This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RohanRedfang on 2026-05-13 20:43:53+00:00.

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The morning when God decided to talk to me again, I woke up tasting sand. Not real sand – you know that dry feeling that makes you choke on your own saliva. Sleep thinned out until the noise of garbage trucks outside brought me back to my bedroom. I stared at the ceiling, my temples aching, and I just knew today was going to be one of those days.

I’d woken up at least twice in the night, each time my heart hammering. The last dream had been about water, or something resembling water. It kept changing and folding in on itself, like a tide moving upwards. Inside the tide, a voice whispered to me in a language I should have recognized but didn’t.

I gave up on sleeping, just as the light started sliding through the edges of the shutters. I dragged myself into the kitchen and turned the coffee machine on. Its rumble filled the dark room while I leaned against the counter, scrolling through my phone with a still-sluggish thumb. My feed was the usual list of random world news.

A pharmaceutical giant announced trials for a new mRNA flu vaccine. Under a sky covered in black clouds, a drone showed footage of bombed buildings in the Middle East. A science article talked about unexpected gravitational anomalies detected beyond the Oort cloud, which astronomers theorized might be a new dwarf planet. Right below that, a huge photo gallery of a pop star’s wedding that I’d bet would last less than a month.

And then, as I waited for my coffee to cool down, I began my morning ritual. A habit I picked up years ago. I know it’s weird and never told anybody because they wouldn’t understand. I pulled up the live feeds one by one.

I began with the courtyard of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, packed with all those people circling the centre. Then I moved to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, bathed in light. Then the muddy and crowded banks of the Ganges behind the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi. The golden roof of the Jokhang Temple in Tibet. Dome of the Rock. The great Buddha.

Normal. They all looked peaceful.

After the coffee, I left my phone on the table and walked to the bathroom, stripping off.

At 32, I make a living writing freelance for a local newspaper. I write pieces on subjects ranging from local politics to poverty, tourism fluff, and theology. I live alone in a two-room flat that I like to keep dark – two months ago I’d tried to explain this to the woman who’d come to interview me to write a profile piece for a literary magazine. How I prefer letting daylight in slowly. How I’d let the city in on my terms – and she’d described it as “Matteo lives in monastic darkness,” which I thought was unfair but accurate.

See, I used to wear a collar. I was a priest. I’d spent four years telling people that every suffering had a divine purpose, until I chose to walk away. There was no romantic way out or a crisis of faith at midnight on my balcony. Not even a woman. It was slow and ugly – I don’t talk much about it. I was ordained at 26 and left at 30, with a bag and a letter; filled with that taste of disappointment that doesn’t really taste like anything and yet never leaves your mouth.

And living in Rome after abandoning the Church felt like an ironic kind of self-flagellation. There was no escaping the bells, the swarms of tourists coming to see the bones of saints, the statues glaring from every corner… but mostly the view from my bedroom window. The Vatican was fifteen minutes away from my front door, and some days I could feel its weight from inside here.

Water still dripped down my back as I stepped out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist. The bedroom remained buried in shadows. Breaking from habit, maybe because of the restless night, I walked over to the window, reached for the shutters, and pushed them open.

Rome’s mornings in mid-spring smell like a mix of stone and asphalt, of exhaust fumes and the scent of fresh-baked bread coming from the streets. The city came in all at once. That particular light I called a “Sunday-morning-quality” even though it was a Monday; a woman on the opposite balcony watered a pot of flowers barely alive, while two guys argued down the street about a badly parked car. With their thick accent and dialect, and their hands doing half the talking.

I exhaled and tried to release some tension. I was glad I hadn’t picked up my phone yet, because I would’ve dropped it. When I let my gaze drift up towards the dome of the basilica in the distance, my hand gripped the window frame so hard the paint crumbled under my nails.

Above St. Peter’s Square, the sky was… angry.

