Meanwhile the 'bats' go further yet to hint

At ancient symbols linked to devilment.

At one point saying they ARE SONS OF CAIN

Admitting darkly THEY WERE NEVER MEN

But were BAD ANGELS who FELL and then were DAMNED

Yet somehow now GUARD THE EMBERS of MIND.

They repeat a myth about their 'fall'

That we'll examine later in this tale.

But first let's try to see what 'beings' could

Possess a nature fully turned from good.

They are a different form of consciousness:

Pure rationality blotting out sense

And feeling, as if life could grow and thrive

Through opposition to being alive.

This opposition is expressed by this:

They persecute FEELING with thoroughness.

In this their awkward naturelessness shows–

For life is but the body feeling grows.

The problem for pure rationality

Lies in its inconceivability;

The element that we call 'rational'

Can only grow, linked to a living will;

And living will must serve the surge of life–

Not only mind's cold analytic knife.

This tension between pure feeling and thought

Shows forms of life turn into what they're not,

And only live as long as opposites

Fight out a war neither side wins nor quits.

Without this tightrope between heart and mind,

Human life can't be or be defined.

And yet this balance is the corner that

Pure rationality must somehow cut.

So the strange and murky bat-thing mission

(That's linked, somehow to nuclear fission)

Exists within a logic so bizarre

That we can't grasp what its foundations are.

And flashing in this impossible space

The concept of 'pure evil' shows its face.

By which I mean, 'evil' can be defined

In just this way: the essence of 'pure mind',

Which can exist in neither thought nor sense,

Which yet claws ceaselessly towards existence.

Which through non-being inverts itself to be

A precondition of reality…

And do the bat-things' sayings about BLACK HOLES

Hint at this paradox of 'evil souls'?

They call black holes 'an evil they RELEASED'

Of which WILL TO NOTHINGNESS is a taste–

Thus their anti-matter mythos taps

The modern sense of spiritual collapse,

As if the answer to modern despair

Lies hidden in a subatomic lair.

And so we see how throughout culture, evil,

May install itself at every level;

By riding in the spirit of revolt

It smuggled in the pillars of its cult.

And thus in the twentieth century,

We discern an escalating orgy

Of negativity turned into law,

A locking of the modern anguish jaw.

The bats admit THEY are the anti-matter–

Could their intentions be made any clearer?

To make their sense of life start to make sense

Picture non-life pressed up against life's fence…

By very nature, lifeless to the core,

Yet pulled with urgency to living's door;

They close around, and tremble helplessly

Enslaved by lust for what can never be;

They worship at the altar of a plan:

From nothingness, to build the anti-man;

And raise themselves, the overriding race,

To swarmingly usurp our human place,

For if the lifeless life-plan push succeeds

In crawling from the non-existence weeds,

Then we'll be shackled to a downward slope:

Enslaved decaying human isotope.

They are the speck from which evil is pearled;

They are the anti-being underworld;

The buzzing priests of mysteries designed

To melt the will and paralyze the mind;

Their madness is evil's hopeless fight;

Their dawn would be our plunge into pure night.

In the first book Ephraim describes a cliff

Over which a flood is frozen, massive,

Recalling Q's nod to “the precipice”;

Mirroring, we might suppose, just this:

The coming confrontation of the flood

With God's will and with living human blood.

The flood that is the final crashing in

Of what, in war and love, has always been

The bitter hatred and the hated foe,

The unrelenting rending of our woe,

The slipping that in every effort tips

The balance from the hopeful hand that grips,

All we lose and all blindly destroy,

All never-loved, all never-hoped-for joy.

The faceless hunger guttering the abyss

Is screeching out its hydra-headed hiss.

Now who, humans, will rise to fight this war?

Rise friends! Fight! It is what we are here for.