NECRONOMICON

Codex 1

The Cthulhu Revelations

By

KENT DAVID KELLY

Inspired By

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT

WONDERLAND IMPRINTS

2012

~

Cover Painting Detail:  The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, by William Blake.

~

Printed in the U.S.A.

Second American edition, February 2012

~

(C) 2012 Kent David Kelly & Wonderland Imprints

Denver, Colorado

“Only the Finest Works of Fantasy”

~

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.  However, do feel free to temporarily lend this work to other Kindle readers in accordance with Amazon policy.  If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy.  The author Kent David Kelly and his family are dependent upon your patronage.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

CODEX I

INTRODUCTORY

Title

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

Dedication

A Reverie

Masks of Madness

Introitus

A Curious Inscription

THE NECRONOMICON

Gathering the First

Scroll 1

Scroll 2

Scroll 3

Scroll 4

Scroll 5

Scroll 6

Gathering the Second

Scroll 7

Scroll 8

Scroll 9

Scroll 10

Scroll 11

Gathering the Third

Scroll 12

Scroll 13

Scroll 14

Scroll 15

Scroll 16

Gathering the Fourth

Scroll 17

Scroll 18

Scroll 19

Scroll 20

Gathering the Fifth

Scroll 21

Scroll 22

Scroll 23

Scroll 24

Scroll 25

Scroll 26

Gathering the Sixth

Scroll 27

Scroll 28

Scroll 29

Scroll 30

Scroll 31

Scroll 32

Gathering the Seventh

A Note on the Text

Scroll 33

Scroll 34

Scroll 35

Scroll 36

Scroll 37

Scroll 38

Gathering the Eighth

Scroll 39

Scroll 40

Scroll 41

Scroll 42

Scroll 43

Scroll 44

Scroll 45

Scroll 46

Scroll 47

Scroll 48

Gathering the Ninth

Scroll 49

Scroll 50

FINIS

Coda

Wonderland Imprints

DISCLAIMER

A Plea for the Continued General Practice of Sanity

This is a work of fiction, inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, created by Kent David Kelly.  The entirety of this work—notwithstanding scientific research, or historical allusions based upon established fact—is a work of fantasy.

Inquiries regarding this creative work (and future volumes in the series) may be directed to the author at shadowed_sky@hotmail.com, or to his Facebook profile at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000867874518.

The curious, however, are asked to carefully consider that the author has been approached by many inquisitive and eccentric people in the recent day and age; specifically, by fervent individuals who insist upon the reality of Great Cthulhu, the NECRONOMICON, the Dee manuscript and this evidentiary document in particular.  For this reason, please note that the author no longer casually entertains in-person inquiries in regard to his creative works.

(Ergo, kindly do not stalk the author, insisting that he is an apocalyptic herald from the Beyond, nor a cosmic harbinger who beckons forth the End of Days.  Thank you, and please do enjoy this dark fantasy novel.)

Ia, Shub-Niggurath!

DEDICATION

This work is dedicated

To the memory of

Howard Phillips Lovecraft,

Eternal outsider.

A REVERIE

Concerning the Translation and Release of the Necronomicon

“As for ... the Necronomicon—I wish I had the energy and ingenuity to do it.  I fear it would be quite a job in view of the very diverse passages and intimations ... I might, though, issue an abridged Necronomicon ... When von Juntz’s Black Book and the poems of Justin Geoffrey are on the market, I shall certainly have to think about the immortalization of old Abdul.”

~

—Howard Philips Lovecraft,

in a letter to Robert E. Howard,

written May 7, 1932.

MASKS OF MADNESS

The Secret History of the Necronomicon

By Professor Kent David Kelly

The original title of the work which has become known to us as the Necronomicon is Al Azif.  Azif, in Arabic, can be interpreted as “sibilance,” or “cries which insects make in the night.”  It can also mean “the howling of the Jinn.”

This sound was believed in ancient times to be the howling of ghuls (corpse eaters), jinn (genies), or dao (demons) as they rose up from beneath the desert sands to feed on mortal flesh.

Al Azif was written by Abd Al-Azrad, known more commonly (in the approximated transliteration rendered by H. P. Lovecraft) as Abdul Alhazred.  Al-Azrad, then known to his rivals and audiences as “the mad one who sings,” was a Yemenese poet and chanter who lived in the city of Sana’a during the Umayyad Caliphate, flourishing perhaps around the year 700 A.D.

His wanderings were many and legendary.  Seeking the truth behind his dementia-induced visions, Al-Azrad visited the ruins of Babylon, the necropoli beneath the Egyptian city of Memphis, and many other lost lands, from Sumer to the fabled spice-land of Punt and even further beyond, into Africa and elsewhere.  For a full decade (a time during which he was declared dead and his fortune forsaken), he traveled alone through the Rub’ al Khali itself.  The Rub’ al Khali of Arabia is the “Great Emptiness,” one of the vastest and most deadly deserts in all the world.

To this day, tribal superstitions hold that the Khali desert is the sacred domain of the jinn, the rabisu (leaping demon), Pazuzu, and the vampiric lamia.  When Al-Azrad—isolate, shattered, revelatory and thoroughly insane—emerged from the Khali after ten years of wanderings, he was deemed by the many to be “reborn,” a man who had been dragged down into the netherworld by the spirits and gifted with a second “blackest life.”  Indeed, in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, he was then to become known in some heretical sects (circa 730 A.D.) as the Second Coming of Lazarus.

(As a deeper heresy, some Apocryphal scrolls which were burned after the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 A.D. went so far as to name Al-Azrad as a prophet and “the second rising of Jesual,” or Jesus.  Such records have been savagely suppressed and incinerated by the Church in every century, to the point that the last known allusive quoting of such material was lost to fire in 1932, to be recorded only in the secret diaries of Lovecraft.)

Al-Azrad’s life remains an enigma.  Although the intrigued, nocturnal audiences for his babbled “poetry of visions” and “songs of the Azif” grew ever larger with his newfound infamy and return from the Khali, Al-Azrad had been irreversibly scarred and aged by his trials within the wasteland.  In the end, spurned as a “rabisu” himself and refused solace by the very astrologers whom he had enriched with his many written prophecies, Al-Azrad dwelt alone as a starveling and vagabond in the alleyways of Damascus.  He is said to have died in 738 A.D., perhaps at the age of seventy, although his face was told “to bear the cast of centuries, and the curses of a thousand dying worlds.”

His death is a matter of some confusion.  Some sources record that he died of the “crumbling disease” (leprosy) or seizures of madness, while others speak strictly of murder.  All of these early accounts but one are regarded as (and indeed, are confessed by their authors to be) unreliable hearsay of the second- or third-hand.  However, his primary and only reliable biographer—the scholar of Egypt and Aleppo, Shams Ibn Khallikan—wrote of Al-Azrad in his Wafayat al-a’yan wa-anba’ abna’ az-zaman (Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch), which was first released as a single handwritten scroll in 1264 A.D.

Khallikan’s original, untainted account declares that Al-Azrad:

~

“... was seized by the claws of a Beast whose face and flesh could not be seen, in the high light of the Seventh Sun Before the Bells.  He was butchered over the Yellow Market of the Qafila al-Bedouin (caravan of the wanderers).  There in the seventh light, the great Lord of Songs was devoured bodily, and his thrashing limbs were seen to be torn apart in the very air, and swallowed by a Nothingness.  Indeed, as the sky-held fragments of the Second and Sacred (Al-Azrad) gushed with gouts of blood, the blood itself gave shape to the Beast around him, filling the air with veins.  Two hundred and more are the men who beheld this.  So sayeth the fragment of the Alexandrian scroll before me.”

~

Unsurprisingly, this passage was expurgated from all editions of the Wafayat which were published after 1274 A.D., and the majority of Ibn Khallikan’s works were burned soon after his own death in October of 1282.

Of Al-Azrad’s own “holy demon” (his madness), many more things are told.  Al-Azrad insisted that he had beheld Irem, the City of Pillars, which to this day lies lost in the region of Iobaritae (Ubar).  Indeed, he brought back crystallized “violet frankincense,” a curious spice which was said to send anyone who breathed its smoke into a revelatory frenzy.

In the labyrinths beneath another wasteland ruin, which is known only as the Nameless City, he is said to have discovered the secret of the Sheshek’ul’thrai: the thu-baan’i, or “serpent-walkers.”  The thu-baan’i, he insisted, were a race of “viper-striders,” who descended from an age of “dragons in the flesh” (dinosaurs?) and whose origins predated humanity itself.  There too, in the mazes of the Nameless, Al-Azrad is said to have deciphered unrecoverable petroglyphs which revealed the terrible secrets of the sinister elder Dragon Age.

His ramblings were seen by many as sacred, despite his own irreligious nature.  As a Yemeni free spirit, Al-Azrad was not regarded as either a Sufi or a holy man who held rigidly to any of the known world’s religions.  Rather, he confessed (in his Al Azif) to worshipping two great entities, or gods, one of which he called ‘Umr at-Tawil, or Yog-Sothoth.  The other he called the Great Cthulhu.  Translation of the full Al Azif also reveals that for a time he served the Lord in Ebon, Nyarlathotep.  His worship of these entwined and timeless powers, he insisted, was a fatal sacrifice which he made willingly in the name of Man.  It appears (and this is highly arguable due to his ranting, conflicting accounts and refutations at various times in his life) that Al-Azrad believed that by worshipping these “un-gods,” he was silencing them in his mind, and thereby prolonging the time in which he was still in control of his own flesh and capable of writing down the secrets of the elder age, so that “the Men of tomorrow might avert the Great Dying for a moon, if not for an aeon.”  Whatever the truth of this matter, it seems that he did not worship (or pretend to worship) either Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu until late in his life.

Due to the man’s infamy, his constantly-proven predictions coming to pass, and the grisly tales told of his death, Al-Azrad’s writings were still well known among the scholars and mystics of later centuries.  Versions of Al Azif therefore passed into the Byzantine Empire, and even to Constantinople itself (and perhaps so far as the Scholomance of Transylvania).  By 920 A.D., his work was well-enough known in Occidental, alchemical circles that it came to be regarded as “an unholy blasphemy, awash with the blackest of lies” by the Holy Church (specifically, by Johannes, Pope John X of Romagna).   We are left to wonder if any of the heretical scrolls which named Al-Azrad as a second “Lazarus” or “Jesual” were in the possession of the Church of Constantinople at that time as well.

In 950 A.D., a monk of the Eastern Orthodox Church—Theodorus Philetas, whose name means “beloved gift of God”—dared to translate Al Azif into Greek, re-titling it as the Nekronomikon.  Despite violent suppression of the work (and the rumored torture and slow Mithraditic poisoning of Philetas himself), the Nekronomikon was further copied and found in the libraries of several European alchemists during the 10th and 11th centuries.  This clandestine dissemination came to an abrupt end in 1050 A.D., when the Patriarch Michael Keroularious (I) of Constantinople issued a decree for the work’s “universal and manifest collection, with all immediacy.”  In other words, he demanded that all copies of the work be seized.

Records are fragmentary, but it is said that several dozen copies of the work (most of them hand-copied) were unearthed by Michael’s inquisitors, then summarily taken and burned.  There is reason to believe that the original Arabic manuscript of Al-Azrad, the singular scroll-bundle entitled Al Azif, perished in these flames as well; but the author of this work has reason to doubt and refute this assertation.

Surely, some few copies of the tome did survive the purge, but this ominous declaration of Christian hatred for the work and its ideas sent a grim and certain message to the remaining holders of the Nekronomikon in 1050 and beyond.  Until the 13th century, whispers of its existence (and oblique quotations from its rituals) were fragmentary and so cryptic as to be unrecognizable by any but the most obsessive of knowing scholars.  It can be argued that much of the art-veiled cryptology which was developed by alchemists and artists in the 11th through 16th centuries was a reaction not only to the Inquisition, but also as a means of coding the Nekronomikon’s survival into other works.

It is only in 1228 A.D. that the writings of Al-Azrad bloomed and scattered into Europe’s philosophical esoterica once again.  An obscure antiquarian (Dominican monk?) by the name of Olaus Wormius—not to be confused with the famous Danish physician Wormius of the later 1600s—dared to produce a new translation, the Necronomicon, in Latin.  Wormius is said to have been strappadoed to death for this blasphemy.  His single hand-scribed Necronomicon was not discovered by the Church (and he died in torture while refusing to betray its location), yet scribal copies of his edition were coming to light in Mainz and Iberia as early as 1231.

(Note bene:  It should be understood that in a prefatory passage of his own Al-Azrad translation, Wormius implied that he was working from the Philetas Nekronomikon, and that the Yemenese Al Azif had already been entirely lost.  If this is true—and this author contests this account—it therefore stands to reason that the earliest and most authentic surviving tomes are written in Byzantine Greek.  Whatever the truth of Al Azif’s survival may be, the last known extant original Greek copy was burned in Salem, Massachusetts during the witch hysteria of 1692.)

The Wormius edition (along with any surviving Greek editions, should they someday be found) was declared heretical by Ugolino di Conti—known to history as Pope Gregory IX—in 1232, prior to his fearful refuge at Anagni.  Indeed, it is very likely that his founding of the Papal Inquisition in 1231 was a direct yet secret response to the Necronomicon’s (re)discovery.  An unknown number of copies were burned, as were many heretics; and references to the whispers of Al-Azrad are almost entirely absent from even the most secret and encrypted European histories of the years 1233 to 1450.  This is the first age of “encrypted artwork,” which would later bloom into a wave of widespread occult symbolism, with secret messages embedded in many of the artistic works created during the Renaissance.

But the work Necronomicon itself lived on.  Following that pre-industrial miracle, the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, certain “black letter” German editions of the Wormius Necronomicon began to appear in Mainz and then throughout continental Europe in the 15th century.  (This author has reason to believe that this “black” edition of Al-Azrad’s words was prepared circa 1451 A.D.  However, the quizzical line of inquiry which led me to this hypothesis is tenuous, and beyond the scope of the current work.)  At some point in the 17th century, another even more haphazard copy of this edition was released in an “anonymous squall” somewhere in Spain.

“Black” Necronomicons from these two printings are entirely uncredited, for the publishers certainly knew quite well the ends to which the unfortunate Philetas and Wormius had come.  Typographical evidence points unreliably toward either a Madrid or Lisbon release for the 17th century edition, and a once-tentative Mainz sourcing for the earlier German “black” is now a matter of certainty.

As a curiosity, it should also be noted that a far less-known printing of the Greek Philetas Nekronomikon was published in either Florence or Milan circa 1525 A.D.  This “Italian” edition is partial, shoddy and improperly collated, yet still priceless due to its partial preservation of the first direct translation.

Unsurprisingly considering the Church’s violent reaction to all editions of the Necronomicon, the work was never translated into English until the late 1500s by the Doctor John Dee.  Dee’s unique work in this regard was certainly further copied by several learned gentlemen (including my own ancestor, Sir Edward Kell(e)y), but the Dee Necronomicon, or Sibilance, was never officially published.  A uniquely transcribed derivative of Dee’s work surfaced much later in the Whateley family of Dunwich.

Dee’s own original text was believed to have been lost (save for in quoted fragments), but the existence of this electronic edition of his work shall constitute sufficient evidence that the Dee manuscript did indeed survive in its damaged entirety.  The majority of the encoded Dee manuscript is currently in the possession of this author.  Originally, this manuscript was owned by one Clarice Whateley of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Sourcing the document to earlier owners has proven to be problematic.

The challenges we face now are in deciphering the Necronomicon’s encrypted passages; in organizing the “scrolls,” or originally-directed chapters; and in finding, purchasing, curating and decrypting those Apocryphal sections which have sadly gone missing in recent years.

Other confirmed copies of the Necronomicon are exceedingly difficult to access.  One damaged German “black” exists in the special Culpeper Collection, locked away in the inaccessible sub-archives beneath the British Museum.  Another near-pristine, but wildly annotated, Iberian “black” is said to lie in a bulletproof glass case among the Strozier-derivative special collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.  One more (Iberian?) copy is certainly located in the secure memorial collection of the Widener Library at Harvard, and the legendary (English?) nonesuch copy still resides in the Miskatonic University at Arkham.  Another, perhaps Italian, example is said to be held by the University of Buenos Aires.  Other reports of the book in private collections are rampant, but in the end amount more to rumor, lie and speculation than actual fact.  The number of accessible copies of this work—for 99.999% of humanity, at least—has remained at zero, until now.

The last “public” person who is known to have read and used the Necronomicon is Robert W. Chambers, who alluded to several of its otherwise unpublished passages in his “fictional” work The King in Yellow in 1895.  He is believed to have somehow stumbled across a fragmentary “black” in the antiquarian side-shops of Soho in the early 1890s.  Of course, textual evidence points firmly at another owner of the Necronomicon being Howard Philips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island.  He built his decades-long writing career upon the tome’s many revelations.  What may have happened to his (father’s) copy of the book following his death in 1937, however, will likely never be known.

Despite all of these losses, resurgences and suppressions over 1,300 years, the Necronomicon lives on.

And so has the mad voice of Al-Azrad—defying all attempts at annihilation—paradoxically ensured both his obscurity and his immortality.  The tale of the Necronomicon’s creation, publication and survival is one of the most convoluted in lexicographical history, yet this fractional sketch should suffice to “lay the dark land” for the curious reader to explore.

This ends my cursory history of the Necronomicon.  Further evidentiary details in this author’s possession, of course—concerning my own possession of the Dee Necronomicon, and its former acquisition by one Clarice Whateley—must remain secret at this time in the name of my own survival.  Forgive.

May the sibilance speak to you.

~

Kent David Kelly

Samhain, 2011.

INTROITUS

(The inner cover of the John Dee Necronomicon reads thusly:)

~

Kitab Al Azif

The Codex of the Sibilance,

The Howlings of the Jinn

Being Known to Olaus Wormius

As the NECRONOMICON,

(Or, Rather)

The Paths and Images of Death,

In Dreaming

Being a Second Translation

Of the Remnants Most Fragmentary

Of the Death-Scroll Confessions of One

Abd Al-Azrad

Ex Libris

Dr. John Dee, Translator Secundus

Ever the Servant to Her Majesty

Queen Elizabeth,

Anno MDLXXXVI

A CURIOUS INSCRIPTION

(The following inscription was discovered between the two glued-together parchments at the beginning of Dr. John Dee’s Necronomicon, scrawled in cipher and in his own faded hand.  This sealed work was discovered and read with a backlit camera flash; the pages themselves remain sealed, for any attempt to physically split the pages would surely cause them to crumble into dust.)

~

Be it known, this sole tome is mine elemental translation of that black grimoire of Sana’a, which I did find beneath the undercrofts of the great cathedral library of Prague.  In serendipity, turned by the immortal hand of Fate, this black book I did descry and so unearth only through the spiritual guidance of mine own seer and speaker unto the Fallen and the Glorious Angels, Edward Kelley, a labor we did begin in the cold of the year MDLXXXVI.

By the guidance of Kelley and the tongue of the guardian spirit, despite my own seer’s betrayal in years hence; in all my years’ bitter fadings, I alone have toiled under this, the ever-recursive translation of the Blood-Song of the Mad One.  From not only the Latin of Wormius but too, from the tongues of Araby, the Aklo and the Naacal, verily have I rendered every scroll’s own riddling passage to the utmost of my prowess—feeble though it has proven—and into the Queen’s Own Language.

And yet, those most heretical of the Mad One’s confessions (for they are many) have been encrypted by mine own hand into the Enochian tongue, as it was gloriously revealed to me.  Too, the most blasphemous passages of all have been encrypted and locked by the Key of Enoch and of God.

You who do receive this writing, who darest in the manner of your searching:  as you have done this in the name of thine own will, and not in the name of God; in finding this blackest glory, you too know well where you shall find the One Key which I have made, that which shall unlock and translate all.

~

(Note:  This editor has reason to believe that Clarice Whateley received the sole manuscript of this decoding work, this Enochian Key of One, through private and select agreement via Sotheby’s London in 1986.  Further, there is reason to believe that the text itself had originally been stolen by an “archaeologist” of questionable background, a gentleman by the name of Iacob Tillinghast, who is recorded as a dig assistant to the international team which disinterred the remains of Dee at Mortlake, Richmond in 1892. ~K..)

~

And so is all that follows mine own humble translation of the confessions of the Mad Sage of Yemen, the Kitab Al Azif of Al-Azrad, rendered so the Sibilance, entitled by the heretic-priests among the Romans as NECRONOMICON.

I remain beyond all Inquisition.

O Father, O Majesty,

I have done as I am commanded by mine will.  Forgive me.

—Mortlake,

XIII Septembre, MDCVIII.

007

GATHERING THE FIRST

Sana’a and the Ideal

SCROLL I

Of the Keying of Minds ~

And So Shall Ye Become the Beholder

Of Great Cthulhu’s Rising

(The text of the Kitab Al Azif of Abd Al-Azrad, translated and encrypted by Doctor John Dee, decoded by Kent David Kelly, begins thusly, with a warning of the reader’s possession by Al-Azrad:)

~

Fool and dreamer, you who in a slaughterer’s delight unbury this, you who set eyes upon this accursed scroll, I, Al-Azrad, ask of you:

Before which of the untrue Gods have you fallen, to beg upon your knee in sin?  By whose King have you been cursed to this cruelest end?  To read this is to be caged in revelation, and now you shall be my slave.

For only the untouchable shall read of these words; for only the dead, eternal, shall inscribe the final cantus unto this, the Kitab Al Azif, the chronicle of the Many, so the Sibilance which shall never be as one.

