Excerpt from "A Vantage of Darkness"

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming novel, "A Vantage of Darkness". To read more, contact Nathaniel at ShrakeWrites@gmail.com for an advance copy.

"Her perspective fluttered from one thing to the next without pretense or concern for logical transition. From a pleasant nothingness, she suddenly found herself looking down a long, dark cave with a distant light shining in its craggy depth. She could feel the dampness of the space, and as the light at its end began to flicker out, the sound of a blood-curdling scream echoed through the walls from a larynx familiar. She then saw a cobblestone well standing beside the burnt-down remains of a building somewhere in the forest. The concrete foundation of the late building lay beneath a chimney still rising into the sky against a backdrop of trees mocking its ascent. A smattering of charred wood lay scattered about the scene as a dozen head of cattle grazed lazily by. A pair of pale hands suddenly emerged from within the well, grasped the lip of the cobblestone brim, and just as the water-logged head of a translucent figure breached her vantage, her perspective shifted to a desolate road in the forest as the rain heavily pelted its unmaintained surface. She gazed longitudinally down the road, which was flanked by tall rising ponderosas in the heavy rain. From the tree line on the left side of her perspective, a donkey emerged onto the road. Upon the donkey’s head was the obviously taxidermied head of a lion, with the saw marks of the lion’s neck still bleeding down the donkey’s legs and its front hooves as it slowly trotted upon the soggy road. Once upon the center of the path, it paused, looked downward with its lion-head mask, then continued ahead into the trees on the right side of Mae’s perspective. Her view then shifted to an all-encompassing view of space from space. All that could be seen was a suffocatingly distant view of the universe, that seemed to stare back at her with a heaviness that snuffed out the breath of her thoughts. The stars seemed to glitter upon an absence of hope that glistened in the tears that swelled in the eyes of her nightmare’s perspective. She waited and pleaded for her perspective to shift, but in the elongated experience of her dream, the stars seemed to threaten, in no uncertain terms, that it would forever press upon the corneas of an unfathomably long, desolate, and impotent existence."