Ashes of the natives were all the evidence I needed to pursue the truth, even to my own destruction. I needed to know what had happened to them. As a photographer of wartime atrocities, I had developed a certain insensitivity to what I saw through the lenses. My clinical ability to take pictures of indescribable horrors was contrasted by my concern for the posterity of truth.

In wartime, truth is certainly the first innocent murdered. It was never the last.

I watched the natives of the island in their outriggers, crying babies in their arms, supplies of food, men standing and watching their abandoned village grimly. Alone, I turned and went the opposite direction. I was armed only with the latest digital and preferred outdoor photography and my desolate nerves.

The island jungle gave way to a blackened wasteland. Pumice crunched underfoot and burnt logs embedded in shiny black stone were the edge of a realm of nightmares. The island beyond the muted jungle was the scorched earth of divine wrath.

Those who had stood and faced the vision were as statues made of ash, human remains, preserved as gray ash. I could only view them through the lens. The inutterable words they had screamed could only be silenced behind the glass. Their faces told me of living death, trapped forever, the name of their sculpture, the god from the volcano.

There was a silence all around so that the minimal audible beep of the digital camera was a death chime. The jungle was silent, no birds sang, no insects scurried, no animals traded, no vines grew, and no leaves rustled in any breeze. It was as though all life and all associates of life had fled the advance of the red flow.

Though the sun warmed the cremated landscape and gray-brown smoke ribboned from cracks in the ground, there was a coldness permeating the air. The absence of heat, in such evidence of inferno, was unnatural. The canny coolness was, as though, the warmth was absorbed by the burning sent from above.

I shivered among frozen flames.

As I lowered my digital image capture, I exchanged the outdoor camera to my hands and raised it up as though a shield. I hadn't looked at any of the standing dead natives with my own eyes. It was how I was able to do my job. As long as I was the photographer, I was not a participant, I was not truly witness to the horrors in front of me. I just pointed and clicked.

As I ascended to the source, hiking the steep slope, I left something behind that I would never recover. I do not know what it was. My mind had begun to accept, for the sake of my work, all that I was experiencing.

I knew that the mere sight of the volcano god meant turning instantly to solid volcanic ash. The natives had said so and I had just finished photographing a number of them that had seen the vulcan-thing. Some part of me was fully aware that it was real, terrifyingly so, and ignored the obvious danger.

My feet were commanded by the part of me that was not native, the foolish part of me that did not believe in the volcano god. I was able to stand in warzones and film mass graves and far worse and had never believed in Hell. Evil, I thought, was incidental, relative and isolated to the human experience.

I subscribed to the belief that evil was contextual. If someone poured gasoline on an ant hill and tossed a match, to the ant, evil had come. To the ants crawling on the dead humans in a mass grave, there was no evil. Perhaps we too were merely ants to something pouring gasoline onto our hill. The match was not concerned with good or evil, it merely fell, struck and burning, transferring energy.

That is not to say that I had no belief in humanity. I was trapped in the human experience. To me, evil was a force of nature, as tangible as gravity or light. What I understood was that nature did not care about humanity.

If anything, nature wished to hasten our removal, abhorring the vacuum, the wastefulness.

"It is just a volcano." I said out-loud to myself. I had begun to believe in the volcano god, in some subconscious faith. My instincts told me that the danger was entirely real. I tried to isolate superstition from science, fact from fantasy, and found that in the realm of ruins: I could not.

That is when existential fear and immediate dread became the only thing that could save me.

I sensed it before I felt it. Terror rose slowly within me, as the most imperceptible trembling of the solid rock I stood on increased. When I could feel the mountain shaking with suppressed rage I began to shake with unsuppressed morbidity.

Instead of running I did what the dead I had passed had done. I turned and looked to the crater of doom. I waited in trembling terror behind the lens of my camera, as though it would preserve me if the god emerged.

The silent words, held in eternal echo on the lips of the ash statues, screamed in my mind. Their fire carved eye sockets forced shut my eyes. I could still see it.

Stolen novel; please report.

With my eyes closed and the camera shielding me, I could see the outline of the molten monster. I beheld its formless body, its faceless head, its spewing maw. I saw the dripping lava, the cracking skin, the inferno within. It was moved without life, lived without mortality and came without natural purpose.

I knew it in my thoughts, the cells in my body recognizing it, the molecules of my composition remembering it from the fragmented eons of the cooling first days of Earth. It was something from before, timeless. The god was already at the end of time and it brought with it the starlessness of the beginning.

My brain assembled into a singular thought: knowing its true name in an abundance of unpronounceable syllables that were endlessly ululating within my skull. A wind of boiling air blew past me, singeing my hair and crisping my clothing.

The film of my camera was crumpled by the image, or possibly the intense heat of that instant.