By God and too, by King, in certainty you are forsaken, compelled to set your mind within this skin, this undying flesh of the one who now inscribes you, here within the first of all worlds’ ending; these are the meditations and confessions of your master,

Abd Al-Azrad.

In suffering, your silence shall be the testament of my years, these words the merest remnant of my love, my shame, my death which is soon to come:  a blessing, all in ending.  Read herein of all my suffering, fool and dreamer.  In oblivion, be one with me.  Judge me, delight and know thy pleasure only through me, forever hereafter.

~

You shall be the vessel, and I the mind.  Live through me unto the End.  Read and walk where I have walked, whisper my incantations and so bring forth the madness, that which I have suffered in the name of the unreachable, eternity.

Love as I have loved.

To entwine with my slain beloved is to know the ice-ebb of the Worm, her kiss upon thy tongue.  To linger as a thrill over my shame is to live thine own life accursed, as my own heart has lived and begged to beat no longer.

Feast, prideful one who readeth me.  Taste deeply of my grief.

To behold the incantations locked herein is to know the eye of oblivion, to gaze upon these secrets is to by Them, forever, be seen.  To deny my truth and the truth of Chaos is to bear the mark of death which now sets upon me.

And so, the mark of the hunt is now the unfelt blood upon thy brow.  As you are now the vessel of myself, so They shall hunt you in turn.  In ending me, so shall They pursue you.  By my inscriptions you are scented, in my annihilation are you beheld.  In delighting in my sorrows, you now beckon Them to find you.

In the ritual of veils, in the keying of minds, your immolation shall be Their gateway.

~

‘Umr at-Tawil, the All in One, Yog-Sothoth is one with the eye inside the gate.  Yog-Sothoth is the key which unlocks the prey, Yog-Sothoth is the guardian whose shadow shall coil and constrict the heart of thee.  Lock unto gate, gate unto key, past after present and so to future, all minds are ever one, in the eye of ‘Umr at-Tawil.

Let the soul trapped inside you gaze unto me:  the dream of black R’lyeh rises, and never again your dreaming shall be your own.

~

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,

In his palace in high R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits in dreaming.

~

Through thy last rapture, destine, in the name of Nephren-Ka, thrall to Nitocris, you who believe you stand shall kneel before the one Black Pharaoh in adoration.  You who believe yourself unchained must now take up the hand that is licked by beasts.  You who believe you shall stride alone, as one isolate truth amongst the real, shall become as one within, one with all our legion, we the swallowed, we the Crawling of the Chaos.

To the very stars unto the end of time, you, fool and friend, shall scribe your name beneath mine own, into the Blackened Codex of Azathoth.

Beguiled, to Him you shall descend, overturned and so ascending.  For the root of the gate is the rind of Sana’a.  Far beneath the earth, you will stand upon the peak of the abyss, that deep height which the unlit lords raised as a mantle over the highest spires of the netherworld.

The seven hundred steps you shall trod into tomorrow.  So shall you walk the stairs, unto the Gates of Deeper Slumber.

The Eden-lost, the wondrous forest beyond the opening shall be thy hunting ground.  Soon you will find thine own prey, the hunted ones shall answer to your name.  For in dreaming—the Other Real beyond the world—the single dreamer becomes the many.  Reflections of your desires shall give birth to other selves within your mind.  You will hunt yourselves unto the End, all the selves of the elder you who fled yourself in revelation.

So shall you—in seeking the escape of an awakening—find only the brim of the Endless Stair, and so down to the height of the deepest netherworld shall you swim and so find the Abzu, the sea eternal which, in your drowning, swallows you into Them.

So in slumber shall your life—the lie, which yet believes eternity—become as one before the truth of death.  For in the death-dreams of Cthulhu, we are all but the illusion, the un-reflections who needle beneath the feasting of the Sleeper.

~

The ocean’s whorl shall be thy revelation,

O Yog-Sothoth.

Yog-Sothoth beholds the fractures of the sphere, the sea where all the fractures and their reflectors lie entombed, the silver of all seas’ blackness, where They once sundered through.  And, through you and I, in rising, so shall we become reflections in the Eye.

~

They shall come, as stars They all shall fall to hunt us in their delight, They shall sunder through once more.  In hunting you, even now They stalk amongst the ruins; still within the wastelands there They tread, unknowing to Themselves, a many-shadow without a caster, an un-light which no seeker can behold.

They walk behind the rows, They filter down through the stars, They give as one a voice to the mouths of men, Their voice is the sibilance of the locusts upon the wasteland.  So is the song of the desert cries, the howling of the Jinn, Al Azif.

In Their feasting, They are hollowed.  In dying, They live again.

They are teethed in turn by men, the flesh upon which They feed, a unity of the devoured and that which feasts.  As merely a swarm of flies do They behold us, and as flies of the dust, we are swept before Them.

Hope, unbeliever, is the name which only fools give unto the One’s unopened door, behind which now unveils His eye.  Waiting within lie your other selves.  As you must sleep the Others rise in waking; all are one, oblivion.  In opening, in reflecting yourselves to unity once more, the door is one with madness.

Embrace these truths not as thy curse, nor warning, but as thy blessing.  Do not flee as the defiant, for I have flown to the ends of the utter earth, through the wasteland of the locust, unto the deepest chasm, to know only the hopeless chill of the viper’s kiss.  In fleeing, the soul is nothing.  Hope is thy mirage, to pursue it and to touch upon its veil is to know only the serenity of its fading.

For They cannot be thwarted, escape is an illusion.  Your flight leadeth only as a circling of tracks upon the ever-coiling sphere, an aging, an unforgetting unto the crueler tortures of oblivion.  There is no hunter as merciless as memory.

~

In seeking to readeth of my confessions, you shall know my love, my Adaya.

Alone, even in the forgetting of They who fall, you will remember only her.  My beloved shall be yours, her death shall be thy delight, and so thine ending.  The mark of love destroyed will be your soul in echoing, Adaya in eternity.

From outside of all remembrance, throughout the resonation of the worlds, from the love you bore, to that which your senses cannot untouch, so will she fall prey to your other selves, they who reign only when you are lost to slumber.  Her betrayal will be wrought by you alone.  From love—that which you believe to be immortal, for such is my heart of hearts and you are mine—there shall never be an escape.

And so am I the innocent, and you her murderer.  In judgment, Nephren-Ka will come.  When the Black Pharaoh doth rise, when he speaketh unto you and so giveth voice to my name, submit to him.

O beloved, unbeliever, it is far greater a glory to atone on hand and knee, to be forgiven by the Pharaoh’s tongue, to know the nepenthe, than to know only hope and pride and so be cursed with understanding.  Slave to me and reader of this scroll, believe in me.

For if, unto the End of Days, you are known only to madness, if to yourself you are a stranger, such shall be thy only mercy in Their coming.  For all will be slaughtered, all souls shall be as one in the wild feast, the writhing mass to greet Cthulhu’s rising.

The gift of madness, the nepenthe I offer you shall be thy only true immortality.  To you who would deny these truths:  past, present, future, all are one, the triad-soul of the single ever-moment, the universes poised within the un-time.

Even now you are lost unto yourself, you wander amongst the desert-selves beyond your own convictions.

~

I now give birth to the sole you who is true, the vessel of myself.

And so your nothingness,

And so my rising.

For I remain:

Abd Al-Azrad,

Son of no one, beloved of the forsaken, the brideless of Adaya.

So it is written, so let it be done in the name of the final prophet, in this Year of the Palest Moon, one hundred and eleven, Damascus.

SCROLL II

The Song of Sana’a ~

Being a Revelation of Our Youth,

The Shorn Age of Simplicity

(Scroll I is believed to have been written among the last of Al-Azrad’s works, in 738 A.D.  In contrast, the following scroll begins the oldest section of the Necronomicon, circa 730 A.D., wherein Al-Azrad tells of his childhood.)

~

I am the keeper of the coldest flame, I am the Tayr al Ramad, O Phoenix of the Ashes, that which burns to nothing, and am thus created.  I am Abd, the servant, Al-Azrad, of the devourer.  I am the one servitor to myself, the spirit of the feeding.

I am the one blinded of the innermost, that which turns in horror away from all truth, the eye of the unbeliever; I am the dreaming dream which whispers, thrice-fold, the bitterest tongue, the silence, in sepia Pharaonis (Dee annotaton:  ink of the Cuttlefish); I am the word inscribed in an ageless voice, ever manifold, never to be spoken.

In these, the pale shades of my elder moons in Damascus, city of manna and veil and treachery, I write of my selves’ unity:  yet neither in the name of reverence, nor with a song of glory shall I entreat thee.

I etch these words solely in my lone belief, thus:  the body shall be no palace for the soul.  For the flesh of the mind is all, the soul is nothing.  Thus am I eternal through my confession.

Should I die hunted, bait of the slaughter, immortal shall be the jambiya, dagger of my reflections.  For the scroll needeth not the surge of blood, the stain of sepia needeth not the breath:  the voice of the mind remains.

Such is the cry of the locust, such is the Kitab Al Azif.

Should fell corruption, the revelation of all my wisdom lead only into oblivion, this laying of these sigils upon the tays-skin (Dee annotation:  Tays, a male goat; skin, thusly, the vellum of the goat) shall remain my only entirety.  High on and through the sandstorm-path, unto the eye of mine own death, echoes fading as footprints before the claw-path of the Ghul, O spirit of Adaya, may the dark radiance of these words yet find you.

So the song of the untold:  let the lay be pure, simplicity.

As first unto the world, we all are children, and through a child’s nightmare shall the lens of the moon-glow find me, remembering.  So I write these words in Ramadan of the anno Hijra, one one one.  (Dee:  anno Domini DCCXXX?)

(Note:  Al-Azrad speaks here of the 111th year of the Muslim calendar, dating to the Prophet’s Hegira into Medina.  In his own Elizabethan translation, John Dee has printed here his “anno Domini DCCXXX?,” which corresponds in Latin to the year 730 A.D. ~K.)

~

And so the mortal’s slaughter is the circle.  Azrael—Singer of the Black Angels of All Ending—cruelly hath given birth to all the living.  My own youth frailed so long ago, from a dawning of such innocence, that beneath this moon it seems that I foretell the tale of another man who is yet to come:  one bolder than myself, more in love, and more believing.

For as the child is elder to the ancient one, so too is Truth the destroyer of our hope.

In aging, I am Al-Azrad the Terrible and the Mad, so named the feared and fearing, the doomed and the forsaken.  Yet still I whisper her name in each of the mansions of the night, my beloved, my Adaya.

And forever I shall believe that all of my adorations, in never-end, are the only chains who keep my will in iron bound.  Despite the revelations of Klocha, regardless of the ice-encrusted secret of Nephren-Ka, mortal I remain, ever human in light of all the blasphemies I now know.

For the love of my dead Adaya, I endure.

SCROLL III

Of the Locust,

And a Child in Exile

In the beginning, I was nothing.

I know not my age.  My father, a warrior who wielded a sword of flame beneath the Crescent, died glorious in the service of the Caliph Muawiyah.  My mother, a slave and spoil of war, was nameless, never giving father her one secret, known to the betrothed—and to her child—only as the Shepherdess.

Of her, I remember only kohl-black eyes, lit with love and tears, a chant beloved of the moon and the youngest star, and the scent of amber swirled upon long fingers.

To her I was born in the Rub’ al Khali, the desert wastes of the emptiness, and to that desolation, in my heart I hold.

So are my years unknown to me, yet still I believe I was born on the cusp of the wind of sharqi (Dee:  the easterly), between anno Hijra forty-two at the eldest, the Year of the Bowing Serpent ... or anno Hijra forty-six at the youngest, the Year of the Twisted Waters.

(Clarice Whateley annotation:  666 A.D.?)

(Note:  Anno Hijra, or anno Hegirae, is another Latin reference pertaining to the Islamic lunar calendar.  The years 42 to 46 equate to, approximately, 663 to 667 A.D.  Here in the annotated manuscript of Scroll III, Ms. Whateley speculates that the year of Al-Azrad’s birth was 666, perhaps referring to the Number of the Beast, which is detailed in the Book of Revelation.  There is, as far as this researcher can determine, no certainty to such speculation. ~K.)

The Shepherdess it was who gave her own life standing over me, her blood before my own, until she was taken from me utterly.  That black tale I shall never tell.

~

In all but my eldest memories, I stand fatherless, motherless, a dust-rat in the gold-spun streets of old Sana’a, raised only by the crone Ghanara, most ancient of the badawi (Dee:  Bedouin) in their exile.

For it is said in the deepest desert, to curse a badawi woman with that one Fate before which Death himself grows pale, that a dune-malik (Dee annotation:  Malik, a chieftain, a petty king), a chieftain of the sands, need only exile the Daughter of the Desert to the City of Man.  Such, in my youth, remained the crone Ghanara.

(It appears that Al-Azrad is implying that his father exiled his mother the Shepherdess to Jerusalem, and that she either settled in Sana’a and perished there, leaving her son an orphan; or, she sold her son into slavery and he was taken to Sana’a by his new mistress.  Al-Azrad’s implication that his mother died defending him from someone makes it likely that he was orphaned, but the treatise of Ibn Khallikan implies enslavement.  Whatever the truth, the old woman named Ghanara seems to have raised and exploited him. ~K.)

I know only that Ghanara who took me in was not of my kith and kindred.  She had shamed her brood, a murderess in all but name, and so did tremble the hand that cared for me.  For me alone, she cast the tongue, the strap, the eye of the brilliant serpent.  Ghanara was the first one to believe my dreams required stricture, my nightmares focus, and so did raise her trembling hand to me.

Ghanara it is who taught me how to dream.

Thus did I endure, until I grew taller than the slump of her brittle shoulders, and a fear of me overtook her.  Guile-rich Ghanara used me well for thieving, for the reaping of secrets, and so by the time I believed myself to be seven summers eld (Clarice:  672-3 A.D.?), I used her in my turn.

Through a blossoming fire of defiance, through my conviction that I would be worthy in doing Ghanara harm, the youngest sharing of my cruelty, my earliest vision came to me.  The vision may well mean nothing to anyone.  But in my life, it was the first dawning of my own will, and so the birthing of my freedom despite my slavery.

~

The vision, as I beheld it:

~

There came a night, moonless, wherein I beheld a locust, perched upon the driftwood pole which held on high the tent-stall of Ghanara, a skeleton of silk and rag teetering in the wind beneath the south wall of Sana’a.  A vigil I held as the locust shared its secrets, and by first light of dawn a water-gift was revealed to me.  I beheld the locust scraping the dew from its thorny legs, drinking; I watched it crawling deeper into the shadow, to feast upon a dried vanilla husk, crumbling in a basket of twisted reed.

I heard it sing to the night alone, uncared for, adored only by myself and the fading stars, and so I heard in an ocean-voice which rose inside of me, the oneness of myself:

‘The locust, it is my heart.’

The first of all my visions, ai.

And so did I come to understand:  the voices of the insects and the jinn, the uncared-for and the unseen, would become the one Voice that would sing to the heart within me.

And so in that night, beholding the revelation of the locust, I became myself.

My destiny would be to hear the Voices of the desert, Al Azif.

~

And so it was I learned upon that night of the locust Voice:  between the weighing of black hearts, of Ghanara and of mine, mine was the one beating ever stronger.  She was eld and I was young; I would live and she would die.

But her death would not come from my own hand, for I thought it crueler that she should understand this, my rising and her falling; understand and so be powerless to deny my rising glory.

In living, I wanted her to fear me.

That dawn I stole her silver, for it was mine, made by my sweet voice and cunning dances.  I salved my strap-wounds with Ghanara’s finest honeys, and drifted into the streets alone, as my own for the very first.

The locust sang within me.

Too, I stole Ghanara’s obsidian-edged jambiya:  not for what it would mean to me, but for what its absence would mean to her.

That night, I did name myself Abd Al-Azrad.

Only once in all the years thereafter, the eyes of Al-Azrad, the self-named, and the eyes of Ghanara did meet again.  She beheld me in hatred and in fear, and so faded away behind me.  The threat of her lost jambiya at my belt stayed within her eyes as she fled away.  From that twilight on, I served a proven wisdom:  my only master was the locust, not the crone.

SCROLL IV

Three, the Children of the Dreaming

For two handfuls of ageless seasons (Clarice:  674-5 A.D.?), I sang and I did dwell in every sand-etched alley of Sana’a, shadowing and avoiding the Caliph’s bladesmen, stealing figs, partaking of the rare gifts of praise or the dancers’ palmsful of offered waters.  By the lords of the northern caravans, and those who deigned to feed me, I although a starveling was yet admired for my grace and for my visions, for my songs and the poetry from out of my shadowed mind.

Young and alone, I was weak among the hierarchies of the storytellers.  Never could I craft the desired tales, the haunted journeys, nor sing the desert songs with truest bliss or the certainty of experience; yet I could remember all I heard, and feign the conviction of any tale’s sincerest speaker.  In mimicking the songbirds of the sands, I could sing any tale with sincerity.  I could become in voice a scarred and lusty mercenary of the caravans, or the sly and jovial changer of the silver, or the whispering, hesitant daughter of the water seeker, who proved to be the wisest of them all.

For songs are never sung as a glory of their own creation; songs are sung to be an echo of life’s unveilings.  There is no song of songs, no sole triumphant Oneness to the art, for lives are many and every sufferer has a tale which can be cast upon threads of beauty by the voice and the voice alone.

In learning the secrets of song, I too learned that mortals burn, forever divided by their desires, a breed in twain:  men speak of the horrors of death and the blade’s bloodletting, the rapture of the kill; but only women see truly the horrors beneath life’s being, the moments of profundity, the blood-shadows which swim beneath the Fates inside the hearts of all.  Men see; women understand.

The tales of men when sung did bring me meager silver, yet this secret of the women was ever in my own heart’s burning.  As I grew older, I sang the women’s truth alone.  My songs were not only heard, they were felt.  I was one string, and my listeners did resonate with me, finding themselves to be in tiding with the lyric of my pain.  Together, I and my audience were an instrument.  And so, more than any of the other singers who did envy me, the palmings of smile and silver came to me alone.

~

By the time I believed my summers to be nine (Whateley has scribbled here:  675 A.D.?), I was tall, my dagger whetted, and my voice was sweeter still.  The urchins who I ran with, daughters and sons of whores, were jackals of lovely face and fickle claw.  These orphans were stronger stars than I, yet less radiant, and so the more courageous in their fall.  These nameless ones protected me, shielded me from bladesmen and from thieves.  Where I did wisely fear adults, the “giant ones” and their ways, the other street children stood forth defiant in my name.  I should have died, but my songs brought forth a sympathy of hearts.

The children were bitter and full of fire, living only for a day, sucking the vibrancy of each moment in desperation and casting the husks aside.  From day to day and night to night, these children would forget themselves.  Yet I, Al-Azrad, I was their rememberer.  I was the beholder of merchants’ eyes which reflected the secrets of the thief; I was the speculator of hearts, ere lovers would spurn and wound one another and return to the arms of another; I was the navigator of dung-pits and empty cisterns.

I braved little, I remembered everything.  I won all.  In becoming one with shadow, in dwelling in every alley, many of the whispers told throughout the city’s heart echoed in their course inside of me.

So did I become the youngest of the loremasters of Sana’a.  For when one whispers of lust or murder or betrayal, who would suspect that of all who are near, it is the child who is listening, who is remembering?

I echoed with every secret, unsuspected.  I told much, I ended others’ trust in the unworthy with revelations.  Those “giant ones” I informed were ever grateful for my words.  I gained trust, I spoke of others’ treachery.  Lies revealed carry a dear price.  More silver and even gold found me at every turn.

The other street children revered me.  I was the jackals’ shadow, the night-pack’s will.  My voice was the more beguiling, I was taller, if not stronger; and quicker.  My arms were longer.  When figs or scraps of kubaneh-bread were thrown, the jackals snapped beneath me, but the lion’s share was mine.  So did the singing one, I the locust-born, grow ever greater in their eyes.

~

Of those countless orphans, two became my family, unified by the secret of our dreaming.  We shared one thing only in common, the nightmare of R’lyeh.  Of this I will tell you (*).

The first of my soul-kindred was named Akram, then my dearest friend ... Akram, the boy-giant, a deafened brute with a clefted brow and ever-smile.  Between us stood the girl, with fingers as long as those of the Shepherdess, and laughter of sweet waters:  Adaya, of Judaea (Clarice:  the Jew?), the sin-daughter, my beloved.

We three—circling through the nights, sheltering together around our shared revelation of the nightmare—became as one in heart and yielding.  So did these two become not only my friends, but my family.  For those few years, until the night of the eclipse, I did not feel as if I were alone.

~

(*) Have I not spoken of the One, of Great Cthulhu?  We three did dream, we three did dream in unity.

From birth’s breath on, as elder as I remember, the nightmare of my father was ever with me.  The nightmare, from the first, is this and this alone:

I dream of a city crushed by the ocean, Cyclopean, Ghul-sculpted, labyrinthine, of obelisks who soar up through the waters’ darkness, tear-stained with ichor and with resins bled of emerald.  The etchings of unearthly sigils stand clawed upon every wall, every pillar.

From this sunken city rises a blackest majesty, the one unhallowed spire which surmounts all else in terror, a graven needle which would make even a mountain’s shadow shrivel from its reach.  This spire, it sings in the deepest voice without a tongue, a purest shiver of lightning’s silence, speaking thusly:

‘Cthulhu ftaghn.’