Swirling directly above the whole Vatican was a massive formation of black clouds. Rising from a point down on the pavement, they churned inwards like an endless spiral, heavy and thick, pulsing with a sickly purple undertone that devoured all the sunlight instead of blocking it. Like a tumour growing on the sky, it spanned at least a kilometre across. Deep inside that mass, flashes of lightning cracked across the darkness and threw jagged shadows over the basilica, making no sound at all.

Where the darkness ended with an unnatural seam, the city was perfectly sunny – and fine.

I gasped and took a step back. There’s something that I never tell anyone about myself. Something I always put off because trying to explain it is… complicated.

See, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to see these… anomalies. Like shadows of approaching grief. Things in the sky that nobody else can see. Not always and not in every place. As a kid I thought I was just ill. Hallucinations accompanied by migraines. I mentioned it to a doctor once and then never again because I’d learned to read the look on his face. But the clouds never stopped appearing.

Before the cables of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa snapped and dropped 43 people to their death, there was a dense black fog hovering above it in every picture and video I saw. Every time news of a school shooting from the US or a terrorist attack reaches us, the images on the screens are blurred by a black mist. And the thicker and darker the clouds, the worse the death toll.

They appear before something goes very, very wrong, right above the place it will happen. I can see it even in pictures or videos. Once, I tried to call the police. That went nowhere.

The footage from the 2004 tsunami still haunts me for a reason nobody else knows. In a video from a beach in Thailand, on my screen, the sky was completely replaced by the same black tumour I was now seeing from my window. The volume of that darkness was so heavy it seemed to flatten the ocean before it broke. And all those people filming were blind to the endless vortex spinning above their heads.

The scale of what I was looking at, right there above the Vatican, felt wrong. It stretched so far, burying the entire state under a roof of rot. I knew what it meant; a slaughter was coming. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were going to die soon.

I stood at the window for a long time, still wearing only that towel around my waist. Long enough for the two arguing guys down there to run out of enthusiasm.

The formation of black clouds didn’t move. Or rather it did – it was still churning in that slow inward spiral – but wasn’t going anywhere. It stayed there, right above the centre of the square, until I heard it. The sound silenced the noise of the city like a leviathan rising from the depths and hit my chest before my ears. Thunder, from a sky that, everywhere else, was blue and clear.

Down in the street, some tourists stood just below my balcony consulting a map. A woman in a jacket carried grocery bags. They moved so normally, with no awareness of that colossal spiral looming just a few kilometres south.

My laptop sat on my desk, with that blinking cursor on the empty page waiting for an article due by tomorrow, about uncivilised dog owners ruining public parks. I ignored it – threw on a pair of jeans and the first shirt I grabbed from the chair. I put on my shoes without bothering with socks. Then I snatched my keys and sprinted down the stairs to the streets.

My car was parked on the pavement just outside. I got into the driver’s seat and drove aggressively into the Roman traffic, windows down, ignoring angry horns and a rider cursing at me near the Sisto Bridge. The Tiber glistened in the morning sunlight. Every time I had to stop, I leaned forward over the wheel and looked up through the windshield.

The clouds were still there. From street level, they were disorienting. I’d lose them behind a building or a church tower, and then I’d come around a corner and they’d reappear bigger and darker. I cut past the old walls and hit the ring of traffic circling the Vatican exterior, pulling over in the first available space I could find. Half a block away, where dozens of other cars had done the same.

Ignoring the officer who shouted at me about the parking, I got out of the car. Then I just ran towards the colonnade. For a mid-spring morning, the heat bouncing off the cobblestones was so intense it mixed with the smell of the city and made me sweat like it had been the hottest summer in ages.

As I got closer, the mass of tourists thickened; the density that exists around St. Peter’s at any hour of any season. The enormous colonnade opened ahead of me; Bernini’s patient ellipse, gathering everyone in. And through the gap, I could see the obelisk and the fountains and the basilica beyond.

Above it all, d...

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