rained blood.

Indeed he had almost believed that blood had rained upon him, and cold
blood from a sacrifice in heaven; his face was wet and chill and
dripping, and he had passed his hand across his forehead and looked at
it. A red cloud had seemed to swell over the hill, and grow great, and
come near to him; he was but an ace removed from raging madness.

It had almost come to that; the drift and the breath of the scarlet cloud
had well-nigh touched him. It was strange that he had been so deeply
troubled by such little things, and strange how after all the years he
could still recall the anguish and rage and hate that shook his soul as
with a spiritual tempest.

The memory of all that evening was wild and troubled; he resolved that it
should vex him no more, that now, for the last time, he would let himself
be tormented by the past. In a few minutes he would rise to a new life,
and forget all the storms that had gone over him.

Curiously, every detail was distinct and clear in his brain. The figure
of the doctor driving home, and the sound of the few words he had spoken
came to him in the darkness, through the noise of the storm and the
pattering of the rain. Then he stood upon the ridge of the hill and saw
the smoke drifting up from the ragged roofs of Caermaen, in the evening
calm; he listened to the voices mounting thin and clear, in a weird tone,
as if some outland folk were speaking in an unknown tongue of awful
things.

He saw the gathering darkness, the mystery of twilight changing the
huddled squalid village into an unearthly city, into some dreadful
Atlantis, inhabited by a ruined race. The mist falling fast, the gloom
that seemed to issue from the black depths of the forest, to advance
palpably towards the walls, were shaped before him; and beneath, the
river wound, snake-like, about the town, swimming to the flood and
glowing in its still pools like molten brass. And as the water mirrored
the afterglow and sent ripples and gouts of blood against the shuddering
reeds, there came suddenly the piercing trumpet-call, the loud reiterated
summons that rose and fell, that called and recalled, echoing through all
the valley, crying to the dead as the last note rang. It summoned the
legion from the river and the graves and the battlefield, the host
floated up from the sea, the centuries swarmed about the eagles, the
array was set for the last great battle, behind the leaguer of the mist.

He could imagine himse