~

As a child of the Khali, before Sana’a, every night I dreamt of the sunken city.  My father forsook me, for I was the echo of his own dreaming; my mother the Shepherdess could not hold away her tears.  In years after, cruel Ghanara would, in my waking nightmares, seduce me with all her hatred into silence.  It was only in speaking to other children, the blackest jackals of Sana’a, that I found two other dreamers, two only who would confess:

They too saw the spire in their sleep, they heard the voice of the thundering silence.  Only Akram and Adaya dreamed as I did dream.  In their slumber, they too beheld the horror of the sunken city, heard the voiceless chanting, ‘Cthulhu ftaghn.’

So did I trust Akram and Adaya above all.  This nightmare we all beheld seemed fated, a sharing of impossibility, a promise misunderstood, speaking only to we three.

~

And too, in Sana’a with my own friends, the dream was the deepest of all that which united us.  When I once awake screaming, asleep in an alley, it is Akram who woke and held me.  And to him, I confessed everything.  And it was Adaya, who in pretending to sleep had overheard us, who told us that she too knew the nightmare, and for this reason the other children feared her.

From that night on, we held our nightmare’s secret away from every stranger, and so nearer to one another, Abd, Akram, Adaya.  It is not until the night of Najeed, and my brazen confrontation, that the pact of silence was betrayed.

I was the one who foolishly sung our secret to the winds.  In having done so, I am guilty of Akram’s death, and that of Adaya as well.  Of this I have much to say:

~

(The same narrative appears to course uninterrupted into Scroll V.)

SCROLL V

A Nightmare Made of Gold

Unified by the nightmare, we three confided everything to one another.  The older orphans, once my protectors, did fear and then forsake me.  My times with Akram and Adaya became all.

I shared my silver and my food with them, and they revealed to me the places of hiding, the rooftops of escape, the cisterns of shade and sleeping.

I continued in my songs and the selling of secrets, but there was a wondrous darkness upon me.  In finding that these two other children had suffered the same nightmare of R’lyeh, I did not despair; rather, I delighted as one liberated.  I spun my songs more boldly, weaving them with images of the Sleeper Beneath the Sea.  Turning away from me in the night and yet unable to quell my voice the other children came to regard my shadow as the rabisu, the leaping demon who terrifies dreamers with his illusions in the night.

Were they so wrong?

I, a child-father with two needful spirits of my own, with Akram and Adaya reliant upon my silver, learned that the other orphans were more a threat to us than kindred.  These lesser jackals, the “dreamless ones” grew more fearful of us still; and in fearing, cast for us only stones and hateful curses.  So did we three find ourselves at last alone.

Branded a vagabond, I endeavored to take Akram and Adaya away with me.  We three left the caravan emporiums of Sana’a, letting the other urchins take our place.  They believed that they had ruined me, and perhaps they had.  But we three, we faded into the night with silent purpose.  We let the jackals have their beggar scraps of meager trade.  Being the more cunning, Adaya and I sang instead at the eastern gate, where the spice merchants come forth from the horrors of the wasteland.

There, we learned more of secrets, and more of death.

It is the east gate of Sana’a, yet still, through which come the gold and spice and ivory and laughter.  The east gate is that of the starker wanderers, the silent and the desperate.  Through the east come trinkets of Asia, rumors of Irem of the Thousand Pillars and clay-shards dug from Babylon.  Through the east come warlock and fakir, exile and leper, astrologer and the maimed man who is dethroned, who stands yet mighty in his mind.

The language of the eastern gate is not one of silver, but one of scrolls, of relics, of tales which tell of Ghul and shroud and tears of blood.  It is the gate of blackest tales, of miracle and nightmare.  To such men and crones as walk in from the east, the redeb music of Akram fell unwanted, the sensual dances of Adaya met with murmurs of desire.  Yet she was but a girl.  My song, only, of R’lyeh and the Sleeper in the deeps, enchanted those parched ones who strode out from the east.

We sang our darkest entreaties to those who carried spice, who carried their tales of death in from the wasteland.

My own song was the most haunting, the most riddled and uncrystallized, and so I was to our listeners by far the most enthralling.  Where Akram would play of the rebab and Adaya would sing of water and spice and horizons which curved as the virgin’s turning breast, I would sing not in words, but in the dream-song of that black voice which we three did taste whenever we slept, the glimpses of the veilings of the Sleeper in the Abyss, of Cthulhu.

I did sing:

Agafh’th kahnta, entorei, entorei.

~

(Dee has transliterated this as written, but the meaning is unknown.  This may in truth be a corrupted remnant of the Aklo tongue. ~K.)

~

The tongue of dreams I sang, and chilled the hearts of all who heard, and they did wonder of my visions.  These chantings of R’lyeh were born of darkness, and the darkness of my song was beautiful.  At times our listeners were the men of far Damascus, at others the warrior women from the Utter East; and always the old dust-men from Jerusalem, who met my sweet boy-voice not with curious smiles, but with tears.  But all who did listen to my song, in fearing me, were moved.  So the silver flowed ever greater, until the night of the gore-moon.

To many such listeners, the strings who resonated with my tales, I became the only singer who was sought.  In time, some few wanderers and secret-seekers came not for the markets of Sana’a, but rather only for my revelations.

And so, perhaps when I was of ten years, with Akram and Adaya I did glory more in secrets than in songs.  We sold treacherous truths, we made enemies all the more.  For children, we grew rich.  The night became our sole domain.  When all the other children and beggars were sleeping, cradled in the frost of their own fears, we three gave reign to our dream of the sunken city, wakening with the sunset and preying upon the veil of breathing night.

SCROLL VI

Of Najeed and Vile Treacheries

(Unfinished)

(This curious scroll begins in the middle, in the midst of one of the most personal of Al-Azrad’s many confessions.  As will be later revealed, Najeed of Sana’a was a servitor and thrall to the Cult of Cthulhu; and in hearing the songs sung by the young Al-Azrad, he came to understand that Al-Azrad was receptive to the tonal dream-visions resonating from dead Cthulhu in R’lyeh.  It appears that Najeed, perhaps in reporting the songs of Abd to the hierarchs of the Cult, was the impetus which caused the three children—Adaya, Akram and Al-Azrad himself—to be considered a danger to the Cult’s secrecy, a threat which should be eliminated.  Allusions throughout Codex I tell us that the Cult of Cthulhu murdered Akram and Adaya, and that Al-Azrad alone escaped their wrath.  Al-Azrad may have fled, but I believe he first attempted to save Adaya and then was nearly killed.  Further decryption of the Dee Necronomicon text may reveal this theory to be unsound, but for now this conjecture seems best to fit with what little is known of Al-Azrad’s youth and his later obsession with vengeance in the name of his beloved. ~K.)

~

(From a notation by Dee which reads “The remnant is as follows,” it may be implied that this scroll was damaged, and/or that this scroll was left incomplete when originally written by Abd Al-Azrad.)

(...)

… yet I was lord of myself even then, until came the night of the gore-moon which the wise men fear.  The eclipse I beheld that night did change my path forever, and the blood-moon’s hollow reflection I ever shall remember.

That night, twenty-seven were our listeners, of three caravans:  one of a malik, one of a mariner, one of a caravansary liege.  So many were the touches of coin and laughter that I sang alone, and Akram—with Adaya, scab-shinned, giggling and perched upon his shoulders—Akram, he was frantically twirling his scarf in the shape of three folds, so that the coins would roll along the linens pale and into Adaya’s beringed hands.

Beyond our listeners, however, leaned a glowering silhouette—so stood the gristled storyteller who alone understood the song that I was singing, black Najeed.

It was he who knew Cthulhu and R’lyeh were no mere nonsense in a child’s song, but instead were unified with truth and one with nightmare.  The moment when I doomed my friends passed, in song, without my understanding.  But that night of the eclipse, in singing of R’lyeh as Najeed looked down upon me, I had dared too much.  For the gift of one eld golden solidus—a rare Roman coin which Najeed had his own secret-bargaining set upon, a coin from the hand of a spice caravan’s one master—had become instead a gift for Adaya’s rapid fingers, and Najeed’s eyes in meeting mine were filled with hatred.

~

After we secured the coin of gold, we departed and hid ourselves.

Long after midnight, when Akram had gone for water and Adaya laid asleep beside our cistern in the Alley of the Yellow Spider, the shadow of Najeed did come to me.  I saw it upon the rooftops, and three were its claws—two hands, and one jambiya.  Najeed leapt down to the sands ere I comprehended the threat of what I had seen.  He did show his jambiya to me, its acid-etched razor, its hilt of mother-of-pearl, its tip a pitted crescent dried and black with another’s bloodshed.  It was this tip that he kissed upon my lip, and asked for silence only.  This I gave him.

And Akram was yet to return.  Adaya slept on.

Najeed’s whispers against my neck told me many things—that he was drunk on spice wine, that he would kill if made to come to me a second night, and that he feared me more than he feared anything but the dream, the nightmare of Cthulhu and R’lyeh.  Najeed said only to me, “Go far from here, O wretched child, go far from the northern gate.  The men of the caravans, the wealthy ones and their blades, they will no longer hear your vile song of Great Cthulhu.  Yes?  Unburden your nights’ entertainments far from Sana’a, or when I next shall come to you, this blade shall not kiss your lip, but rather the throat of your sweet Adaya when you are sleeping.  We understand?”

This I with all sincerity did promise him, that I alone would leave Sana’a, never to return.  As I breathed this last, he fled, and then only did that fool-friend Akram return with a frown of confusion and the idle slosh of water in his vase.

In the daylight, however, I questioned my fear of Najeed.  How could I leave my only home, on the wings of a coward’s threat?  And when the unknowing Adaya smiled upon me, that same fear of Najeed I came to mock and named as nothing.  Thus we held for some few moons (Clarice has written:  Months?) to our stories, our songs, and trade in secrets before the eastern gate.

~

Akram, of the furrowed brow and the sun-browned hands, of the smiles which told of laughter but not of brilliance, he was growing and becoming a poor burden in this regard.  He toiled all the harder to please me, and so I fed him, but his tongue was a torment to the ever-deeper delicacy of this trade.  Adaya the cunning stayed with me, learning, turning secret-keepers’ silences to kindly entreaties.  But poor Akram was a shameful weight upon this darker trade, and this in those last nights he did begin to understand.  Two nights after the first coming Najeed, Akram did leave us.

Adaya and I—especially myself—still brought Akram food, and even scrolls.  For somehow, through a merciful tutor skilled with the resistant clay of an ogrish child’s mind, Akram had been taken in as the scribe to an astrologer.  The scrolls we brought, Akram in turn revealed to his master, who knew better than to question the gift from whence it came.  In this he was truly a man of Sana’a.  In those few deep moons of water and locust cry, Akram would share the decipherments of our treasures, as his master slept in a curtained chamber far below.  It is Akram, then, who unknowingly taught me to read a little in many languages—not by what he told me, but through the scrolls and shards I brought to please his master.  This proved to be Akram’s gift, and the pleasure the writings gave him was a solace to my heart.

And so did ever darker secrets, of past and impossibilities, come to me.

In this time, I was yet too young to understand why Akram’s slowness angered me.  Only by the written word did he come to brilliance; all else was ruin.  It is now I understand that I did love him, but more than this, he was my brother.  And so it was that my impatience with his brute thoughts overshadowed my adoration of his heart.  Such is the curse of brothers, we find one another’s weaknesses and we worsen them.

~

As these moons grew on, and our secrets became Adaya’s wisdom and my tongue itself was turning from cryptic silver into gold—in these nights of enchantment, these nights of Ghul-tale and scorpion whisper—Adaya became a young maiden, and in her own secrecy came to love me.  But these fleeting joys, which I did not embrace in their time, were to end all too soon.  The prideful innocence of we three jackals ended on the night that Najeed came forth the second and last time:  Najeed then of the crazed eye, the burn of branding, the babbling and the knife.

~

(Dee has written:  “The scroll doth endeth here.”  It appears that Al-Azrad had originally intended to confess exactly what transpired upon the night when Adaya lost her life, but if he has done so at any point in Al Azif, this translator has yet to discover the passage.)

GATHERING THE SECOND

Cthulhu, R’lyeh and Nightmare

SCROLL VII

Of the Myth of the Gilded Waters,

The Myth of the Matriarch

(Fragmentary)

(An unknown span of time exists between the inscription of Scroll VI and Scroll VII.  When Al-Azrad resumed his writing of Al Azif, his focus was not upon the sorrows in his own past, but rather on the ever-recurring nightmares of Cthulhu and fell R’lyeh.  Here, in Scroll VII, he writes of the Myth of the Matriarch, a favored tale from Sana’a and Jericho, as well as ancient Babylon.  The Kingdom names “Akkad” and “Sumeru-land,” however, appear to be unique to Al-Azrad’s telling of the tale.  The placement of this scroll before the Second Gathering implies that Al-Azrad believed this Myth to be one of the few surviving tellings of the tale of Cthulhu. ~K.)

~

Herein,

Reader and defiler of my secrets,

Shall you know

Of what little I have learned,

In terror and in bloodshed,

Of the Myth of Matriarchs,

Of the Great Dragon, the Kulullu,

(Clarice:  Sumerian tongue, the sea monster?)

Which slumbereth in the Abzu,

Deep in the Abyssal Reaches,

The Chaos beneath the sea.

~

O, Abaddon.

~

(lacuna)

(…)

This is the elder fable of the Sufi, the lost ideal of the golden age as it was told to me.  Herein, too, lieth my own meager handful of fragments, its thousand revelations, the fable’s lies and truths, thus:

~

The Myth of the Matriarch

~

In the beginning, men did not rule.

In the dawning of civilization, when the people were ruled by Matriarchs, when it is said that the rivers’ spirits spoke to women in tides of dream, whispering unto them to settle their people where the bounty was ever greatest; in this age, the water temples were the first great edifices to be lofted, temples of mighty brick layered in bitumen, adorned all with mosaics pressed in coral and lapis lazuli.

These great temples, these ancestors of the ziggurats, were raised in solemn reverence to the goddesses of plenty, of fertility, of harvest.  As the settlements around the temples grew into cities peopled by women of wisdom and men of peace, wealth came.  And with wealth, there came disparity, and envy.

The war-tribes of the north did covet the temple treasures of Sumeru-land, and the warriors of the dunes did envy the lives enjoyed by the hunters of the grassland and the priestesses of waters.  The men of Sumeru-land, once silent, began to speak against the war-tribes of the wasteland.  The voices of these men grew bold, for men were the masters of the hunt and keepers of blade and spear.  Men did pride themselves then as defenders of the mighty walls of the cities of Sumeru, the many-templed glories between the rivers.

As the war-tribes came near and tested these men of eld, arrows took to flight, and men and women bled.  The cities of Sumeru were besieged.  Peoples of harvest and the worship of the water-goddesses turned their minds to war alone.

The war-tribes were beaten back, at great price.  Sumeru was laid low, and the lesser land of Akkad its only remnant.  Flood and fire ravaged many fields, the cities grew ever-inward in their covetous glories and crumbling temples, and where the Matriarchs once ruled there rose the Patriarchs alone.

The age of men began.

In this age, the dreams of men rather than women were deemed sacred and eternal in the war-cities of Uruk, and Nippur, and Eridu.  And it is to these minds of the warlike Patriarchs, sensitive to matters of power and grief and bloodshed, that the goddesses of the waters could not whisper.  Even among the women, the spirits then were silent.  In this void within the tides of dream, where fear and hatred and violence did reign, the whispers of the great Kulullu did take hold.

Holy men whose voices were law and destiny to their people, these men became obsessed with the unity and sameness of their one nightmare.  They all did dream in horror of a Sleeper, a tentacled Beast which gloried in death upon a throne of dreams, slumbering deep in the Abzu of the netherworld, the un-sea which lieth far beneath the sea itself:  a Chaos of nightmare.

These dreaming Patriarchs spoke of the tomb-throne and its riches, and the name of the sunken city was R’lyeh.  To some few prophets R’lyeh was the kingdom of the dead and eternal torture, while to others it was the promised city of inverted heaven beneath the waves.  Ziggurats were raised in R’lyeh’s image, and the ruins of the water-temples were cast down.  The name “Cthulhu,” from Kulullu, gave way to ritual, and in the mouths of ten thousand worshippers, this Beast was named rather as a lie, as Ti’amtum.

In this manner, worship of Cthulhu became separate from the worship of the Beast.  The Beast cult was of the Kingdoms’ feast-halls, while the worship of Cthulhu faded into secrecy.

Ages past this in fabled Babylon, the name of the Beast Ti’amtum became Tiamat.  Thus did the worship of the Great Dragon beneath the seas become a lie.  Those who worshipped Tiamat knew not the nightmare in itself, they knew only the dream of Cthulhu as it was spoken to them by the Patriarchs.  They did not know the nightmare’s name.

In hundreds of years, even this secret truth was lost.  But to those who still worshipped in blood and secret, the truth-knowers who chanted the one true name—the Cult of Cthulhu—did exalt Him in cavern, in temple ruin and in fen.

The Cult of Tiamat is nothing now, murdered by its own foolish lies and hatreds, its lords never comprehending the lie in its own sanctity.  Tiamat is a fable, Cthulhu is the real.  The Cult of Cthulhu, those evil ones who know the truth of the dark prophecy and the coming End of Days, yet lives on.

Again the centuries passed in legion, floods tore the earth and the seas receded.  Fertile river-lands became marshes choked with sand.  Wars were waged over what little of the Akkadian glories still remained of lost Sumeru-land, and plague and famine followed in their wake.  The nightmare of men came to dominate the water-dream of the women, and soon it was that the worship of the water-goddesses was forbidden in the ruins and then in the cities themselves.

Gods were then named as lords on high, rulers of the many heavens.  There was Marduk, and there was Yahweh.  There was Baal and a hundred more.  We have had Mithras, we coveted Jesual and so then he was lost to us, but all of these were only the dreams of men themselves.  The only truth, in horror, was the outsider dream which came from the Thing which whorls beneath, Cthulhu, in his great palace of R’lyeh.

Outside the secrecy of the Cult, men know nothing.  But in his eternal tomb, Cthulhu slumbereth and dreameth on.  When he doth wake, the End of Days is come.

Such is the fable.  Such is the end of the golden age.

~

In scrolls hereafter I shall speak of my own truths, my own nightmares, the horrors which I have seen and the lies of faith which hath been shattered by revelations and the Beasts from beyond the spheres.  Some little of what I have learned, from Sufi or fakir, is at peace with this Myth of the Matriarchs.  Deeper secrets, from the voices of Ghuls and trances of Klocha, from the near-ruined hieroglyphs of buried Hadoth, tell me of far darker Things.

Yet the names of the fable I here preserve, for they are in languages now known to a precious few.  As the Crescent rises and war reigns high once more upon its throne of plague, the sages are lost and even the echoes of their whispers soon die thereafter.  But I, disciple of Klocha, know some little of the dead tongues, and I so do set this here, the Myth of the Golden Waters.

Glory to fallen Akkad, lost Sumeru.

~

(The contents of this Scroll are troublesome, as they imply that knowledge of Sumer, Akkad and other primal cultures of the Fertile Crescent was still extant in scattered repositories of tablets and even scrolls in the time of Al-Azrad.  It also implies that there was a secret oral tradition of a myth now nearly lost to us.  Frazer’s Golden Bough speaks in echoes of this remnant, but later scholarship tells us that these ancient civilizations were practically unknown in the 8th century A.D.

Akkadian is certainly an extinct language, and in Al-Azrad’s time was virtually unknown.  And yet, Al-Azrad’s inclusion of Sumerian and Akkadian names throughout Al Azif speaks to the veracity of this survival.  That which was lost was long forgotten, but not to everyone.  Was the burning of the Library of Alexandria the event which destroyed the majority of these records?  History does not tell us.

The mystery is beyond my expertise, but it is certainly fascinating.  Regarding Al-Azrad’s own belief (which was apparently touched upon in Ibn Khallikan’s lost scroll of the Wafayat) that the Arabic language stems from an Akkadian root, I can say a little more.  This seems false, as Arabic has far more in common with Nabataean, Aramaic, Hebrew and even Phoenician when compared to Akkadian and the related Babylonian dialects.  Still, we wonder:  what languages did Al-Azrad write the original Al Azif in, besides Arabic?  Dee’s secret inscription alludes to the Aklo tongue and the Naacal.  Did John Dee obscure all of these original forms with Edward Kelley’s crystal scrying, turning a multi-linguistic treatise into unified Enochian?  Or was the Latin of Olaus Wormius the point at which almost all of Al-Azrad’s original words were lost?  These riddles are crucial to our understanding of the Necronomicon (especially the purported effectiveness of its spells and formulae), but they will probably never be answered. ~K.)

SCROLL VIII

Of the Tyrant Dead and Dreaming ~

He Who Shall Riseth Upon His Throne

And So Our World,

The Great Cthulhu

These are the revelations of the Great Cthulhu.

Bartered with my own blood and grief, these secrets are the manifestation of He who will rise out from R’lyeh and be master of our world; He who shall reign over us in slaughter; He who will feast and glory; He who shall leave the world a husk and so plunge on unto other worlds, other aeons, hastening the End of All, the collapsing of the Omni-Kosmos.

Eternal returning, in death we shall be reborn.  O Azathoth, ia!

(The Omni-Kosmos is a topic of considerable complexity, which Al-Azrad speaks of in far greater detail in later Scrolls of Al Azif.  In essence, the Omni-Kosmos is the “metaverse,” the infinite matter and energy web into which all possible universes are interwoven, comprising ten (or more?) tiers of intertwined dimensions.  Here, he alludes that the collapse and rebirth of the Omni-Kosmos is the sole purpose of Azathoth, and that Cthulhu has some significant role to play in the quickened destruction of the metaverse’s current incarnation.  The Omni-Kosmos is apparently regenerative, reborn through its own destruction and the death of all its lifeforms. ~K.)

