Rasputin After Tunguska

It took another eight years to kill me, but it was that battle – not the base and perfidious treachery of humanity, that defeated me.

Do you think poison, and bullets and icy water could kill me? Unless I had been blasted first by power beyond theirs, I would have shrugged.

They called me evil, but mine was the evil of humanity: that stands against the awful emptiness of the Heavens.

But for me, the falling star would have struck Mother Russia in her glittering heart. My magic it was, my power, that drew it to the desolation, to my Siberia, to the empty places of the Earth. There it spent its evil. There its malice was ended.

There are forces that kill the flesh, and forces that kill the mind. The former powers slew eighty million trees to strike at me but I was the tree in the forest that did not fall. The latter powers I could not avoid.

Remember me.