which had so pitilessly spelled the doom of all life. The ground cracked and split, the very earth unable to bear its approach, spilling noxious gasses and pyroclastic flows. In its wake crawled, flopped and slithered a blasphemous host of misbegotten terrors, called from their hiding places to partake in the shouting, revelry and slaughter that reigned over all.
My dream-self, for all his vaunted reason and belief in the natural order of the world, gibbered and prayed to that nightmare incarnate, if only it would deliver him from the coming cataclysm. For this was a blinding revelation, though it was momentarily incomplete: the horror that stalked forth to clear off the earth
was the natural order, and it was rational civilization that was the sorry by-blow of idiot chance. No deliverance came, not the least from that very engine of annihiliation, and so the revelation was complete. Even in understanding, none would be spared. Thus, all that remained was to cower and await the end.
However, as a being of reason, my dream self was not content. He would endure agonies all the greater for this lucidity, but again he turned himself to his etching stylus and media and began to write, to chronicle the end of his world. Would not life rise once more, only to be again so cruelly snuffed? Could some creature in the far-flung future find his words and know their end as it approached?