These secrets have come to me from the ruined shrines of Shub-Niggurath, drowning beneath the harbor of Alexandria; from the stones of the shattered Pharos and its sigils.  Too, these secrets come from the hieroglyphs of Hadoth; from the whispers of the crone Klocha, she who tormented and exalted me; from the reflections of the Shining Trapezohedron; from the petroglyphs of the Nameless City, the tomb-gifts under Irem, the funereal discs of Babel and my own nightmares of dread R’lyeh itself.

Of Great Cthulhu, these secrets are to you a weapon.  He is eternal, the End of Days cannot be averted.  For we are less than insects before the Great Old Ones, and of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu is beyond even Them.  Dread Cthulhu is the one who soweth, the one who reaps of mortal flesh.  To we who shall be reaped, who struggle on in vain, He is the unconquerable.

But the cataclysm of our slaughter can be delayed, by the blood sacrifice in war of the valorous and the wise.  You who do find these scrolls, blood shall be the binding, and you are mine.

~

You, reader, will sacrifice yourself.  As one who will dare to defy Cthulhu, you will rise, and for those you do adore, you will slay to the last.  Knowing that our world is coming to an end, and only we few stand to protect it and allow it to linger on, how can a valorous man or woman do anything but fight against the rising of the One?

There is no other worthy destiny.  Fools might flee upon winds of nepenthe into the Empire of the Blackened Mind, but their bodies will be annihilated; cowards might kill themselves, but their children will face the slaughter of the End of Days in their stead.  We can fight and slay those who hasten the One’s rising, but Time shall ever be our greatest enemy.

Learn of the Cult, and taketh from them everything ... by blade and by thy own treachery.  Give no honor to the evil.  Slay.  Show no mercy, for mercy before Cthulhu is the death struggle of the hopeless.

For the greatest weakness of Cthulhu is that in death and dreaming, he needs the legions of the weak to do his bidding.  Without his Brethren of the Stars, without the Deep Ones, without Dagon and the mortals who receive his dreams and bow to him, aeons will pass before the black tomb of R’lyeh shall be opened.  Yet with their aid, and if the Cult is not disrupted?  His rising will come in thirteen hundred years.  (Clarice has written here:  2030 A.D.?)

So sayeth the Lord in Ebon, Nyarlathotep.

And so these secrets are for you not in the vain belief that you can destroy Great Cthulhu himself; rather, these are the sacred secrets of his Cult, and it is well to remember that those who worship him—even the Deep Ones themselves—are mortal.  Learn what horror lies beneath you and seek it, annihilate it.  Wherever you see these signs, where you find the echoes of these secrets, do not falter.  Find Cthulhu’s worshippers, and slay them.

By your hand, and by my resurrection in your mind:  in centuries long after my own sacrifice, so is my beloved Adaya to be avenged.

SCROLL IX

The Mask of Being,

In Which Cthulhu Veils Himself

The shape of Cthulhu and of his Brethren is known to us from idols crafted by his worshippers, and his images graven in all the elder ages by the Deep Ones.  And too, I have seen his visage, rising in my dreams.

The race of Cthulhu is Mnemba (Clarice:  octopoid), translucent as crystal, of pulpy sinew and curdled ichor, yet limbed and structured upon enormous webs of rind and bone.  The Great Cthulhu is a draconian Thing, a Beast bipedal, with heel to haunch and legs back-bending as do the limbs of the jackal or the desert wolf.  He is gaunt with rot, his skeleton sheathed with translucent emerald flesh, a glass-veiled (transparent?) heart surging with yellow curd of blood, ichor pulsing through the spiderwork of his veins.  From his spine there rise membranous wings which clot upon the sky, and over their breadth there whorl the liquid rainbows of blackest oil.  Atop all, a crown of horror, the head with its eyes—slit-jeweled and immemorial—is surrounded with polyps and with barnacles; and ever the writhing, the hundred tentacles veil beneath the ravenous maw of the Mnemba, a beak of gristled bone.  From the bony ridges of this gnashing circle shall thunder the roar of triumph, calling forth the End of All.

Yet what the idols revealeth not is His terrible vastness.  This is ever the vision of my nightmare, and as I know it is a dream-sending from Cthulhu of what shall be in his awakening, this I will bear for you once more, so that you may receive it:

As a mountain does he walk, the wave is born of his rising, the stones he grips upon crumble beneath claws the size of a rukh’s imperious clutches.  Fingertips pop open with corpse gas and pus, sending forth squelching bubbles, venomous tide-pools in which a man or beast could drown.  And many shall.  And from below, following the searching of the claws, the grasping of the earth, the bulk riseth.  The grease bubbles up, the parasites from the many reflections (dimensions?) which clustered for aeons upon Cthulhu’s rot shall scuttle down and struggle in their torments and their dying.  Bereft of the ocean’s vastness and its crushing pressure, these Things shall burst asunder whilst still scuttling upon the legs of locusts, breathing nothing, drowning upon air.

The depths will drool and squelch with echoes, blasts of blackest steam will rise as the effluvium pooled beneath Cthulhu’s corpse is given unto the open air for the first in countless ages.  The horrific foetor riseth, the stench of a million corpses, for though Cthulhu shall riseth up from death, his body is ever festering, ever healing, seeking to decay and collapse within its rot, held together by his will and by the lingering of Vhoorl within his veins.

Tiered jellies over sinew, the limbs stretched far, as a mockery of the shape of man, a Titan, the abomination stands.

Arms outspread to a crimson sky, gassy sacs distended at the joints, giving forth the effluvium and emerald gases, jellied filth drips from him in a rain.  Some few idolaters underfoot revel there in their drowning, swallowing of his glories.  And so they perish, exalted.  From his face, the tangle of tentacles rises, writhing, cored through with rot wherever their razor-tendrils fester, and there in trumpeting the grayed sun doth shineth forth through every hole in the tentacles’ rotted skins.

Such is my confession, my vision, and the dreaming of Akram and Adaya.  When you dream thus, when we come to you in the Real of Otherness, know that he is coming.

SCROLL X

The Feasting of Cthulhu Upon Our Dreams

Cthulhu has come not only to slaughter and to reign, but to feed upon minds and the feeble offerings of our fears.  Our world is one of millions to which he has descended.  In tearing away the veil and crossing the Void into our universe, he died; for the nature of the fractures between the spheres is such that his ichorous flesh could not endure the stricture of its reflections into the rudimentary cages of length and width and breadth (Dee:  “These, the three dimensions”).  And while the manifestation of his flesh was thus destroyed in his emergence, the Chaos of his dream-self lingered on.

As psyche only, the Great Cthulhu did gather the essences of Vhoorl unto himself, recreating the image of his flesh about his being, and so regenerating the plasm of his form from the will alone.  Vhoorl his homeworld whorls within another universe, a higher reflection.  Having been of body and sinew reborn, the flesh of Cthulhu now is strained.  It is phased, flickering both in our world whilst ever resonant upon the distant world of Vhoorl.  And so he is the manifest and the presenceless, the Beast Within Two Worlds, the Spawn of the Stars.

As he lived, so did he die, and in death he was reborn.  While after his emergence his body was full reformed; while even in aeons past did Cthulhu stalk upon this world to wage his war upon the Elder Things; still, in the sinking of R’lyeh, his corporeal husk was ruptured once again.  Such is the eternity of Cthulhu, mortal immortality, dying and undying.  Enshrined within his tomb beneath the spire of R’lyeh, the body can only wake once more to life when our feast of dreams has strengthened his psyche to the point of re-conception of his self.  And so does he lie dreaming, eroding, becoming.

This is no weakness, this is the way of the immortality in flesh and mind yet unified, the ever-birth and death of Great Cthulhu, most mighty among the Old Ones.  Timeless he stands, the flickering of the body lorded over by the mind in twain, and in only ever other moment is he imprisoned.  The dream-pulses of Cthulhu cascade with the unbreathing ecstasy of his rage.

It is said in fable that the stalkers of the desert, the Ghuls, did choose their deathlessness bereft of dream in order to silence the horrific sendings of Cthulhu inside their minds.  In this way, the Ghuls name themselves the forsaken and the free.

For we mortals, however, who choose not the path of the Ghul and the devouring of our own kind, there is no such mercy.  Thus the mortal paradox:  we are the free, and we are the caged prey.  We imagine illusions greater than any god.  In so imagining, we learn and we are lords of creation; but in dreaming, we feed Cthulhu and so bring forth the End upon us all.

SCROLL XI

The Revelation of Cthulhu,

High Priest and Tyrannis of the Brethren of Vhoorl,

And the Higher Lord He Doth Worship

There is a greater secret of Cthulhu, the revelation of his reverence.

Be it known that if Cthulhu be truly a god, he too doth worship.  He is the one high priest of his own kind, the tentacled ones, the Brethren of the Stars.  Too, some do whisper that Great Cthulhu is the high priest of the Great Old Ones as well.  For Cthulhu is the mind of legion; of all his race, he alone is the dreamer and the nexus of their will.  As he is mind, so the Brethren are the body.  The Brethren sendeth dreams by his command, and so are Dagon and the Deep Ones made to rise and mingleth with the women of our kind.

Our kingdoms are to overflow with children, souls in legion, risen in their billions for the reaping.

And what then of the greater riddles?  Who does Cthulhu worship in his solitude?  Does he bow to a higher power, or does he deign to serve as the high priest of a lesser puppet to his will?  None knoweth.  I believe he hath two lords, and they are the ‘Umr at-Tawil, Yog-Sothoth; and so through the gate revealed, there riseth ever higher the Only, the One of Chaos, Azathoth.

Verily is Cthulhu a conduit of Yog-Sothoth; for with his dreams in death, he does craft bridges of souls and so bring forth the resonance of the gates which lie between the worlds.  So too does he empower himself, and through him as their hive-mind, the Brethren of the Stars draw the essence from the stones of Vhoorl itself into the wounds which were gashed in the monoliths of R’lyeh.  R’lyeh was ravaged in the war with the mighty Elder Ones.

Far beyond the southern seas, R’lyeh is swallowed in the silence of our world’s oceanic netherworld, the Abzu.  There, deep in the nether, are many of the visions of Cthulhu silenced ere they can corrupt the dreams of men.  It is well that the ruined city lies beneath the waves, for were it elsewhere, Cthulhu would already stand reborn and ravening.

May it be, that as the bridges and the gates between the Abzu and Vhoorl are raised through the reflections, R’lyeh stirs and its gashes are healed.  And so in our age the city yet may riseth, aswirl with the malignity of its own firmament, entwined both with our lesser sphere and the greater of Vhoorl’s own, unified, unconquerable.

For when the gates to Vhoorl are unified, when the lenses of thought are with the stars aligned and stricken through with Great Cthulhu’s scream of the awakening, the sky will rain with blood and the rift to the Otherness shall be opened.  The immovable Void, torn away as a tapestry, will warp unmoving, and so will it come to us.  The airs and aethers, the clouds and heavens of our world shall be stripped away.  The mirrors upon which all realities are reflected (Clarice has written here again:  higher dimensions?  Alternative universes?) shall warp in twain, the stars themselves will wheel in unnatural courses, and so shall Al-Ghul, Yad al-Jauza, Fam al-Hut, and all of the Kahkashan come to swirl as one and rise where our vizier sun itself shall then be blinded.

(These are the names of stars in Arabian astrology:  Al-Ghul is Algol, Yad al-Jauza is Betelgeuse, Fam al-Hut is Fomalhaut, and the Kahkashan is attributable to the Milky Way. ~K.)

So by the Cultic sacrifices, by the feast of dreams the stars shall be made right, so that the reflections are all as one.  The sundering of the city shall be healed, the opening of his tomb in fell R’lyeh must come to pass.  The hastening of such is dependent upon the resonance of Vhoorl, the waking and focus of the Brethren, and the gates of Cthulhu’s dreaming which bringeth the reflections of the emerald (?) into unity.

~

Cthulhu will rise, and the Last War shall be waged.  As the End of Days begins, another un-god will rise in immortal defiance.

A prophecy does further entreat that the Nameless, the Unspeakable One, shall be empowered by the shaping of the rift as well.  To those who are of the Cult of the Yellow Silk, there is the belief that the King in Yellow will arise and so wage war upon Cthulhu for the right to reapeth of our world.  If this be true, in their tumult shall all mortals then be slaughtered or enslaved.

The Majesty in Yellow cannot be worshipped as our savior, for if he is the victor who seizes the throne of the Abzu beneath our world, we are as lost as if Great Cthulhu himself were to be alone our tyrant.  Whoever the victor of the Last War shall be, we beneath their feet will be lost.  There is no path which leadeth to our salvation.

These only shall be the fates of the Kingdom of Man:  the many shall be the feast, the few shall be enthralled, and our ravaged world of slaughter shall remain Cthulhu’s kingdom.

GATHERING THE THIRD

The Death of Adaya

SCROLL XII

The Empire of the Blackened Mind

(Fragmentary)

(This scroll was apparently damaged by fire.  I am tempted to regard XII as the missing half of Scroll VI, relating the death of Adaya; but I have no evidence of this, and even if this is true, a crucial joining section of the narrative is lost.  It appears that the missing section speaks of Al’Azrad’s tragic final nights in the city of Sana’a.  It appears further that Adaya was murdered, and that Al’Azrad himself had fled, returning only to find that Adaya yet lived on, then to die in his embrace.  See also my preliminary note to Scroll VI for my personal thoughts concerning the fact that Najeed was a servant to the Cult of Cthulhu, and that he was culpable toward Adaya’s death.  He himself may well have been her murderer, or he may have been accompanied by the Cult whom he did serve. ~K.)

~

(...)

... and so it was that Adaya, bleeding from her wounds, did die in my arms.  Her last words were that she loved me, and would do so forever, and that I in my time should come to her.

As I asked her, “How, beloved, can I ever come to you?  And where?” she breathed her last.

Yet I knew then that my theft of the Mnemba (Clarice Whately has again translated from the Arabic:  “octopus-headed”) amulet had been the reason why the vermilion-robed ones had stalked me to the cistern; and that, in giving the bauble to her as the love-gift of a young man and a fool, I in my prideful spiting of Najeed had caused her to be slain.

~

But our love was one of dreams.  She still was with me.  Born of nightmare, Adaya and I had spoken not only of our sharing of R’lyeh and its horrors.  Too, we whispered to one another of dreams more beautiful, those which were born of our own hearts.  I told her of the jinn of the silver waters, and she told me of her fantasies of mountains, where water itself would turn into a priceless crystal, ice, and never flow again.  In our years together—and this was never understood by Akram, and in envy it did divide us, we two brothers—Adaya and I learned too that there exist two hierarchies of dream.

In the lesser, known by all mortals who sleep, linger the mere fantasies which are isolate and forgotten upon waking.  Such fancies are illusions born merely of desire and desire’s fading, and come to nothing.  But the greater dreams are of a world of kingdoms which, like the horror of R’lyeh, is shared in rapture and locked away as a secret by the blessed few.  Some do name this consensual paradise the Dreamlands.

The Dreamlands are of wonder, and beauty, but there is horror there as well.  And it is known to me now that if one should meet with horror and believe that they have died within the Dreamlands, that the body within the Real will die as well.

Thus are the two worlds, ours and the Real of Otherness, entwined.

In dreaming together, Adaya and I came to understand that we could walk as one sharer within the Lands of Dream.  And, upon our waking, we would remember all the glories we had beheld.  There, we dreamed as one.

But the Lands of Dream carry a graver price, for they are born not only of the dreamers’ shared and mingled wonderment, but also of our primal fears.  There are terrors in the Lands of Dream to which only Cthulhu would loom as a greater abomination.  These nightmares reside within us in an ancestral sharing of elder memory, a core of ourselves where those who gave birth to our sires’ sires left their terrors in an eternal imprint upon our souls.  These loathsome dreads are made manifest against our will, the reflection of our mortal dread:  the ultimate fear of Death.

And in learning all of this, of the beauty and the nightmare which swirl as one in the Lands of Dream, I now do name this Otherness the Empire of the Blackened Mind.

~

There was a time when I did believe that I could dream my dear Adaya back to life.  I learned in my years of wandering the wasteland that even in dreams, the dead are lost to us.  But still, there are domains of majesty in dream, there in the unearthly kingdoms to behold.

For dreams are memories of moments which never happened.  This is not to say that dreams are false, no.  The Lands of Dream shift in tidal oneness with the rhythms of the earth, yet these eternal lands are never bound by the laws of Time.  In architecture and structure, in the ways of their peoples and the temples which they have raised, the Empire is centuries behind our own.  It is a reflection of our memory which never was, our age of Matriarchs, our golden age.  There, some shards of the ancient Myth of the Gilded Waters do live and breathe in truth.

For there are indeed glorious peoples within the Empire of the Blackened Mind who dwelleth there alone, who when they themselves dream, dream of our own reality as their fantasy.  Too, there are dreamers who are native to the Real, who in crossing in their sleep into the Empire’s domain know and find themselves to be journeyers in a land which never was, and yet which is enthroned upon the True, an aspect of reality, as a facet is but one fragile mote of a shining jewel.  Well it must be remembered that a death in the believed Dreamlands is a death of the dreamer’s flesh.  The body cannot linger when the mind it cages hath died in horror.  As the mind dieth elsewhere, the body crumbles here.  All of these miracles of beauty and of dread are unified, enmeshed in the riddling kingdoms of the Empire of the Blackened Mind.

Yet what of such glories, when the end is yet to come regardless of our will?  All of these truths remain as the futile wisdom of a stranger I have now become, a mad hermit of the alleys of Damascus, aged and alone.

I return to my storied yesterday.

~

To my youthful hope, to be with my Adaya once again, it seemed that in dream it might well be possible for we two to live forever.  Yet how then would I dream of my Adaya, when she herself had perished?

As wheels of sand, ever churning, flow the lingering paradoxes of the Empire of Sleep.

The riddle which vexed me was my own belief in her oblivion.  In dreaming, I knew that the Empire was real, and so it was.  Yet there I also knew that my Adaya was dead.  How could I divide my mind, so that I believed in the Empire of the Blackened Mind, while forgetting that I believed in the death of my Adaya?  That paradox was the secret.  If I could forget her unreality, she would become real within the Dreamlands.  If only I could impel myself to disbelieve Adaya’s death, and I did dream of her alive … in the Empire, would she live again?

I believed.  But my doubts could not be excoriated.  I tormented myself in sleep, dreaming of her always but forever unable to make her real.  In my nightmares she did die again, a thousand times and more.

~

There was a way.  The sages knew, the stories I had sung and whispered mocked me with their possibilities.

There is a word of power among the Greeks, and that is nepenthe.  Nepenthe is a willful forgetting of the utmost essence of the self.  It is not oblivion, but rather a divine revelation in which the tortured aspects of the elder self are shed, as are the ashes of the Phoenix; and so the greater, ever-younger self is thus reborn.

In forgetting the man, the soul becomes the child.

In centuries past, nepenthe was a gift of spice wine, or the envenomed vapors which rose from the cavern-clefts of oracles.  The mysteries of Eleusis did coil round the worship of nepenthe, and the Hierophants of Arcadia knew its truth.  But in Sana’a and my own century, there was known to me one dark gift only which came from the Utter East, and that is the violet frankincense.  That alone, the stories told me, was the last gateway to nepenthe in this age.

Frankincense in and of itself is but a spice.  But the violet strain of this spice is a crystallized corruption of itself.  By the mad, it is whispered that the violet spice is born of the fungal leavings of the Yuggothai, those astral stalkers which are known as the Mi-Go.  Of these sagacious and unearthly Things, the Fungi Who Stride the Ice, I will speak elsewhere.  But my first understanding of the treasures born of their waste was the violet frankincense, the spice kissed with their leavings.

This spice was found only rarely in the east gate caravansary of Sana’a.  But I was the jackal of that city’s secrets.  I gave myself, body and soul, to a sallow merchant who demanded me as his price for the frankincense of the Yuggothai.  And this I paid.  There in the caravansary, seven nights after Adaya’s death, I did purchase a dram of this precious spice, this violet liquid crystal.

Verily, it is worth ever more than its weight in gold.

For the violet, in truth, when burned and breathed as smoke brings in truth the sacred nepenthe of ages old.  I sat beneath a rooftop tent, and burned the frankincense in the night.  There, in the cloying and sugar cloud of its burning, this spice did bring me into the Lands of Dream.

~

Behold, the dream rendered by the mists of Yuggothai:

I dreamed more vividly than ever in my life.  I balanced upon the border of the Dreamlands, even as my entranced eyes still were closing.  There in the Otherness I did believe, and an illusory palace rose all about me.  As I strode from courtyard to courtyard, the palace became the Real.  This was the dark gift of the spice:  I forgot all of my sorrows, and so too did I forget that Adaya had died beneath a blade.

Nepenthe.

I did desire her, and I did dream of her.  And there, adrift in my grief and ecstasy, lost in the Palace of Nothingness, the slain Adaya did rise and come to me.

My soul could not question the impossibility of her presence, for it sang with an all-consuming joy.

So did I find myself enraptured.  From out of the courtyard gardens she glided to me, we touched hands.  We kissed, and we did lay together as never we had in life.

Having loved her I did rise, and hand in hand we walked the halls of the endless and ivory palace.

