Raindrops fell around the feet of the priest as he shouted into the crowds, crowning himself harbinger of the end times. The black clouds in the sky blotted out the sun and darkened the horizon. But this was nothing new. It had been this way for weeks, the rain rarely stopped.

            “The rain comes!” he shouts. I do not know why this crowd has stopped before him. It is known God has forsaken us. “You are given another chance – wash off your sins, or drown in a sea of them,”

            I try to shoulder my way through the crowd, but there’s too many. I stop, and listen now, as I have no other choice.

            “Here you gather before me. Broken. Starving. Wounded. And yet, still you sin! You whimper, ‘Why has God forsaken us?’ And yet you do not stop – you do not kneel, to dust your head in the mud?! You put yourselves high, above the precipice of God’s judgment, yet look to Him for guidance! For protection! God has spoken to me, yes – he whispered in my ear, ‘Let the skies rain on the weak and the fallen’. Free yourselves of all the pain! Carry the weight, or let yourselves be crushed under it!”

            I step away, back the way I came. A priest with that much of a crowd won’t stop ranting for some time, I know. It’d be quicker to came back the same way. He was wrong, though – so wrong, and the poor fool didn’t realize it. I have seen the throne of God, and it sits empty.

            What I’d done to see that empty throne, it almost hurts to look back on.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

            When I’d begun my lunatic search, she became unnerved. But she stayed, much against what she believed would be best. She stayed because she believed she could help me – but no, the one small glimpse I got, of God, and the mouth filled with blood, even if it was in a dream, it drove me insane. She noticed I was not getting better, though. She could tell, as I was able to find less and less connecting this to any real manifestation instead of some warm fever dream, it only spurred me on, to search.

            “When your spirit is broken,” she told me, “And your will disconnects from your mind, you will know,” she told me. “You will know when you’ve made your mistake.”

            And yet I stayed. I could not give up now, I’d already sacrificed so much in order to get here. I told her I would not go with her, away. I could not. And her eyes grew bigger then, in the moonlight, glittering. She leaned to me, and whispered tears into my ear.

            “In your eyes, I can see a longing for the truth,” said the man. Shady as he was, he knew exactly of what I spoke, and that I was not the only one to have this dream. It must have meant something. “You are burning within, for it.”

            He showed me. ‘Wise is the man who was led astray,’ I was told. Everyone had always told me I was led astray by this dream of mine. My skin was parted from the bone. My eyes hollowed from the inside out. My blood- turned to sand, fell through the hourglass to grow cold.

            And then I saw. I will carry it from this life to the next – the empty throne of God. I saw heaven, burning in the sky beyond the clouds. And at the foot of that empty throne, was a man, smiling, blood in his mouth and meat stuck between his teeth. Blood matted his beard. The man who ate God.

            I will carry the weight, as I must. Though I wish I could return to her, free of all the pain. But I cannot now. She would not recognize me as I am. Nor understand a word I say.