"You see," he says to me casually, "the moth is way up there by the white wall of the doorway, and it is visible only because it moves. From here it almost looks like a bird high up in the sky, if you think of the wall as the sky. That's probably how the moth sees the wall, and only we know it is wrong. But it doesn't know that we know. It doesn't know we exist. You try to communicate with it, if you can. Can you tell it anything in a way it understands; can you be sure it has understood you completely?"

"I don't know," I replied, "Can you?"

"Yes," the old man said quietly, and with a clap of his hands he killed the moth, then proffered its crushed body on the palm of his hand.

"Do you think it didn't understand what I told it?"...

..."Now, imagine" he went on, "that there is somebody who knows about us what we know about this moth. Somebody who knows how, with what, and why this space that we call the sky and assume to be boundless, is bounded - somebody who cannot approach us to let us know he exists except in one way - by killing us."

"Somebody on whose garments we are nourished, somebody who carries our death in his hand like a tongue, as a means of communicating with us. By killing us, this anonymous being informs us about himself. And we, through our deaths, which may be no more than a warning to some wayfarer sitting alongside the assassin, we, i say, can at the last moment perceive, as through an opened door, new fields and other boundaries. The sixth and highest degree of fear (where there is no memory) is what holds and links us anonymous participants in the game. The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes."

Milorad Pavic The Khazar Dictionary