She was silent, she a princess, and I her inamorato.  Guided by my desire, she flowed with me neath cascades of birdsong and currents of leaf-shadow, out of the last courtyard and through to the endless halls, until we two discovered an ornate stair, which led down into the palace’s beguiling under-realm of emerald and twilight.

Seventy were the steps we descended in our bliss.  The coolness of shadow filtered through the lingering echoes cast in wild-song by the birds, yet soaring far above.  By the time she and I came to alight upon the twentieth step descending, the air began to warm; and we sensed a burning far below.

The staircase spiraled ever down, and flickering shadows of firelight began to dance upon the alabaster walls.  Gusts of heat turned the moisture of the air into a mist.

With doubt and trepidation, Adaya did falter.  I looked back to her upon the higher stair, and tears shone in her eyes.

Did she understand that she had died?  At that moment, in the nepenthe, I myself did not remember she was gone.  And so she was there, caged in my fever dream.

She said nothing; I kissed her brow, and upon my gentle insistence she did stir and acquiesce.  So by the draw of one trembling hand, I did lead her further down.

Scarlet radiance flared and the heat washed over us.  We stepped into a grotto encircled with licks of flame, an ancient polished cavern filled with an ever-reflecting glory of shadows and of light.  The little fires did leap from narrow fissures jettied all along the cavern’s walls.  And in the midst of that cave of eld there stood two priests from the land of Khom, arrayed in ochre robes and cloth of gold.

They raised their heads, not in the least dismayed then to behold me.  They were pshent-bearded in the manner of Egyptians:  not as the merchants and bladesmen are in my day, but rather by the arts of ancient Khom herself, the dead realm of the Pharaoh.  Ringlets of gold—and translucent crystals, each hollow stone filled with water—did ring their beards.  These two men were of that race, the Khomites, dark and wise:  their kohl-rimmed eyes were ancient, and in regarding me their eyes reflected every fire.

Adaya in fear did quail from them, and weep.

And as I comforted her, the younger of these two ancient ones did say to me, “Welcome, one who names himself as Abd.  I am Nasht.”

And the elder, speaking in solemn cant, “I am Kaman-Thah.”

I greeted them, and stated that my beloved and I desired to enter the Eden-lost, the enchanted cedar forest of Huwawa.

And Nasht nodded to me, and as he turned his hand upon the air, the flames of the farther cavern wall relented.  There was revealed an ornate portal, Arabesque swirlings of hollowed stone carved from the cavern itself to frame another descending stair.

And I began to cross the cavern in silent joy, for I knew that the Eden-lost did await me far below, a lush netherworld of wonders.  There I would find the deeper gate which opens upon the forest of our dreams.

Yet Adaya would not follow me.  As I turned to lift her—for she now was curled in grief upon the floor—Kaman-Thah did say to me:  “You, Abd can pass, for you are worthy.”

I replied—for the nature of nepenthe is to cloud the memory, and yet to glory in its mist—“Worthy?  There is my father’s darkness in me, and I do revel in it.  I beneath his Fate may be to lie accursed as a murderer, I do not remember.  I am not pure.”

And Kaman-Thah nodded, pleased yet saddened.  He did say, “There is a terrible darkness in you, child.  This is true.  The nature of your soul-shadow you have now forgotten, and so on a drift of spice have you come to me.  But the Dreamlands are meant not for the pure, but rather for those who believe in both the terrible and beautiful as one.  Of all the souls of your city and the spirits of your age, beloved Abd, you are he.”

I was well satisfied.  I was worthy.  I was.  I would venture on, I would conquer the daemon Huwawa who guarded immortality.  I would have and rule my Eden-lost, my Kingdom of Nothing.  And so I compelled Adaya to rise, and I enfolded her.

Yet Nasht did say to me, “To the Gates of Deeper Slumber, you alone may pass.  The Forest Enchanted and all the lands which lie beyond will welcome you.  But this bereaved one, this grieving maiden?  She cannot go forth with you.”

And swallowing my rage, I asked, “Why not?”

And Nasht replied, “Because she is not truly here, and you only dream of her.”

Kaman-Thah did say, “She is with death.  She is lost to you.”

And I said, “But this is the threshold to the Otherness of the Real.  Here, the impossible shall reign.  These are the Lands of Dream.”

And Nasht replied, “So they are.  But this moment and this place are real in themselves, and in all of the realities, she is dead.  Adaya is not here of her own will, child, but rather solely of your own.”

I gazed into the eyes of Adaya, and she did kiss me.  She did speak then in my dream, for the first and only time.  She said unto me, “Al-Azrad, ever do I love you.  Know this, remember this if nothing else upon your waking.  I beg of you, set me free.  Give me the peace of death.  Live your life, learn the secrets of the Abyss which you must know; and when the end of your time is nigh, release yourself, and so in eternity will you come to me.”

And as I wept and touched the ringlets of her braided hair, Adaya faded from my embrace.

I woke with the same tears upon my face which I had cried in the fiery cavern of Nasht and Kaman-Thah.  I cried out her name, yet I was upon the rooftop in benighted Sana’a, alone.

The smoke of the earlier hours yet lingered, but the crystals of the violet frankincense were ashes.  Many a year would pass before I ever found such crystals to be my treasures once again.

And never since that night have I dreamt of my Adaya again, despite my fervent wishes every night to do so.

SCROLL XIII

The Lament of the Dead

Despite the lingering mercies of the heat and the aridity of high Sana’a, the body of my Adaya had begun to render itself unto the dust.  I extracted from her mouth one tooth, for that is the way of my people when the beloved must be buried.

I wrapped her then in linens and I sealed her shroud with beast-glue of melted fat.  I stroked a veil of cinnabar over her hidden face, shaping it in the symbol of the moon.

My love.

Having done this, in deepest night, I left Sana’a with her enshrouded body.  I forsook the city at that time, wanting nothing more to do with it or its people; and I swore that my beloved’s body would forever remain untouched.  For to one such as myself who knew black secrets, there were tales whispered that those corpses which were buried in Al Adim—the canyon hollow, the grave-ravine beyond that city’s black western gate—were blasphemed by treasure hunters, by necromancers, and worse.

For my Adaya to be untouched, inviolate, I would bury her in secret, and alone.

And so it is that in the night I carried her to the Oasis of Zarzara, three leagues into the desert, sahra.  Striding through the chill and wind in solitude, arriving there just ere to sunrise, I prayed thus:  for my Adaya, the afterlife would not be the end of all, but rather a rebirth.

Would then that I knew my destiny.  O Adaya, forgive me.

~

With my spade and my own fingers I did bury her beneath the date palm which offered the sweetest shade, near to the waters of Zarzara.  Her shroud I did well anoint with amber and spice of myrrh, for I knew these sweet scents of eternity were offensive to the digging beasts of the sahra.  With layers of fronds and stones each set upon her, I did set her to rest.

She was my beloved, a daughter of Judaea.  Although her ways were ever a mystery to my own, I sought desperately to honor her in the ways of her people.  I knew precious little of her tribe, only what I had heard from merchants in the night, for she rarely spoke of the mother who had died, the father who had forsaken her.  I myself had no religion, no belief.  I was in exile, not only from the people of Sana’a, but also from my own grieving heart.

I no longer knew myself.  The gift of the nepenthe is its own curse as well.

~

Having buried her, I drank of the morning waters, and I did grieve.

I sang my most beautiful song of songs over her grave, and laid there in the shade until exhaustion stole over me.

In falling prey to slumber, I had a precious memory of Adaya return to me.  How before that moment had I never remembered?  Had the veiling of that past torment been a trick of my own wisdom, a nepenthe born not of spice, but of the heart in all its need?

The memory was this:

As a child, first having fled Ghanara, I did see a bleeding woman garbed only in sackcloth and crown of thorn.  The bladesmen of the emporium cried out to the blood-hungering crowd that she was an adulterer.  She was stoned.  In my fascination, the sick and twisted pleasure with which I watched that miserable woman in her suffering, I was not only ashamed of myself, but I was ... what?

As every stone fell, I experienced pleasure.  In the black shadow of myself, that aspect of my spirit which I strive to deny in all of its desires, in the Beast, I was fulfilled.

The woman died gazing across the marketplace, looking into my eyes alone.  Only I would meet her gaze.  To the others, she was not a tragic loss, a woman of exquisite beauty even in death.  To those who had killed her, she was a husk, a depleted vessel unworthy of further thought.

I cried that night, not only for the poor woman and the horror of her killing, but for myself, the damage I had done to my own spirit in taking pleasure in her suffering.

That was the first night in which Adaya had embraced me.

~

Adaya was my lover in dream alone.

I was a boy, and she a virgin.

We never more than touched, but she was and shall be my love forever.

SCROLL XIV

Of the Crimson That Is Desire

(This scroll was uniquely titled thus by John Dee.  From the elaborate script of his pen in this passage, it seems that he was deeply moved here by Al-Azrad’s adoration of Adaya.)

~

(This is the scroll-song, translated into English, which Al-Azrad did compose and sing over the grave of his Adaya.  It is perhaps one of the most haunting passages in Al Azif.)

~

Mersiye (Elegy) ~

The Funereal Song

For the Maiden of Judaea,

O Adaya

~

Ever in her memory,

I am the beloved of the lost.

We dreamed as one,

Echoing thrum of jackal heart,

She was the only,

She is everything.

~

In death, Adaya,

Forever you are mine.

In the Empire

Of the Blackened Mind,

Unto the crest of cavern’s fire,

Yet cradled in nepenthe,

There my maiden breathes.

~

There, in Dreamlands, she embodies

Sheer transparency of starlight.

In Palaces of Nothingness,

From off the twilight’s sculptures

Of fire and of shade,

Gathering my every breath

From star and blossom into song,

Measuring the weft of every moonbeam,

Adaya, O weaver of my dreaming

Turns my lucent soul within her hands.

~

In lingering in the Empire,

She draweth down the moon,

She with spellbound fingers

Twirls the sacred crescent from the sky.

~

Yet unknowing

She is lost, awash in laughter,

There she weighs my spirit’s wane

In a spindling of her fingerprints.

She and I, with songbirds

Glory in the majesty of flight.

~

For she

Is the beauty of the rarity of rain,

The desert misting in rains’ flight,

The crystal lingering of manna on the hapau trees.

More truly than the flesh she left behind,

Here she is herself, simplicity,

Wedded sweetly to her imperfection.

~

And beholding me, so she loves,

And so she doth remember love and life,

And so

She is lost to me.

~

Ever in my memory,

O Adaya,

You are the beloved and the lost.

We dreamed as one,

Echoing thrum of jackal heart.

In life, she was the only.

In death, she is everything.

SCROLL XV

The Watcher at the Oasis

Having sung my heart to the body of my beloved, and having slept, I woke with the next sunset to the flurry of wings.  An oasis is not only a sanctuary crafted of sweet waters and cool breezes; it is a place of the birds of passage.  These ever-beautiful creations fill the palms before they endure the fire of the day, coveting the moisture and the shade.  At sunset, they soar across the desert in its chill, lofting on the thermal winds seeking their next horizon.

Yet in waking me that twilight, the cacophony of the birds was not only one of wings, but of cries of alarm.

I drew my jambiya and looked all about, fearing bandits or badawi grave robbers.  Perhaps, I feared, even the foul Najeed had followed me to render himself as my assassin.  But no.

There was a silhouette of black against the blood-red of the setting sun, its heels set to its haunches, and as it crouched it sniffed the scent of me from the air.  Its snout was of the wulfen, a predatory face of canine cast.  It lifted its too-long fingers to the breezes.  The thing was so gaunt, its waist was pinched as narrow as that of a wasp, and then I knew:

My mother, the Shepherdess, had in all her whispers—the desert elegies sung for me as her child—spoken true.  The myths of the Ghuls, the deathless and corpse-eating prowlers of the desert, were no myths at all.

The Watcher at the Oasis, this thing, was a Ghul.  Once more, it scented the moistened air.

The thing did sense me as I lowered my blade in comprehension.  Seeing this, it did not flee, it did not approach.  I believed that it would kill me, and despite my blade I bore no illusions that I could survive such a confrontation.  For this was a Deathless One.  The thing had mastered the desert and hunger and had snapped the chains of death itself.  How could I, not even yet a man, hope to vanquish it?

And so I bowed my head over the grave, and whispered a prayer to be with my Adaya.  It was a blessing, it seemed, to die where her body had been buried by my own hand.

But when I dared to raise my head again, not even the echoes of birdsong were to be heard.  Only the wind.  The Watcher had left me to my love.  The Ghul had gone.

SCROLL XVI

The Temptation of Aharon

After the fulcrum moment of the Watcher at the Oasis, I was reborn.  Not only was I alive, but for the first I had a glimpse of understanding into the truer nature of the worlds.  What some called superstitions:  the Ghuls, who stride the waste and lord over themselves undying?  To my mind, these were proven to be real.

It was not so difficult for me to believe in them.  The Empire of the Blackened Mind, the Otherness, the nightmare of Cthulhu, these were to me facades which despite their own realities had never touched my life of the waking world.  But all of them were real, were they not?  All of them had been experienced not only by myself, but by Akram and Adaya as well.

The Ghul at the oasis had certainly been real and of this earth, and I had beheld its silhouette before the setting of the sun.

I was yet enthralled by the ways of youth, the ways of simplicity.  I had seen, and so what I had seen was true.

~

Of course, the world of grief and exile held its own complexities.

I had sworn that I would never return to Sana’a, the death-place of Adaya and so by my heart accursed.  Yet still I needed food and water to survive.  My shame, in deciding to live on, was to leave Adaya’s grave.  But as I recalled her farewell words to me, in her death and in my dreaming, I found that it was not love alone which dwelled inside me and gave me the breath of life.  Greater than this, there was a curious mask upon the face of Hope.

This mask, I learned, was Hatred.

I desired nothing more than for Adaya’s murderers to die.  But more than this, seeing the Watcher at the Oasis had caused me to question many things.

There are many even among the Sufi and the sages who in their heart of hearts truly never believe in miracles, or the horrors of the netherworld.  Comforting themselves with intangible visions of man-gods and lovely angels, they never allow themselves to fear the true Things which crawl amongst the shades, the Things which revel in our horror and long to devour us.

But for myself, cursed by the dreaming of Great Cthulhu, and finding that others knew of the dream’s every detail ere I ever shared of them, I knew that there are many things in this world that are more real than ourselves, more real than the narrow cages of the few things we dare to believe in.

Mortals are sentient beasts, but beasts nonetheless they remain.  We are fools, slaves to desire and pleasure and denial, prey to hunger and relentless in our flight from the truths of cruelty.  In return, those truths care not if we believe in them; they simply are.  And so the sight of the Ghul, although it terrified me, did not cause me to deny it in horror, to loathe it, or to believe that I had fallen into madness.  Rather, it gave me Hope, and the power to remove Hope’s mask and find my destiny.

I would have my revenge upon Adaya’s murderers.

~

I knew then it was possible for the flesh to live beyond the grave, and for a lost Ghul to rise again and return in a flesh which even the desert could not kill.  Could it then not be possible to bring my beloved Adaya back to life?

Even if she were to return as a Ghul, I would love her.  If that were the secret of immortality, then so be it.  I would resurrect her, I would commit the same blasphemies upon myself, and as Ghuls we would live forever.

Are not the desperate hopes of youth so fragile?

~

It is evil, to hope for the beloved’s resurrection against her will.

The desire for another’s eternity is not a weakness, yet it is the most merciless of strengths our hearts remain compelled to understand.  Such desire is a longing for the forbidden, to shatter the mortality of the beloved and to make of her an idol of carven flesh.

Love is not only longing, it is the coveting of more than all that is truly possible for man.

I knew the tales of such blasphemies very well.  Such thoughts were the lure of the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka, who in his own oblivion knew all that we desire, and who curses us by giving that wish to us as the most deathly gift of all.  Immortality is a wicked treasure, as dire to give as it is to receive.

But all men wish it, either for their lovers or for themselves.

So do sages set their names into the Blackened Codex of Azathoth; if they do not adore a woman, still they adore the lure of wisdom of the stars.  Those who compel themselves into obsession for ever more of desire are touched upon by the unreal.  Such is the nature of the Empire of the Blackened Mind, consensual longing born of sorrow.

If Ghuls did exist, could I not raise my Adaya?  Could I not beg the Watcher to resurrect her, and then to change me to stand beside her?

Such an innocent I was.

It is evil, to hope for the beloved’s resurrection against her will.

~

Such ruminations filled my mind as I walked back from the oasis through all the shadowless fires of the day.  I found myself, parched and sun-stricken, at the lesser caravansary seven leagues west of Sana’a’s great walls:  the encampment named Jumani-Sab’a, the Place of the Seven Pearls.

There I did meet Aharon the sage.  There was but one caravan there in the high-sun of the day.  Its guards warded me off, hounding me away from the camels all laden with grain and spice.  The merchants, seeing that I was deluded from my hours beneath the sun, gave me a berth of silence and nothing more.  The women made the signs of the horns with their slender hands, and none would speak to me.  But the holy man, Aharon the desert wanderer, rose in his tattered robe and he did fix upon the wanting, the pain, the fire within my eyes.

He alone was kind enough to trade my empty waterskin from the Oasis of Zarzara.  For payment for the sharing of his own water and the sanctuary of his shade, he asked only of me the last of the amber and cinnabar with which I had anointed Adaya’s shroud.  Thus he gave me a full waterskin of his own, and the shadow of his wind-frayed tent, a skeleton of wicker sticks and rags of linen, leaning to and fro upon the sand.

I drank.  I slept and woke in brief and fitful torments.  Aharon, he did care for me.

In between my silences, I offered my grudging thanks.  The meagerness of my gratitude was made stronger by my sincerity.

Night began to fall, jackals yelped near the horizon.  We spoke of many things.

And as the chill of evening crept over the dunes, and my body blistered and shivered from the torments which it had borne, Aharon asked me not my name or what secrets I had buried in the sands beside Zarzara.

But rather, he asked me:  “Friend, when you walked to the oasis alone, and you did slumber there, on waking, what did you see?”

I saw the Watcher.  I beheld a Ghul.

I had no reason to share such an unbelievable secret with this man.  But I had been hollowed by my grief, by the vision of the Watcher and my acceptance of the Unnatural, striding among the wastelands of our world.  So hollowed and shattered, I was uncaring of whatever might happen to me.  I wanted only to grow wise enough to know the ways of Adaya’s murderers; to grow clever and fearless enough to stalk them; to wring the secrets of immortality from either them or from the mysteries of the Ghul; and to grow merciless enough to slay them all.

I had hope alone in my belief that there would be a way to bring my Adaya—as Ghul or returning mortal, I cared not, for love is eternal and the flesh is never equal to the spirit of the beloved—back into my arms.

And in such a reverie, I did tell the fakir Aharon precisely what I had seen.

“I saw the Watcher.  I beheld a Ghul.”

Rather than scoff at me, instead of kicking me away from his fire or cursing me as mad, Aharon only smiled sadly and did look into the flame which he had made.  He scattered the precious amber I had given him into the cinders, and the sweet perfumes of embalming and wonderment did course over us in a smoke of fog and spark.

He said to me:  “Of all amongst this caravan you could tell, only I.  You share this with me alone, a gift of truth.  I do believe you.  Ninety-seven moons ago, I myself did bury my first wife at that oasis.  The palm I had laid her beneath is gone, dried away from the receding waters and taken by the sands.  Her grave is lost.  But I know she is there.  And the Watcher?  The one who sits upon the rise and crouches and gazes and does not slay those who behold him?  That selfsame Ghul, I did see him as well.  For after I buried my Zahiya, he came to me.  And I was fool enough to attack him.”

Spellbound, I said nothing.  I waited.

Aharon went on:

“He dashed the kulhad-hatchet from my hand, shattering my wrist and writing my shame in scars all down my forearm to the bone.  Do you see?  Here, and here?  Yet the Watcher he did spare me, and he swore that he would provide me with the black gift of nepenthe.  This Watcher has a name, as well.  In his own age of mortality, a stargazer and a harp-priest of Akkad, he was known as Naram-gal.  He offered to me release from grief, the forgetting of mortal cares, for I was dying of a broken heart.  If only, yes, if only I would give to him one gift in return.”

“And what gift?” I asked of him.

And Aharon said, “I did let Naram-gal unbury my wife, and feast upon her flesh.”

Revolted, I stood and kicked the amber coals of the fire across the sand.  I began to draw my jambiya, and the guards stationed at their farther fires silenced their private laughter and drunken slurs and quieted themselves to watch me warily.

But Aharon, who had taken me in that day and had shared the waters and gentled my sorrows, ignored my blade and only looked into my eyes.

Feeling a fool, I cast my blade away.  And I asked of him, “You let that ... that thing defile the body of your wife?  How could you?”

And Aharon replied, “Young one, do you not know?  If love and honor truly were all to you and sang as one within your heart, you would have killed yourself over your Adaya’s grave.  You did not.  If you could release her, if you could be so strong as to free her unto death and go on to a life alone, you would have buried her in the canyon-land Al Adim, where every other soul of Sana’a is laid to rest.  This too, you did not do.”

“No.  You took her body to the Zarzara, you balmed her with treasured spice, and you tarried there.  You thought you would take your life, and you did not.  And in waking, seeing the Ghul Naram-gal and embracing the mercy of his intrigue, you did walk away.  And so you are here.  You choose to live, as you choose to be furious with me.  Because if the Watcher had promised you resurrection for your love, you might have done the same.  Desire of this kind which burns within you, it is not only love, it is selfishness, yes?  The soul of your Adaya longs only to be at peace, but still you want her.  Is that not the bitterest of truths?  Your love for her is great, but your love for yourself is greater still.  You forbid her exaltation.  You cannot let her leave you.”

