I tilted my head slightly. A robed figure, tall and slender, materialized from thin air. Even though I recognized its shape as human, I could never quite see its face.

I thought I had a dream once. There was a field of golden wheat and a sky that seemed intentional in its darkness. Somehow the sun illuminated the endless lengths of crop without laying bare on the firmament. A great battle took place there, I remember as much. Two great kings had chosen that field, at that time, to send millions of young men to pierce the flesh of one another. A rhythmic cacophony of clinging steel and screams of the dying resonated throughout the valley. 

I sat by an oak, witnessing the theatre from afar. 

“Such sounds that man can create,” someone said.

I tilted my head slightly. A robed figure, tall and slender, materialized from thin air. Even though I recognized its shape as human, I could never quite see its face. Not because the hood it wore covered it in darkness, but because it didn’t seem to have one. There was just a gaping nothing-ness and strange spirals all the way to the infinite. It grabbed my gaze and I couldn’t look away.

“Are you afraid, little one?” It continued.

“What are you?” I asked.

“A priest. A warrior. A farmer without land. Orator of the Divine. A gaping wound or the bandage that heals. The One Who Walks. I have been called many things,” it said.

“Then what are you now?”

“I am an appendage of something far greater, the wet tongue of Creation itself tasting the hills and rivers that it made so long ago,” the Priest said, barely moving.

He turned to look upon the battlefield and together we watched the carnage in silence. A cavalry charge. A lance being thrust into the shimmering armor of a knight. Men—whose only difference were the colors of their banners—slaughtering each other. 

“It is curious,” the Priest said after a while.

“What is?” I looked at him.

“The blood of the slain will permeate the very ground of which they stand on and nourish the roots of trees that will outlive empires.”

And then I awoke.

The scream of the wind rattled against the RV, its metal shell groaning as if the storm was trying to peel it apart piece by piece. The radio crackled, static swallowing half the words.

“We got rotation!” someone shouted over the comms. “It’s dropping fast—mile, maybe two out!”

I shook my head, still reeling from the dream—was it a dream?—and pulled myself together. My fingers trembled as I zipped up my jacket, the smell of ozone thick in the air, as if the sky itself was bleeding.

Outside, the plains stretched out in every direction, the grass flattened beneath the pressure of an approaching giant. The storm loomed ahead, black and churning, its center bulging downward, a writhing funnel reaching for the earth. My breath hitched. I had chased dozens of these before. But not this one. This one had weight, an ancient, deliberate presence.

The team moved with rehearsed efficiency—cameras, anemometers, GPS tracking. They whooped and shouted into the wind, adrenaline high as they positioned themselves at the perfect vantage point.

And then, the world split open.

Lightning licked across the heavens, not in jagged streaks, but in arcs that twisted and coiled like living tendrils. The tornado dropped fully now, an obsidian column gnashing its way toward us. But beneath it—inside it—I saw movement. Not swirling dust, not debris, but something vast shifting against the fabric of reality. The lightning wasn’t electricity—it was glistening eyes opening for the first time in centuries. Appendages. Mouths that weren’t mouths. A body too large to exist.

My teammates were screaming commands, but their voices blurred, muffled as if I were underwater. One of them—Oscar?—clutched my shoulder. “You good? We gotta move!”

I turned, my pupils blown wide. “You don’t see it?”

Oscar barely had time to respond before the wind took him. One moment, he was there, gripping my shoulder tight. The next, his body snapped backward into the air, limbs flailing, his scream already lost. The others—Anna, Luis, Harper—tried to run, but the sky descended on them. Where they saw only rain and dust, I saw hands. Fingers long as highways curling around them, folding them into the storm.

Anna was reaching toward me when she came apart, her body unspooling like thread plucked loose by invisible claws. Luis was pulled screaming into the air, his jaw stretching open impossibly wide as he was devoured by something not-quite-there.

The wind howled. No, not wind. Laughter. A voice too big for sound.

The sky split like torn flesh. And behind it—

Something looked back.

I fell to my knees, the sheer magnitude of the thing pressing into my mind like a vice. A curtain had been drawn, and I had seen beyond it. The storm was not a force of nature. It was a feeding hand. A reflexive twitch of something too large to fit into understanding.

And then, standing beside me, silent and unmoving, was the Priest.

The storm roared on. The Priest merely watched.

“You see it, don’t you?” I whispered, my voice barely audible over the apocalypse unraveling around me.

The Priest tilted his head slightly. His hood rippled, revealing not a face but that same spiraling void, a wound in the shape of a man.

“Of course,” he said. “I always do.”

My stomach lurched as another crack of thunder split the sky. For a moment, I thought I saw it—the thing above the thing, the presence beyond the storm. The true calamity. But my mind could not hold onto its shape; it was like trying to grasp mist in clenched fists.

And then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the storm began to die. The wind lessened, the black funnel unraveling, scattering debris as it weakened. The pressure in my skull lightened, though what I had seen did not fade. The earth was scarred, the sky raw, but the storm had passed.

My friends were gone. The RV was gone. The sky still churned, but it was no longer a gaping wound.

I turned to the Priest, my voice hoarse. “Why show me this?”

The Priest was silent for a long moment. Then, ever so slowly, he knelt beside me.

“Because you asked,” he murmured. “Because you looked.”

I looked at the fading sky, my hands shaking. The realization settled into my bones, heavier than anything I had ever known.

Every storm. Every quake. Every comet that streaked across the heavens.

All of them were something else.

And they had always been watching.