I dropped my camera, unaware that it was already forgetful of what the lens had captured. Different kinds of indescribable terror thrashed as chaos within me as I screamed. No sound came from me.

The air was gone, sucked into the volcano as the god emerged. My scream was empty, without release. I was covering my eyes in the crook of my elbow, shielding my eyes from the x-ray glow of the fiery monster. I could still see it, even as I turned my back and staggered across the cold magma.

My other hand was a reflex that had felt the concussion of nearby explosions and remembered them. My other hand recalled the sensation of stray bullets in the air around me. My other hand responded to the odor of decay, the wail of the bereaved and the mindless evil of the human experience. My other hand calmly grasped my trade, despite the relativity of evil.

Without aiming there was a blurry image stolen from the daytime nightmare. My digital camera froze the struck and falling match and the hand that would drop it upon the human-anthill. I held the second theft of the devil's fire, such knowledge of nature's insidious message.

I had reached the village ahead of the molten blood of the mountain. All that was in its path was burned away, leaving nothing. I stood there, somehow suspecting without immediate understanding of why: that I was not the first fire thief.

Fumes choked me and gave me visions. I was a charred prophet, alive and having known the name of the god, the true name of the volcano god. As an oracle, asphyxiated and red-eyed, I stood in the god's shimmering shadow. In such timeless shade I knew of the first to take a picture of the god.

Long ago there was another who had come to prove that the islanders were not mere savages. They subdued the god by feeding it the young and the innocent, beautiful virgins, often the children of their noble line of chiefs. This was done out of necessity, not brutality. The human sacrifice was almost invariably a kind of volunteer, drugged and tied up to ensure the ease of those who would survive them. There was great horror in pushing someone into a caldera, to feed a monster.

The food of such a person sedated the god, causing its unbroken slumber.

When the islanders were forced, by the laws of those who did not know the truth, to abandon their religion, that is when the volcano began to again lay waste. Except the destruction was not consistent with any known volcanic activity.

An esteemed anthropologist, hearing of the forbidden religion, teamed up with a ridiculed geologist that had studied the strange volcano. They brought with them a special camera, state-of-the-art at the time, to the base of the volcano. It was a daguerreotype camera. I knew what it was, in studying photography as a student I had heard of it. The camera took only one unreproducible silver plate image.

Their ghosts had held their silence until I stood among them. I felt their presence and heard their mad prayers. Amid their mutterings they spoke of an iconoclasm of a buried god-slayer. The god had come back from below, so soon, to destroy the impossible replica of its form.

I wandered around the burning village, past the fleeing chickens as they clucked and burst into flames. The chief's hut was marked with the broken triangle that honored the tradition of noble sacrifice. My eyes were burning in the smoke and I felt around in the hot and packed soil under the mats with stiffened fingers.

I was in a trance, survival and madness, fear and horror, all my thoughts in disorder. One singular drive made me dig with shoveled hands. Then I found the fearsome icon, the silver plate. A sensation of déjà vu calmed me enough to lift it from the steaming socket in the ground.

"Nothing survives the god's visage." I recalled the words of the natives. I kept the plate facing away from me. I was terrified beyond my ability to reason with myself. I was chuckling in disbelief, even while I knew the truth. The god was coming, it would not stop until it was satisfied.

I walked out amid the drifting cinders and the darkness of smokey skies. From behind the silver I stood, holding it in front of my sight. From the mountain the gaze of the god found me. I was quaked and stunned, petrified with fright.

Then the volcano took back the monster from within. It collapsed, splashing into oblivion and crumbling into inanimate rocks. There was a sound, a blast, that knocked me backwards and scalded my skin and deafened me. It was the death knell of the eternal abomination. It had seen its own image, and not in the distorted reflection of obsidian, but the perfect outline of the daguerreotype plate of silver.

The seething fear and thoughtless wisdom left my mind and I lay there, still alive. Some kind of sanity was left to me upon which to reconstruct my experiences. I was intact to a degree, although changed forever.

When the island natives returned to their village, they knew their god was dead. My survival testified to that for them. I also told them what I had done. I had shown the god its irrevocable image, made its evil relative to its own experience. It was not so timeless after its final emergence.

I had, in my fleeting madness, looked upon the sooty plate in my hands. If the mere image still had the power to kill me, it would have. Instead, there was nothing there except the outline of the mountain and a place in the blossoming smoke where the god was revealed. Its image was gone, along with its existence.

I was cared for as my injuries healed and humbly thanked. I looked with my own eyes upon the green life that was starting to push through the black cracks. The village was rebuilt, and the island healed as I did.

The dormant volcano - the dead volcano, became a geological anomaly. I went home and looked at the digital image of the eruption, fearless of any danger. Nothing remained except the truth.