There was one moment, a fleeting one of fire, when I nearly took up my blade again and slashed Aharon’s throat.  But my hand did tremble.  Why?  Because the sage was cruel to say such things to one bereaved?  Because he was fearless of death, and perhaps even would welcome it?

No.

It is because what Aharon said to me was the truth.  This I could not deny.  I did want her back, whatever the price, whatever unnatural magic might be demanded to cheat death and kiss her living lips once more.  Aharon knew this.  For the first time since Akram had smiled upon me, and the first since Adaya had taken me into her shelter, I had found a kindred soul.

All of this Aharon understood as I knelt in silence.  And I wept.

He did not touch me.  He said nothing until I raised my head, then only, “Boy.  Look to my hands.”

Aharon then did show me the tattoos upon his palms, each burned and scarred with the primal sigil of the Cabal of the Ghul.  The sigil is in the shape of four extinct tiger jawbones, arrayed in the order of the four stars of the horizons, a compass rose made of teeth.

He told me that he was burned thus by the grateful Naram-gal, and that this is the symbol by which the Ghuls mark those among the mortals who are to be spared.  Such people may wander into the desert, into the farthest wastelands and even the graveyards of the haunting Jinn and the cries of Al Azif, and never be slain by the Ghuls who dwell there.  And if such a marked one should choose to do so, he may later even share the feasting upon the dead beside the Ghuls themselves, and so become one of them, and learn of their every secret.

Immortality.

And who lords over the Ghuls, or the ones who are marked so?  When I dared to ask Aharon whom he did serve, he did not answer.  When I asked further if he had eaten of the flesh of the dead, he said, “Not yet.”

But he did gift me with an amulet, made of corpse-lizard bones, in the same shape of the sigil of the Cabal.  This I wear still.

And then Aharon did tell me, “Listen to me now.  Do not judge me in anything but silence.  Yes?”

I let him put his arm around me.  He said further:

“Truly, it will be possible to bring your beloved Adaya back to life.  One such method is yet known by the most elder among the Ghuls.  This secret I do not know, for I am marked and not yet of them, but I do know that the gift of rebirth would not bring her back in the way that you believe.  Deeper, I know that the price of such a sorcery is far greater than any sane man would ever pay.”

He shrugged.  And he went on, “But who am I, young friend, to question your obsession?  I have a madness of my own, for I believe that the afterlife is not in heaven, but of this earth.  And I believe that I will walk that earthly paradise.  I will feast with the Ghuls upon my own flesh, and so I will become one with them.”

I covered my face.  Was that the secret of the Deathless Ones?  Or only one of a thousand horrors?

“Friend,” Aharon said to me, “I can only point you the way.  This sorcery of resurrection is known to the eldest Ghuls, this much is true.  You alone can choose which path you are to follow.  Will you seek such forbidden wisdom, or will you shun it as the blasphemy it certainly must be?  Such is the way of desert walkers, the marked ones of the Ghuls.  Once tattooed or bearing an amulet, we vow to share the secret of the sigil with one we believe is worthy, and one person only.  I have chosen you.  Tonight, sleep beside me.  If you kill me, I will have dishonored my master Naram-gal in choosing wrongly of your heart, and so I will deserve it.”

“But if this night you stay with me in peace, then I have chosen well, and my debt of shame is paid.  The spirit of my own beloved Zahiya will forgive me for allowing the Watcher to feast upon her, and she at last will slumbereth in peace.  Then will I be worthy to walk into the desert and share the feast with the Ghuls of Naram-gal, and so will begin the blessing of my afterlife upon this world.”

There was nothing I could say.  But I did lay myself beside him, and to show my faith in his confessions, I thrust my dagger into the fading coals and left it there.  Aharon did not seem to care.

When the moon had risen, half-cored and orange with a sandstorm raging upon the ever-far horizon, Aharon turned his back to me.  But his last murmur bade me to sleep beside him.  I laid near to him, waiting.  In time, he breathed with the ease of sleep.

When I woke there in the morning, recovering my jambiya from the ashes, the caravan had departed.  I found only Aharon’s tracks leading out from Jumani-Sab’a, toward the far oasis of Zarzara.

He had chosen me as his successor, to carry forth the secret of the Cabal of the Ghul.  He was gone.

GATHERING THE FOURTH

Of the Cult of Cthulhu

SCROLL XVII

Unveiling the Deeper Treacheries

And the Unholy Naming

Of the Masters of Najeed

(?)

~

(The title is known.  This scroll is missing, but Dee has left clues in his scrawlings that he believes that Al-Azrad did come to learn with certainty that the Cult of Cthulhu, as well as Najeed, had caused her death.  The only word on the scroll which now remains is “Nyarlathotep.”)

SCROLL XVIII

Akhutu,

Of the Brotherhood of Filth

The Cultists of Cthulhu oft speak of themselves as one with the Akhutu; that is, “the Brotherhood” in the lost tongue of Akkad.  The word “cult” itself may be a corruption of this ancient name, a curse upon the worshippers of dark forbidden powers beneath the earth.

The Akhutu is the many-one of those blasphemers and defilers who toil to bring about the end of free mortal reign upon the earth.  We who do not embrace Cthulhu’s worship; or worse, we who fight against the Cult and seek to slaughter its priests and thralls?  We are but their prey.

We are here to by them be cleansed.  Our deaths must be in agony and terror, for only then in our dying cries do we send forth the primal essence of our minds, and in the panic of torment our dying feeds the psyche of Cthulhu as he slumbereth in R’lyeh.  In this manner do we strengthen the Sleeper’s dreams which open the gates of cataclysm between Vhoorl and R’lyeh, quickening the coming End of All.

Be it known that all of the Akhutu are mad.  They are bestial, and worthy only of destruction.  To their minds, however, the sacred madness is a gift borne of revelation, and those who do not possess this “Mark of the Chosen” are weak, and incapable of comprehending the glory of the End.  In such thinking, the oblivious and the innocent are a waste and serve no other function than to feed the Great Cthulhu with their agonies.

The Akhutu believe that in serving Cthulhu thus, they will rise among the few who are spared in the End of Days and who shall be exalted as the many-pleasured task-masters, anointed by the Brethren of the Stars to rule over the tearing of our world.

The Akhutu believe that only the mad are strong, and only the strong will prevail.

Can such be true?  The greatest men and women I have ever known have proven to be mad.  I, too, succumb to the disease of visions and screams deep in the night.  I am mad not for what I believe, but for what I have seen with my own eyes.  Of the Cult’s convictions, I do not believe their judgment of the innocents to be true.  To me, the Akhutu are nothing more than a Brotherhood of Filth, the mere deluded pawns of an un-god which ravens enthroned beyond any mortal dynasty.

And yet I believe that those who fight against the Cult are sacred warriors; that those who sacrifice themselves to slow the time when the stars are to be right are the greatest and holiest fighters that the Kingdom of Men shall ever know.

Many of my allies, my mentors and even unbelievers have fought the Cult over the years.  I have seen valorous men and women fall prey to the abominations of the murderous Cult, and cowards as well.  The Akhutu, they seek to silence us, for they know that an awakening is nigh.  In the last few centuries before Cthulhu’s rising, there will be a War of Culling and of Reaping, the likes of which no empire or kingdom of our earth has yet beheld.

The time of that war is now.

~

In writing of this Cult, I invite my death.  There are now few cities and fewer sanctuaries to which I can run; and I now devote myself to sharing these forbidden secrets with you, my reader, as my slave warrior and chosen.  You will be my vessel, by reading of me you will invite me to be your will.  Together we will slay and delay the rising.

And in this time, the time of this scroll’s inscription?  I will flee no more.  Of all the sanctuaries I have known, of all the places where I have eluded the Cult and refused to make my stand, there now is nothing.  Too many have died protecting me.  Of battlegrounds, and chosen mantles of sacrifice, Damascus shall be my last.

The writings of the Cthulhu Revelations are nearly complete.

When I am done, having inscribed all of the many hundreds of my scrolls, I will hide them in the libraries of Damascus and those caverns which line the shores of the Sea of Salt.  Though horribly I will die, I will die a man.  The flesh is a century’s slave, but the will is of eternity.  My revelations, in you, will live beyond me.

I grieve not, I am already dead and mankind must know what is to come, so that the end is a Last War of defiance, and not a pathetic slaughtering of the lamb.

~

In fulfilling my return, know ye well:

The Akhutu believes itself to be eternal.  But our world is more ancient than any but the most fearless dare believe.  In all of the billions of this world’s years, there are many more aeons yet to unfold ere the finality of Gaia’s destruction by ice and fire.  Great Cthulhu himself will leap from this world once the aeon of slaughter ends and he is sated, hunting other worlds to further greaten himself and glorify his psyche, as he seeks the ultimate power which he believes will allow him to endure the destruction of the Omni-Kosmos and so the rebirth of Azathoth.

(Whateley:  Does this mean Cthulhu intends to survive the end of the universe, the “Big Crunch”?  The Second “Big Bang”?  What is to be reborn after the collapse and the end of time?)

And so while the Cult and humanity itself will eventually perish utterly, for a time of some thousands or millions of years Cthulhu in his triumph will revel and feast upon our world.  Even after war and cataclysm, in the aeon of Cthulhu’s triumph there will be a need for some few mortals to remain.  As we are harvested, the chosen few will serve as the instruments of destruction and be gloried with every pleasure which the dying slaves of the innocent can rendereth unto them.

It matters not to the Akhutu whether Cthulhu rises in this lifetime, or the next, or a dozen generations hence.  The Cult believes itself to be one, a unity of minds which is of many bodies and a single will.  As the conduit of Great Cthulhu’s dreams, the Cult is a hive, a legion of interlaced vessels all resonating with the oneness of the Sleeper’s revelations.  When some few of the Akhutu die, the survivors revel to know that the oneness of their body is shorn in blood and growing stronger.

And are they wrong to believe so?  I cannot say.  It is said that the Cult began when the holy men, the shaking men (Clarice has written here:  “Epileptics?”) were first called sacred by our ancestors who were the Troglodytae, the crawlers in darkness and the dwellers of the caves.  When our dreams began, Cthulhu knew.  And as our ancestors’ first dreams of beauty created the Dreamlands, so were the first nightmares of the Sleeper and his festering adorations in the corpse city of R’lyeh.  From the beginning, beauty and evil intertwined.

Our ancestors believed their nightmares were the calling of the earth.  They worshipped Gaia with their blood.  From such were born the Akhutu.  The Cult is so the vilest of mortal cabals, and the eldest.  It has endured the fall of empires, it has passed beyond confines of language and kingdom and through the veils of utmost secrecy, into every land of this earth.

As horrible and degraded as the Akhutu may be, as bestial and inhuman as I judge them to remain, they still are ever fervent in their primal oneness, the bloodthirsty atrocity of their faith.

So, in killing them, will you stand among the righteous.

~

(Note bene:  The author Howard Phillips Lovecraft claimed that there were no discussions of the Cult of Cthulhu contained within the Necronomicon.  This may be true; however, it must be remembered that Dee’s encrypted text purports itself to be a true and faithful rendering of the remnants of the work of Olaus Wormius and therefore Al Azif.  Al Azif precedes the Necronomicon.  Does this mean that a later and second Necronomicon, translated and published after Dee’s version, was created by another; and that this partial work contained none of the scrolls which speak of the Cult itself?  Did Lovecraft himself possess such a “successor” text, and did he write the fiction of what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos as a veiled testimony of all he had learned within?  I do not possess sufficient evidence at this time to insist that a “Lesser Necronomicon” exists.  Without further proof, I am loathe to purport a hypothesis of Lovecraftian ownership of such a work, and leave myself open to professional disgrace.  But I will say that even if such a theory is improbable, it is certainly not impossible. ~K.)

SCROLL XIX

Of the Cult’s One Primal Sacrifice,

And the Blasphemies

Where They Revel in the Marshes of Salt

(This scroll appears to mirror some repetitive passages in other scrolls, and John Dee in his translation has written:  “The year anno Domini DCCXXXVII?”  This implies that this scroll may be a later writing of Al-Azrad, which he then decided to bundle in the earlier works which constitute this Fourth Gathering of Al Azif.  It is likely that he decided he had more forbidden secrets which he wished to reveal at last. ~K.)

~

The obsession of Akhutu, the Cult of Cthulhu, is to quicken the time of the un-god’s return.  In dominating thralls and slaves, in murdering the sharers of their secrets, in culling mad dreamers of R’lyeh’s whispers and making of them priests, the Akhutu bringeth the minds of mortals to resonate with the dreaming of He Who Sleeps Beneath the Waves.  For the greater the legion of mortals who dream of him and believe in him, the quicker shall R’lyeh rise, and so bring Great Cthulhu his triumph and our butchery.

I write of this so that you, who read this, shall know of the coming of Cthulhu, and how the Cult accelerates his coming, attuning minds and bodies to the death-dream resonance of his oneness, speeding the rising of R’lyeh.  The more cultists and defilers we shall destroy, the longer is his death’s lingering.  For an aeon farther still, may the Kingdom of Men yet endure.

~

But there are greater powers than the Cult which we cannot hope to conquer.  There are the Brethren of the Stars, Cthulhu’s own kind who slumber with him beneath R’lyeh.  Too, there are the Deep Ones of Lord Dagon, who breed with our maidens and rise forth as the instruments of His will.  And what of his mortal servants?

They are weak, and proud and vain, reveling in the certainty of their triumph.  It is these that you must kill.  The more I reveal to you of Great Cthulhu and his Cult, the more you will knoweth him; and though in destroying them you yourself shall become a beast, the bloodshed you bring will serve to slow the coming of our Apocalypse, the End of Days.

~

To find and destroy the Cultists of Cthulhu, the temples and the rituals shall you know.

Many of the temples are ruins, for the unholy places of eld were raised where lines of power—those fractures of passage, which scab and slide between the spheres—intersect and render tangible the opening of the Gates, the pathways of the ‘Umr at-Tawil.  (Clarice Whateley has written in the margin:  “Ley lines?”)

In the wasteland, the lairs of the Cult are few.  As Great Cthulhu slumbereth beneath the waves, so do his servitors favor shorelines, ancient seas whose beds are now dry, and poisonous waters such as the Scarlet Sea, and the Sea of Salt east of Jerusalem.  Where there is water, the resonance of the dreams is ever greater.  In the Rub’ al Khali, the Akhutu are little known; but in the salt marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates, their crumbling shrines and horrific idols there are many.

These marsh-shrines can be found where the trees of weeping rise above the reeds.  Such places are not reverent temples of brick and bitumen, but rather cleared hollows in the wilderness where the idols of Cthulhu have been raised upon the stones of the fallen temples of old.  When one strides the salts and there finds a hewn circle within the marshes, where all the trees are shorn and piled in dams of waste, and the salt-waters coil about the idol of a Thing that is neither cuttlefish, nor dragon, nor man … Mnemba ...

Such are the marsh-shrines of Cthulhu.

There will be a monolith in the center of all:  perhaps a remnant of a Khomite obelisk, or a shattered pillar raised from lost Persepolis, or I too have seen a great cedar carved all with hollows, chained all about, the bloodied and shrieking forms of dying children chained into the cedar where they did die slowly in horror, and the innocent blood dripped down to be lapped from the mud by the Cultists in their ecstasy.  Far worse horrors there are, but this I have seen.

The monolith, whether stone or wood or blasted clay, is the Cult’s unholy symbol of R’lyeh.  Upon or before that vile symbol they will place the greatest and most blasphemous of their treasures, the image of The Mountain Which Strides, the Great Cthulhu.

And they will dance in circles about their idol, abandoning themselves as the dreams of the Sleeper course into the idol and the tentacles of psyche overbear their frenzied minds.  At times, those whom they have brought for sacrifice will be forced at blade-point to dance naked before the idol, until the entire Cult riseth with a shriek of triumph to tear the exhausted dancers apart with tooth and claw.  So is the idol bathed in blood, for the dead flesh of Cthulhu must have sustenance to firm itself within our own reflection of the Real.

SCROLL XX

To Be Known by the Avenger

As a Signifier of the Defiled Ones,

A Rite of the Cult of Cthulhu

In seeking out the Cult and the fell places in which they worship, the Canticle of the Beyond is one of the blasphemous rites which you shall be compelled to hear and to behold.  When the Akhutu has gathered in chant and sacrifice, their priests are vulnerable and their servitors lie blind in their adoration.  When the enemy is gathered thus, a coiling of vipers, you must strike.

This rite praiseth not only Cthulhu, entombed in the deeping of our world; but elsewhere as well, the other great powers of the Beyonding.  Who can know the Canticle’s full purpose or its meaning?  May it be a ceremony of blood tribute, or merely a presage to sacrifice?  I myself believe that this black rite is never chanted by the Cult of Cthulhu alone, but too, by the many who are in legion.  The Cults of Shub-Niggurath, of the King in Yellow, of the Lord in Ebon himself may well indulge themselves as well in all these mysteries.

But never have I known a sage or sorcerer alone to conduct this rite.  Even by Nyarlathotep in his crueler condescensions, this rite has never been asked of me.

What means this?

As canted by the Cult of Great Cthulhu, perhaps the Canticle’s purpose is to appease those powers who are not only thirsty for the blood of innocents and the damned, but for release into our world.  Mayhap, it is a sacrifice made prior to greater worship of Cthulhu Himself, so that undesired interest from Those Who Lurk Beyond is not received by the Cult who entreats of Him.  For Cthulhu, yet dreaming, is a dead Thing.  He slumbereth, and his worship oft requires much sacrifice—or greater, the orgiastic rituals of the Deep Ones, which I shall delve into further in accordance to my purpose—to ever have impact upon the incessant silent thundering of his will.

The rite may be in praise of these higher powers, seeking their aid and boon, imploring them to shatter through the spheres and to hasten the time of the stars coming to be right.  Thus it would be as well to hasten the rising of R’lyeh.

Yet what of summoning?  Why not bring these hideous powers forth?

This rite is not one which beckons, but rather one which abjures.  The truths of Yog-Sothoth, the gate and key and opener of the gate, are not venerated in this Canticle and this alone tells us much:  the summoning of the horrors from Beyond is not its purpose.

Be it known that the Cult of Cthulhu believes that its own survival rests upon the fruitions of this ritual.  Its disruption, and the slaughter of those present, is ever worthy of thy vengeance.

We need not understand the Canticle, after all.  We need only slaughter those who sing.

Find those which canteth thus, and silence them.  Scatter them to the dust.  And shall ye free the innocents, those who were to be sacrificed?  No.  The ritual must endeth all.  Be merciless.

~

In Praise of the Farther Powers,

The Canticle of the Beyond

~

Hear us, O mighty ones

Who lord over oblivion!

We speaketh in blood,

We pray to thee in sacrifice.

All praises to They who leap between the stars,

Who are ageless, who feast upon the worlds,

Blind and numberless

Which coil as cinders round

The blackest frosts of the Utter Void.

Adoration to thy will, feast and hear us!

~

Praise unto the Mother, Shub-Niggurath,

For she is Queen and Lady of the Wood.

Where the cedars rise over the blood pits,

She rises, the Entirety.  Her gifts of the flesh,

The Thousand Young

Rise as a reseeding of this earth,

A sowing of fields of flesh

Presaging His greater harvest.

~

May she thwart the coming of the Hunters,

The destroyers who reave our journeying,

Who desecrate the gifts of the tribe of Leng.

Serve to shelter the ways of our own passage

From the Hounds who hunt,

The Beasts of Tindalos.

Time and the Void are one,

The opening of the gates,

The fracturing of spheres

Is hastened by our sacrifice.

~

As we lay death-gifts in breathing

Before the mighty ones who reap of us,

So do we serve the Chaos

Who is all, O Azathoth.

Hear us, let the paths

Of the unworthy be unmade!

~

The Great and Elder,

They shall glory in our sacrifice.

From the crystal pools of night

To the shardings of the Void,

From the shardings of the Void

To the crystal pools of night,

Beyond and so ever before us,

Ever shall be our praises of Great Cthulhu,

Of Black Tsathoggua, reveler of Shathak,

And of Him Who is the Unspeakable.

~

Ever we cry their praises,

Ever birth-blood we offer

Unto the Black Goat of the Wood.

Ia!  Shub-Niggurath!

The Goat with a Thousand Young!

For in this age it has to come to pass,

That She of the Woods,

Now made motherless to our kind,

Beareth no High Priestess of our kith.

For the fools of this world

Hath slaughtered those who receive her.

So doth she demand a feast of the Cabal

Of the worthy, of dreamers,

And so hath they descended unto the gate,

Seven and nine, descended the steps of onyx.

So shall the one, the harbinger and chosen

Be gathered by her maws,

And there be annihilated,

One with oblivion,

So made worthy.

~

Great too shall be the tributes

To the Daemon Sultan, Azathoth,

He of whom Cthulhu

Hath taught us the revelations,

And so we inscribe in souls

The names of the worthy

In the Blackest Codex

Where the essences of the chosen

Are to be kept as one,

And so exalted.

~

Azathoth!  His herald descends amongst us

On tides of night from beyond the Void,

From beyond the rinds of the limitless

And the fracturing of the spheres.

He descendeth

Through the scattering of stars,

Unto the thousand worlds,

Through the spheres

Of which Yuggoth is the child,

Coiling in the aether

Which whorls beyond Yuggoth’s rim.

~

He descendeth, beloved of the Beasts

To all the thousand worlds

Where the sages of the chosen races rise,

Culling his harvest of prophets,

Crushing to dust the worthless chaff.

~

And so this night,

We choose from the unbelievers

Those worthy of slaughter,

We choose from amongst our brethren

The wisest to crawl before him.

Our prophets hath journeyed

Out among the Kingdom of Men,

Hath mimicked the ways of Kings thereof,

So that He who revels in the Void

May knoweth of the deceivers.

~

To the treasure-laden herald, Nyarlathotep,

Must all such things be told,

So that he may know our frailties

And so overwhelm them in revelation.

For as with Nitocris, as with Nephren-Ka,

He shall clothe himself in the images of man,

The obsidian mask and the robe which veils,

And He shall descend

From the world of the Seven Fires,

Into the Otherness of Dream.

~

There, in the name of the fearless seekers,

He shall taunt and mock

The feeble gods who slumber

In their citadel of Kadath,

Their tomb of clouded onyx and brittle frost.

~

So are the false dreams to be silenced,

So are the minds lain open to receiveth

The cry of He Who Slumbereth

Beneath the Waves,

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh, Cthulhu R’lyeh,

Wgah’nagl fhtagn.

~

So cometh death, the silence!

Hear our pleadings to the Sleeper,

The Great Cthulhu,

O Nyarlathotep, herald of the Chaos,

Bearer of the triad of the scarlet eye,

Bequeather of adorations unto Yuggoth,

Lord and Father

Of the Million Who Are Chosen,

Stalker among the netherworlds,

Culler of the fractures, finder of ways!

So let our entreaties to Cthulhu be heard,

So let our sacrifice be not in vain!

~

For we have chosen from the deceivers,

So that ye may reap of them.

Take these, the unworthy, and be appeased,

So that in the hollows riven by their screams

Our prayers may be heard

By He Who Sleeps Within the Depths,

In his palace in R’lyeh!

Cthulhu, who lieth dreaming,

Be aided by our sacrifice,

Rise and feast, triumphant!

~

(The slaughter of the present victims then begins.)

GATHERING THE FIFTH

Into the Wasteland

SCROLL XXI

The Lure of the Sand

(The tale of Al-Azrad in his time of suffering, after Adaya’s death, continues.)

~

Of the time when I did learn that I could not be without my beloved, my Adaya, there is more that you must know.

I tell on, then, of the Place of the Seven Pearls, and there, my solitude.

Searching Aharon’s belongings that morning—for he had taken nothing, not even his water, ere his journey into the wasteland—I learned only that he had in life followed the caravans, the emporiums, the spice trade of Damascus and all the lands beyond.  Besides my own amber-pouch and the leavings of myrrh, I found many tiny purses filled with frankincense, onycha, galbanum and cassia, with balm of Gilead, and even a pinch of saffron worth more than its weight in gold.

Alas, of the violet frankincense, the fungal leavings of the Yuggothai whose burning brings nepenthe, I found nothing.

But the mundane spices were a treasure nevertheless.  These I did take and bundle into my own satchel, for they were the perfect lures to loose the tongues of any secret-sharers I might find.

But where then was I to go?

Searching further, I found nothing, only the echoes of mysteries.  Did the Cabal of the Ghul, crafters of the tattoos and of the amulet Aharon had given me, spread far and wide in the cities of this world?  Were the secrets of the Ghuls known then to thousands?

I needed to know, for I believed that among mortals, these men only would know the secrets of Adaya’s resurrection.  Surely not only they would know forbidden secrets, but they at least might count me amongst their own kind, should the amulet of Aharon be proven true.

Others would know darker things, and might well mark me in their turn.  My sharp eye had seen the vermilion-robed ones in the nights of Sana’a, the vile servitors of Cthulhu; and even two or three assassins skulking their paths of sin unto the palace-tents of sheikhs.  I had never seen such a symbol as on my amulet, or such tattoos as the scars borne by Aharon.  But then, if Aharon had been one with the Cabal for many years, and these few wandering souls did serve the Ghuls in order to earn the worthiness to feast and rise among them in eternity, where would such men dwell?

They would be wanderers.  Any who saw a Watcher, a Ghul in the likeness of Naram-gal, would be an exile or one who would bury a corpse off in the wasteland.

Such men would be hermits, untouchables, vagabonds of the desert.  They would revel alone and die within the desert, or be reborn there.  And so it was simple—my quarry, the keepers of my secrets would be not only wanderers, but men of the caravans.  How else could one wander every desert and endure?

And then I knew—if I desired to make use of my symbol of the Cabal and to learn more from the Ghuls and their servitors, if I longed to learn the forbidden secrets which could bring my Adaya back to life, I too would need to become one with the caravans and stride among them.

I would find these men.  Aharon, gone to his own destiny, had eluded me.  For answers, however few, there would be others.

I thought of returning to the Oasis of Zarzara, but I believed only one end awaited me there—the judgment of Naram-gal, the Watcher.  And would he come to watch over me in peace a second time?  Would such a creature care that I bore the symbol of his kind?  I did not know.  Something however, an instinct or compulsion, told me that it was too soon for one as ignorant as I to seek the Deathless Ones themselves.

I doubted Aharon would be there at Zarzara; for if he had been worthy of the Ghuls’ feast, he would be taken into the desert to dwell with them.  And so the only reason I might return to the oasis would be either to end my life, or to begin my own eternity as a Ghul.

I chose neither.  My twin obsessions, Adaya and her vengeance, these alone became my life.

~

The tracks of the caravan’s mules and camels, fading into sands and melting away with the wind, told me that they had journeyed north and east, toward the ravaged town of Marib and likely thence north and west to the spice city Yathrib, great Medina.  Even with water and stealing through the chill of night, I could never survive such a journey on foot alone.  And thus, I took the shade of Aharon’s abandoned tent, and looked to the east, waiting for the next caravan to journey near to me from accursed Sana’a itself.

It was near to sunset once more when I did see the dust plumes of a lesser caravan coming toward me.  Galloping far in front of them came the bold caravan master himself, a wind-cut and pot-bellied man riding upon a beautiful white Arabian steed.

He stopped, and let his horse paw the dust, as I cleared the mirages from my head with a shake and a stare of disbelief.  The man was still there.  He did not approach me, but rather held his reigns and even put one fist to his thigh as he waited for me to rise and come to him.

As I neared the caravan master he loudly named himself, Saheed.  Looking at me, my gaunt countenance and muscles taut with the endurance of all my fresh trials in the desert, he even called me “almost a man” and offered to let me serve as a grain-sack thrower in his train.

His caravan, yet far behind him, was coming nearer.  Putting my own hand to my hip and the other upon the pommel of my jambiya, I said to him if I was almost a man, then I would serve well not as thrower of grain, but rather as a guard to protect his riches from the bandits of the wasteland.

He threw back his head and laughed at me.  But it was a good laugh, one which marked his surprise to find himself beginning to respect me.  For I was barely out of boyhood, yes, but what boy had he ever seen standing in the desert alone and daring to barter proudly for his station?

“As you are neither boy nor man, yet full of fire, then,” said Saheed, “a bargain, yes?  One so gaunt and lithe as you would serve better as a lover for my guards, rather than be a guard yourself.  Can you drink spice wine and still keep a clear head for love and battle?  No?  Well.  Your voice is sweet and carries long, and you have no little measure of valor in you, almost-man.  Beside us, you will ride.  A frail mule, yes, but a quick one.  You will serve as a scout in the desert beside my caravan’s sunward flank, watching for your ‘bandits’ and racing back to us should you see them.  Neither a guard nor thrower, but a scout.  Yes?”

It was far better than I had hoped for.  I thought of a haughty reply, a further risk and barter.  But to my dismay, I was not offended by either Saheed or his generous offer.  I began to like him.

Reflecting his boldness still, I dared to lift the amulet which Aharon had given me.  I had corded it upon a piece of dried camel sinew, and I strung it around my neck and placed my hand of the blessed upon it.  “By this symbol,” I said, “I will go with you.”

If Saheed knew what the sigil of the Cabal of the Ghul could mean, he gave no sign.  But he did provide me the small honor of trotting his beautiful horse before me, leaning over, and spitting between my feet.

Water for the desert, in my name, a handshake of its kind and truer than any promise?  I bowed to him.  He laughed again, full heartily, and his caravan coming near caught the echo of his spirit.  Men cheered and welcomed me, waving, not even yet knowing who I was or what I was to become to them.

Before they came near, I whispered to Saheed, “And what if in scouting for you, I believe I see a Ghul?”

To my curiosity, he did not seem surprised to hear me say this.  Looking back, I now know that such “superstition” was not only common amongst the desert men, it was something of a secret religion of mannered fear.  Had I not believed in Ghuls, he may well have been suspicious of me and wondered if I had been born in a city instead of the wasteland.

Little did he know that I had reason to believe in the Ghuls themselves.  To me it was no superstition; it was the dawning of my understanding of a greater reality.

I said further to him, “If ever there is one you see who bears my symbol, you will befriend them, and in honor you will speak for my worth and you will bring them to me, yes?”

And he replied, “Why would I do such a brazen thing?”

In answer, I gave him the saffron.  He opened the pouch, tasted a grain upon his finger, and I had the pleasure of hearing him gasp.

He demanded to know where I had gotten such a treasure.  But I had timed my gambit well, and now all his smiling guards and laborers were sitting on their mounts all about us.

I said only, “Remember our deal, Saheed, for mayhap there is more saffron to be had.  I will be the finest guide you ever knew.”

And I spat before him.  The men all laughed and cheered.

What holiday was this, that the great Saheed had met his equal in an almost-man?

So did I become the scout of the sunward flank in service to the Caravan of the White Stallion.

SCROLL XXII

The Mysteries of the Spice

And so did I journey with the brazen Saheed of the White Stallion upon the spice road to Yathrib.  We passed through the serpent-bannered town of Thoma, touching upon the tribal Chalukyas and their nomadic moving villages without names; and on into Najran of the white walls and many peoples.  Najran, with its lithe black women and cinnamon-skinned children, was spellbinding to me.  I never had journeyed so far, and the city-edge market of tents and stalls upon the valley brim of Najran intrigued me even more than had the orderly emporiums of Sana’a.  There was danger there, and merriment beneath the setting sun.  Gold was not the law in such a place.  Barter was all.  Jewels changed hands for sensual favors, silk for spice, and rainbow-colored songbirds for encrypted papyrus scrolls.

~

Away again, then, from Najran we braved the north, ever onward toward Yathrib.  We lived on succulent dates from the few oases, and strips of dried meat flensed from the few mules which we had lost.  Beneath the night skies, where the jackals called and the moon was sprayed with the silhouettes of bats, I even tasted the spice wine of the men.

In the daylight, Saheed proved to be as crafty as he was wealthy.  Ever in his dealings, he traded away only those choicest riches which women would weep for and which stately men would practically beg to touch and see.  For Saheed was a solitary glory, one of the few survivals of the magna pigmenta trade which had barely endured the strangling of Byzantium and the miserable death of Rome so long ago.

In Najran and farther on, I marveled at the secrets which the Caravan of the White Stallion brought from the lands afar:  white pepper-fruits from the western rim of India, pheasant eggs, almonds, galangal, vinegar and honey, clove and mastic borne by sail from the secret isles.  This caravan lord’s specialty was Phoenix Eggs, which proved to be nonesuch treasures crafted by the spice-blenders of Aden, special orbs of mixed spices uniquely fashioned and wrapped in raw silk.  For these, even kings and caliphs would throw away their pride and vie for sole possession.

Ever Saheed greatened the treasures which his caravan would carry to the spice-city of Yathrib.  But along the path, if some desperate merchant or noble’s errant-gatherer were to offer him an outrageous price for one choice treasure, then Saheed would trade.  Yet the wily master never accepted his payments in silver or in gold.  He took only other spices as his price.  In this way, as we wended our way northward, his caravan became laden with an exotic bounty the likes of which I have never since seen.

In the lonely and arduous days between encampments, I proved to be adept in the art of the scout.  My eyes were good, and my instincts for danger had already been finely honed.  The bandits proved to be little more than vagabonds and were few upon the route.

But one day, I did protect the entire caravan from a sandstorm.  I early spied the telltale devils of dust—the Ukum, the coils of Harabu—coursing toward us from far away, and knew the peril.  By the time the heat-currents shifted and the flavor of the wind had turned to ash, I had already warned Saheed of the coming storm.

He, the man of meticulous instinct, had been wise enough to believe in me.  By my warning and Saheed’s entreaty, the laborers rushed to circle the mules and fashion a wall of grain-sacks.  The guards dug in, leeward tents were erected low and holes were dug beneath them.  Still, we were barely given time to shelter and to tether the camels and save ourselves.

No one died in the raging of the storm, not even a slave.  For this, I earned great respect.

~

In the nights before this, volunteering to assist the weary watchmen in their vigil over the caravan, I had come often to walk alone upon the dunes.  I forever looked not to the west and its rocky spires, but to the east, into the emptiness where my father had fought and died and I myself had been born unto the Shepherdess.

One night, when the guard nearest to me had fallen into a fitful sleep (which he would in the morning be whipped for), I thought I heard the cry of my Adaya singing upon the desert wind.  In a delirium of want, I am told I wandered half a mile into the desert.  I was woken only by the panicked shout of the waking guard, who cried out, “Al Ghul!  Al Ghul!” and pointed to me as I stumbled in from the distance.

Parched and confused, sleepwalking, I woke as I returned.  That was the last night that Saheed allowed me the night vigil.  To this day I believe he kept me from that honor not in disappointment for my behavior, but to watch over me.

~

There were far more arduous times than these.  There were scorching days when I was the last to earn our failing water, and even a day without food when we were slowed and lost for hours when the windswept path faded away to sand.  And once, I woke to one of the guardsmen—Basim—trying to rape me.

At that time, I was sleeping beside the campfire of the laborers where I had sheltered exhausted beside a thicket.  Although Basim had a cord around my throat and my parched mouth was clamped shut by his hand, the vigilant sentry who was on watch had dared abandon his post—risking a whipping for himself—and had come stealthily to my aid.  This would be my friend and my protector, a desert-withered veteran named Fikri of the Seven Fingers.

Fikri pummeled the lustful Basim over his skull with a tent-stake cudgel, while Basim gloated and struggled upon me.  Caught utterly unaware, Basim’s eyes went white and rolled.  He rose, staggered a step and fell over one of the laborer’s legs.  The laborers, perhaps knowing more of the ways of Basim than did I, woke and scurried silently away.  None of them ever said anything of what next transpired.

Fikri returned Basim to consciousness by cording the villain’s throat with his own strangler, and nearly death-gripped the panicked cretin’s jaw with his three-fingered hand.

And Fikri said, that if Basim were ever to try again to take of my body without my own permission, Fikri would be certain to heat his own blade and brand the rapist’s face with the scar of a disfavored eunuch.  And if Basim then cried out as he was branded, he would make a eunuch of him then and there, so that the scar upon his face would not be a lie.

Looking into Fikri’s eyes, Basim let loose his water.  His urine ran out upon the sand and trickled into the fire.

Basim was then released.  He fled, saying nothing.  He never again touched me.

~

In my gratitude, I tried to give Fikri three pouches of Aharon’s spice.  But he refused me, and would accept only my thanks.  And this he said to me:  “Let me watch over you, jackal pup.  You’re too good a scout to lose as a fool, and so let us make the fool in you a stranger.  Perhaps the desert and I will make the rest of you more like me.  I rename you, little scamp.  Abd of the Ten Fingers, and counting.  Yes?  Perhaps one day, you will grow to be like me?”

Fikri, very proudly, held up his seven fingers.  For the first time since my Adaya had died, I laughed.

From that night, old Fikri was my idol and my mentor.  Saheed, saying nothing, seemed to approve of this.  Fikri watched over me in the nights.  I was allowed to stand awake again in the evenings, if Fikri was on guard.  He showed me how to move my place of vigil and to sense the coming of scented men from downwind, and how to look over the desert through the lens of the sand-reflected moon, as an eagle would.

Too, he gave to me a token which in my old age I treasure still:  a piece of ancient cedar, smoothed into the shape of a tusk.  This talon-charm, Fikri told me, would protect me when he himself could not.  When I asked its origin, I was made to marvel, for he told me that he had pulled a plank from a Grecian shipwreck in the Emerald Sea north of Egypt, a wreck from the age of Heracles.  Near one of the crumbling quays of Tyre, he had dived for the wood and carved and seasoned it himself.

I believe that talon protects me still.

~

Under Fikri’s tutelage I became a man of the desert.  Young I remained, but as our caravan wandered ever farther north from Najran and into the waste, no one doubted my worth.  I was becoming one of them.

When Fikri was busied during the day, as I scouted beside Saheed himself, I learned some little of the spice.  Saheed was coy, for his secrets and unique sources were many, and he still held out some hope of learning how I had come to possess the saffron and all the rest.  The spice trade of my youth was far different from the pale shadow of it which now lingers in my elder age.  Now, the armies who fight beneath the Crescent or the mercenaries of the Stars have closed off every spice road between Occident and Orient.  The great caravan tides are parched and choked away.  But within the confines of mighty Arabia, and in Yemen and the Holy Land, a scant yet vital trade in the spice continues.  The caravans are rarer now by far, yet some few journey on.  But the likes of the Caravan of the White Stallion will likely never be seen again.

(An interesting note on lined yellow paper was inserted here by Clarice Whateley, who here proves herself to be not only interested in the Necronomicon’s chronology, but also in the veracity of its locales and its ties to recorded history.  She writes here:  “The ability of these unknown spice caravans to travel freely indicates that the Second Islamic Civil War was, at least in this region, either waning or ended.  The fact that Saheed would take an unknown child such as Al-Azrad along with him implies not only a need of men, but also a re-opening of trade routes and a time of volatile opportunity.  These reminiscences by Al-Azrad may date, by their ending, toward 684 or 685 A.D., when he was perhaps 18 or even 20.  Of course, the non-chronological nature of Dee’s survival of Al Azif makes the dating of many events and lacunae excruciating.”)

~

From Fikri I learned of the many lands and tribes of the peninsula.  I believed I knew much already, from my years in Sana’a and singing to the caravans as a boy; but I discovered that the world was far greater, and far more sinister, than I had ever imagined.  My knowledge was rich indeed for one of my age, yet without my learning of written history, beyond Akram’s few translated scrolls, I had none of the revelations from the Chroniclers of Old.

I learned of the vast Badiya and how the desert shifted not only its sands, but how it devoured civilizations, and how all but the eldest sages forgot the peoples and the places it destroyed.  To the Romans, the most brilliant of our lands’ invaders, these provinciae were threefold:  Arabia Deserta of the wastes; Arabia Felix of the fertile pleasantries; and Arabia Petraea, the stone-lost reach of Petra, the forbidden city.  I learned too the whispers of an ever greater and more glorious city once known as Irem, the lost; and the ancient legends of a place which even the remotest tribes knew only as the Nameless City.

In how I devoured the lore of the sands, and how I was proven worthy under the watchful eye of Fikri, in time the other guards did take me in as their boon companion.  Even Basim—the knot in his skull hidden by a makeshift turban—took a grudging liking to me:  as his equal, instead of as a catamite.

Thus did the men begin to tell me far darker and more sensual tales of their many years in the desert.  In return, I would sing for them of Sana’a and its secrets, and I too would drink.  But I was not only there to revel and bask in the men’s laughter and their praisings.  All they taught me, I committed to memory.

I even began to write, faltering though my hand was, on a poorly-seasoned papyrus which Saheed had allowed me in lieu of one day’s pay.  Those notes in cuttlefish ink were lost to the winds in later years, as I journeyed toward Jerusalem; but my craft with the stylus and scroll forever improved.  The talent has never left me.

~

When at last we were near to Yathrib, a day or two hither, came the time of my destiny.

We had lost a day to a mule with a broken leg, and the slaughtering of the pathetic thing for meat.  Its run had scattered four spice-laden camels to the desert, and these by Basim and his companions were pursued.  When we finally had them all tethered and returned, it was too late for the caravan to rise up and continue.  Saheed therefore decided that we would remain there until the following evening, when our travel would resume.  And so that night was chosen for celebration, honoring me for the time of the sandstorm, when my quick warning had saved the caravan from loss.

That joyous night, as the bonfire of celebration burned high, Saheed brought to me an outsider:  Fatimah, the blind woman who would later steer and fix the course of my life.

~

Of Fatimah I will tell in time.  When I went away with her, I was mournful to leave Fikri and Saheed.  To Fikri I said farewell, a sincere and dear parting, and with a hiding of tears he fumblingly embraced me.

But Saheed?

I had never known my father; and Saheed was a great and goodly Patriarch.  In leaving him that night, I did kiss his brow.  I know he was awake; otherwise I would not have dared it, for he was ever alert and I could well have been stabbed if I had woken him in alarm.  But he did not stir.  And that, to me, was his farewell, an acceptance of my decision to leave him and accompany Fatimah, before we ever did come unto Yathrib.

And I now know—from the later time when I was blessed to meet again with Saheed the aged, twenty-three years thereafter—that he understood why I needed then to leave him.  He did know of the Ghuls, that crafty wolf; and he had suspected my loss and my obsession.  But he had hoped that in feigning ignorance of my path, he might dissuade me from it, or even lead me into a good life in the spice trade of the desert.

But Fatimah the blind had seen into my heart more deeply than good Saheed ever could.  I did love Saheed, and dearly, but my obsession to raise my Adaya from the dead was everything to me.

SCROLL XXIII

The Tale Which Draweth Blood ~

Of the Horrors of the Desert,

And the Truths Which Lie Beneath

After my time with the Caravan of the White Stallion, Fatimah did lead me on into a more majestic and far more savage world than I had ever known.

In my time with each of the caravans, I learned much.  Even later, in the east toward the ruins of Babylon, other guards beyond the companions of Fikri and Saheed would come to adore me as their loremaster and storyteller.  When they would drink, and I would bind their wounds, they would speak only of pain and hunger and their own misery.  But deep in the night when they are sung to, and their brethren are asleep and the last man on vigil sits awake beside you, hearing your elegies of love lost and the mysteries of the wasteland ...

... In those hours, that man will confess all to you, and entrust you with his greatest fears.

This is the path to the revelation.

~

To the weft of these frayed and few shared secrets, I wove in the revelations of my new mentor, Fatimah.

What I learned of the legends of death, of reincarnation, of resurrection and the transmigration of souls from vessel to vessel, all of these whispers told me that I should seek the city of Irem for my answers.  But Irem was lost beneath the sands, and I had yet to find any tablet or inscription which claimed to speak of its kings, its towers, its region, or any other intimation that might lead me to its ruin within the Real.  There were fables of Irem everywhere, but never histories.

I remained undaunted.  If Ghuls were not fables themselves, but merely a secret hidden from virtually the entirety of Man, could not Irem be real as well?  Who could say where a legend would die, and with its shimmering and its fading unveil its own reality?

The more I learned of Irem, however, the older the legends became.  Disparate secrets often joined together when I asked Fatimah if separated truths which I would learn of held any relation to one another.  She taught me much of those elder lands which had been glorious and verdant in the age before the deserts had overthrown the works of man and conquered all.  She told me too of lost Sumeru-land, of Akkad, of Babilu and Eridu and Nippur of the Lord-Wind upon the ziggurat.

Fatimah knew many elder names which appeared within codex, scroll, or cenotaph.  I guess now at the sources of her convictions, but that black wellspring—despite all my own adventures—remains beyond my full understanding.

I respect the secrecy of her past.  I question it not.

~

Have I not told of her?  My scrolls are written in the torments of the night.  Each written is an exegesis of the Blackened Codex, the essences of Azathoth:  a purging of my anguish into vessels of page and ink.  These scrolls are confessions of absolution.  Rarely do I return to one when I can begin another.

Nepenthe.

~

Of Fatimah, then, the sagacious and the blind:

She was one of the “errant-falcons,” those noble servants who are now called “graspers.”  These are the clever souls who purchase goods from rival caravans, sealing pacts of barter which leave both the giver and the receiver believing that they have triumphed in the trade.  She was one of the few such who was craftier than good Saheed himself.

The caravan she served was not solely led, as was Saheed’s.  It was a conclave of seven merchants, and its treasures were far lesser than those of the White Stallion.  For where the caravan of Saheed reveled in wealth and majesty, the Caravan of the Seeking Vulture was an arcane gathering which prized secrecy and knowledge more than spice.

As a buyer for the conclave of the Seeking Vulture, Fatimah’s purchases were ones in which she always knew what she was acquiring, while those who bartered with her only guessed at the secrets they gave away.  I never found a language, dead or tribal or mother tongue, which Fatimah did not know.  However blind, she was a master of procuring artifacts dug up from the sands:  shards of pottery, corners of alabaster wall, shattered mosaics, heads of decapitated idols.  Everything she purchased was ancient and mysterious, and every piece bore glyphs or graven writing of some kind.

Fatimah dealt primarily in stone.  Being blind she could not read of the codex or the scroll, but each carved piece of tablet spoke through her fingers of many elder and wondrous things.

She had dealings with Saheed, from what little I understand, many times.  Ere Saheed came to Yathrib, she would unladen his burden of the few things which he carried which were of “questionable” value.  Always, these ruined pieces bore inscriptions as I have told.

Despite her craft and guile, Fatimah still had need for a guide who possessed the gift of sight.  That night of my destiny, she had come to make her dealings with Saheed, trading spice for the shards of an obelisk.  But there at Saheed’s rest, her guide boy—a wretched fool, superstitious of her ability to walk alone at times despite her blindness—had abandoned her at the White Stallion’s banners and fled into the desert.  Thus was she alone, with Saheed in his rush to Yathrib and no one capable of leading her back to the camp of the Seeking Vulture.

No one, that is, but me.

~

The boy had been a fool to abandon her.  A young man could learn much from such a cunning and fearless survivor as Fatimah.  She was a blessing, that she should find me.

That night when I said my farewells to Fikri and kissed Saheed upon his brow, I left in my newly-assumed role as Fatimah’s guide.

And why did I leave?  What had decided me was one whisper, which she spoke into my ear after I had first refused her employ:

“I am of the Cabal of the Ghul.”

She did show her palms to me, and there were the scarred tattoos of the four fanged skulls, the symbols which I had first seen upon the hands of the serene one, Aharon.

~

Of my time with the Seeking Vulture I will say little, for now.  But Fatimah, as we headed north and then east into the great wastes seeking artifacts and the scatterings of fallen kingdoms, she was my shelter and second mother and I was entranced by her.

There was a time south and east of Yathrib that we were ambushed by the territorial skirmishers of a superstitious wasteland tribe which feared the banners of our caravan, the Seeking Vulture, bird of death.  Fatimah was wounded by a stray arrow ere the guards routed the tribesmen back into the desert.  I bandaged her arm, for although the blood of desert women clots quickly, moisture is imperative and I knew that to not sew and cauterize the wound could well mean her life.

The merchants of the caravan insisted that the guard captain, Haidar, be the one to heal her; but Fatimah early revealed her favor for me by saying that she would allow herself to be touched by me alone.

And so with reluctance and some little respect, the caravan master among the seven merchants, Gauhar, entrusted her to my care.  She born pain more bravely than any women I have ever known, and many of the guards I deemed to be less courageous than she.

~

As I finished binding linens about her forearm and gave her water, she asked me who had given me the spices which Saheed had been so curious to know the origins of.  I told her the truth, of my time with Aharon in Jumani-Sab’a, the Place of the Seven Pearls.  She asked me of Zarzara, a name which I had not offered her, and asked me if I had seen the Watcher upon the dune.

I did say yes.  And when she asked me what is the Watcher’s name, and I answered Naram-gal, she did say, “You speaketh true, and thus you are this prophet Aharon’s chosen.  I believe in you.  I will share with you that sparse lore of the Ghuls which I believe my mentor would allow me.  For the rest, you must learn it from them for yourself, should you dare to feast with them.”

And I asked, who is your mentor?  And she, “He is of the eldest among the Ghuls of Khom, and his name is Hetshepsu, Eater of Dust.  He is the desert strider, he is eternal.”

This name meant nothing to me then, but would come to be one deeply fated in my life and indeed in my own survival.  The trials I suffered as a man in Khom were horrific and many, and I shall speak of them in time.

(These intriguing adventures of Al-Azrad in Egypt and the spice-land of Punt are told of in Codex II, which is currently in preparation as the texts are being decrypted by Professor Kelly at Miskatonic University.)

~

Over the next several moons (months?), as the caravan moved and we dug at various sites for the tablet shards and potsherds which were Fatimah’s treasure and the lifeblood of the Seeking Vulture, she told to me many things.

We spoke of the Alu, the daemon of night, who slays the man who wandereth as a fool into the wasteland.  The Alu slays by devouring the soul, and leaving the horrific husk of man—as a Lazarus, if you will—to live on in anguish, feeling everything and nothing.  Such men, Fatimah told me, are marked by an accursed shadow which the Ghuls greatly fear, and a man enmasked in the Shadow of Alu they will neither hunt nor touch.

We spoke of the Asakku, the daemon which causeth madness, revealing visions to man which are true but not of this world.  Such visions slayeth not, yet lead the beholder to tear his own eyes out in a desperate bid to free himself from the dread affliction of black prophecy.

We spoke of the Gallu, the daemons of the netherworld, they who are the guides or killers of dreamers lost within the Vale of Pnath.  Such are now called Ghasts, they who become accursed, forsaking the ancestral grimoires they once protected and thus forgetting all they were.  These the festering and degenerate, once mighty, now know only the ravening hunger for human flesh.

We spoke of Huwawa, the terrible and leonine, bestial guardian of the Forest Enchanted:  the cedar paradise which Adaya named the Eden-lost, that which brims upon the Empire of the Blackened Mind and veils the glorious cities which rise beyond it in cloud and spire.  The face of Huwawa is made only of the entrails of his prey, and he is the caster of radiances from the eye of the wrathful gods:  gods who set this cruelest glory upon him as a gift.

~

In time as Fatimah grew to trust me and so to depend on me to guide her in the ruins, she spoke to me with some reluctance of the Jinn.  Thus I learned of the sibilance, Al Azif, and came to understand why the childhood vision of the locust had meant so much to me.

The locust, she said, is the basest servitor of the Entities who lord over the world invisible, stalking as deathly hunters between the spheres.  It is they who sense the coming of these Horrors, and who take flight in swarms to flee from Them in their stalking of the voids between.  What superstitious men call the Jinn are in truth the mighty Entities eternal, who regard men themselves as insects and who will beckon the Great Cthulhu to rise again.

One night Fatimah whispered that Jinn can beget young upon womankind; and even this, there are those who mate with men in their sleep, and thus impregnated the Jinn then go forth into the desert to spawn the most vile and unholy progeny.  To a secret such as this, I feared too much to respond; but in the morning, emboldened I did ask her to explain further and she would say nothing more.

~

The Seeking Vulture traveled long.

When near to the city of Gerrah, I was a wizened young man, knowing much and eager to seek out the Ghuls and entreat them to teach me the arts of necromancy.  Still, my obsession to raise Adaya from the dead was my sole desire.

In those times, I asked Fatimah if the Asakku, if the Gallu, if the Jinn were superstitions or the Real.  She said indeed they all were real and even of the flesh, but they were not known by such simple names, and they were far greater and vastly more powerful that what the superstitions dared imply.

In all our time together, she did not begin to speak of the Ghuls until after the wounding, when I healed her.  And that night I did ask her of them.  She relented, and kissed me upon the brow as if I were her only son.

I was moved to tears, to be loved thus solely for being who I am.  However blind, she knew this.  And she began to tell me all of that which I share hereafter.

(Al-Azrad’s extensive lore concerning his knowledge of the Ghuls is highlighted especially in Gathering the Sixth, The Cabal of the Ghul, which appears later in this work. ~K.)

~

Of the great honors Fatimah bestowed upon me in our time, that kiss was the second in its glory.  The foremost glory I shall inscribe upon the next scroll to come. So shall I tell you of how Fatimah invited me to speak with the mighty one of secrets, Naram-gal.

SCROLL XXIV

Of the Maelstrom

Before the Battlefield of the Saif

The Caravan of the Seeking Vulture wended its way from Khaybar, to the north of Yathrib, south and east to the far port of Gerrah upon the Gulf of the Arvan Rud.  Our journey was wayward, for we halted many times to seek out ruined towns uncovered by sandstorms, to follow the tales of thieves and to rediscover lost oases.  Much of what we found was of great worth to Fatimah and the merchants of the conclave.  Far to the east, in the region of fallen Babylon, the sages and astrologers were certain to pay a dear price for the treasures we raised from tombs and out of the drowning sand.

The journey from Khaybar to Gerrah is a perilous one even still, for the oases there are few and much of the wasteland is trackless and coveted only by the storm.  Some few cairns are to be found upon the higher outcrops, raised by the Seeking Vulture on its former journeys westward, and these did guide our way; but many more of them were toppled by wind or tribe, and still other markers we never did find, despite the maps made by our canny guard captain Haidar.

~

Ever the way was arduous and fearful.  At times we would find pennants planted by superstitious Bedouins; more often, we would find the skeletons of camels and the fallen men who had lost their way.

Where the heat became too great, in the midst of nothingness, we slept in the days and traveled in the night.  We drank our own urine, and melted camel fat, and culled our sweat in scarves only to wring them into our mouths.  Four laborers and two guards died along the way, and at their burial the caravan master Gauhar did say that this was a gentle journey indeed.

Such is the glory of desert riches, the majesty of the wasteland.

And then came the sandstorm of the Jinn.

~

The storm came upon us:

First arose the locusts, hissing frantically in clouds up from the south and far away.  Then, the bitterness of finest ash upon the air.  So fleet and faint were these grains that we could not see them, but far to the south all the sunlight turned to scarlet.

Fatimah the blind was the first to warn us that the storm would be great indeed, a maelstrom of dust and death.  At once the conclave of merchants began to argue and Gauhar could scarcely contain their spiteful quarrels.  Concerns for survival warred with those of greed.  I did learn that day why there were seven merchant leaders of the Seeking Vulture, and neither six nor eight:  three were for digging in and taking shelter, while the other three demanded that we press on and pray to elude the storm with utmost haste.  In such conflicts, the deciding vote of command belonged to Gauhar alone.

And this is why I named Gauhar as caravan master, despite the conclave’s strength.

By Gauhar it was commanded:  we would dig and shelter and bear the storm.

The three exasperated merchants who had been overruled were beside themselves; one shouted that we were near to the great battlefield, where the God-warrior Ibn Hatim the Undefiled had fallen in battle with the Sindhi some hundred moons ago.  The land to our immediate north was said to be filled with corpses, unconsecrated and therefore the forsaken vessels of a thousand restless spirits.

How could we dare, even in the face of death, encamp near such a place?

The cry of the Jinn, the sibilance of Al Azif, began to rise as the great storm came near and turned all of the southward sky to scarlet and to darkness.

I believed I had suffered a sandstorm when I had saved the Caravan of the White Stallion near Yathrib; that was nothing.  The maelstrom which tore over us near to the Sindhi graveyard was a daemon of wind and claw.

Led by Gauhar we sheltered in a perfect place, where a low cliff wall gave bulwark to the south.  There we tethered the camels and covered them in tarps, while the tents were strutted low and men with staff and spade waited at either end of the encampment to dig and keep the sanctuary from being devoured by the sand.

But the Jinn-cry became a chorus of moans, deep and low roars of fury more felt than heard.  Needles of sand tore at flesh and left traces of blood where they pelted hand and face.  The digging was furious, the animals began to panic and to rise.  In chasing them into the vicious storm, one of the most daring men lost an eye.

The storm was so great that despite all our preparations, waves of sand began to trickle and then cascade over the cliff, collapsing our tarps and tents and sending all the camels into flight.

Virtually all were lost.

The terrified merchants shouted in one another’s ears.  I could hear nothing but the roar of wind and the screams of the digging men; but Gauhar, in a wild argument, at last threw up his hands and was defeated by the six.

By their command, the conclave united against the master.  The Seeking Vulture was to move, fleeing from the storm while trapped inside it.

~

That night was a horror I shall ever remember.  The tents were pulled, what few we could tear away from the tumbling sand-waves.  Wrapped in these, we ran and even crawled to the north, all dreams of treasure made as nothing as we prayed for our survival.  The night was spent dragging our shelters behind us, crying out as we lost sight of others three paces away, fleeing from the death-cries of the pleading lost men and women as the sands tore them apart.  Somehow, through it all, Fatimah stayed beside me.

There was no sleep; half of the men had been lost or died.  Of the women, only Fatimah was still with us.  One of the merchants had perished, drowned in sand.

For four days we searched for survivors and found none.  Some few of the camels we did find, and some of the sacks of relics and tablets were still strapped upon the carcasses.  But all else was lost.  With scarcely enough water to reach the next eastward oasis, the caravan’s remnant headed east on foot in the midst of night, silent beneath the orange carving of the moon.

~

For Fatimah, such times are meant for abandonment.  She needs only a guide.  It is the way of ashes.  It is her way.

The night we were to depart, Fatimah came to me.  Her face was wrapped in cloth for travel, and she carried an improvised sackcloth face-mask for me as well.  I asked her when we would be leaving; she replied, “The caravan will leave when they waken within the hour, but I have paid the sentry to be silent of our fate.”

Our fate?

“For the Seeking Vulture, this is the night of flight.  But for you and I, Al-Azrad,” said Fatimah, “this night is one of destiny.  We go forth into the graveyard of the Sindhi.  Let us go unto the Rest of Ibn Hatim, and there partake of the water-gifts of the mighty Naram-gal.”

SCROLL XXV

Of My Initiation

As the Chosen of Aharon and Fatimah

Into the Cabal of the Ghul

It was time.

I did understand the grim implication in what Fatimah was not telling me.  This would be the one and only time in my life when I might speak with the Watcher of the Oasis of Zarzara, the great Ghul Naram-gal.  From all that I had learned from Fatimah in our scavengings of the desert, I believed with all my heart that he alone—lord of the Deathless Ones, keeper of the secrets of fallen kingdoms—could share with me the arts of necromancy which would bring my beloved Adaya as a miracle resurrected, back into my arms.

And still, there in my shredded tent with the masked and blind Fatimah standing over me, her sightless eyes glittering like silver crescents with the moon’s reflections, I sat in a torment of dismay.

There were so many questions.  My doubts flowed over themselves in tides, flowing into one another as I struggled to voice them all.  I whispered, fearful of waking the exhausted laborers sleeping near to me.  How could Fatimah know that the Ghul Naram-gal awaited us?  And yet she was certain, I could see this.  What did this mean?  Had she herself been enthralled to such a one?  Had she feasted on the dead?

And so much more.  Was it prophesied, or planned, that I would meet with Naram-gal within the wasteland, consorted by Fatimah and no one else?  And far more ominous was this:  how could such a mighty storm have risen from the desert on a day of few winds and lapis skies?  Did the Ghuls possess the power to raise such storms?  For Fatimah had spoken of how the Ghuls hunt in raging sandstorms, and how they seem to frequent the few places where the most vicious tempests rise.  Did this mean that Naram-gal could control them?  Worse, had the storm which had destroyed the Seeking Vulture’s fortunes and slain so many innocents been raised solely to separate me, to bring me to my fate before the Deathless One?

These riddles and more I posed to Fatimah, in whispers furious and then gentle.  She gave me the ghosts of answers, but they were elusive as serpent tracks upon the dunes.  At last she said only:

“Child Abd, the Cabal of the Ghul is not answerable to you.  Your pride will be your ruin.  You beg for miracles, and lo, all may be given unto you.  But do you understand the terrible powers you are toying with?  You are blessed to be so chosen.  How much do you believe that you must sacrifice, how much are you willing to surrender to bend the will of nature for your love?  You believe you sacrifice now?  You know nothing.  And your beloved:  would you kill for her?  Would you die for her, and rise again?  Would you live forever at her side?  Do not answer me, for I fear you have yet to fathom such answers even in your heart.  Ask of me no more, or I will leave you behind.  Answer this only, for I risk my life to bring this gift of great moment unto you:  do you trust in me?”

I sighed.  With humility, I did say that of all the peoples in this world, I did trust her most of all.  And I said on:  “Fatimah, for the gifts of wisdom, for all the kindness you have done me, I will follow you to the end of any wasteland.  You are a mother to me, the only one whose name I have ever known.”

And she did hold out her hands, and I rose to her.  And she did embrace me, and silently we strode away into the locust night, with only my jambiya, some waterskins, and meager food-scraps as the limits of my burden.  We abandoned the artifacts, the scrolls and all else; for the caravan would have dire need to repair its fortunes.  And while Fatimah was leaving her friends behind, she did not want us to be branded as thieves.

Save for one fleeting glimpse of Gauhar in later days, I never saw any of them again.

There was honor in this, as well as there was exile.  I only hoped that Gauhar and Haidar would understand.

~

We two trudged north, the air still choked with fine dust crystals left in the ethereal wake of the death-storm’s passage.  Devils of dust, the Ukum, whirled and played beneath the orange moon.  Black silhouettes of tattered banners flapped upon the crests of the northern dunes.

And so did we come to the Battlefield of the Saif, the Rest of Ibn Hatim, fallen god-warrior of the trackless emptiness.

It was not far.  In the terror and exhaustion left in the sandstorm’s wake, I had given no thought to how near we must have been to the graveyard of the battlefield.  And in fleeing north from the storm, pulling our tents behind us, we surely had come very near to its fringe.

The blind Fatimah did not need my guidance.  Now that we two were alone, she made no pretense and did not hide the truth:  she had the gift of second sight, eyes without eyes.  She walked alone with all the precision of the Fates, and I did follow her.

We climbed the greatest of the dunes, and looked down upon what seemed to be another haunted world.  The storm had bared the horrible mass graves of the battlefield of old.  Ranseurs, pikes and spears were stabbed into the desert’s exposed and clefted stones, where they had marked the graves of nameless fighters so many years ago.  There were withered cedar poles looped through with the eye sockets of skulls, stacked a dozen high.  And the corpses were everywhere.

The desert is an angel of the afterlife, for even without the rites of mummification or embalming, the bodies of the warriors were contorted in eerie knots and piles where they lay.  Their flesh—while desiccated and worn away to leather which looked like cinnamon, acrid in husk and rind—was nigh perfectly preserved.  The death-wounds borne by the armored and the stripped were black with old blood; cries of agony were frozen on their faces.  Thin papery cheeks were pitted through with holes.  The tongues of the fallen warriors were curled like shriveled flowers, and the eyes either plucked or crumbled away, but all else of their mortal remains endured, immaculate and eternal.

Such horrible tranquility.  I had never seen a thing so beautiful.

~

The scavengers, the jackals and the vultures, were not there.  I believed I knew why, for greater predators prowled here than they, and the instincts of beasts are far more finely honed than those of man.  But Fatimah had ushered me to silence from the moment we descended from the dune.  We stepped among the storm-bared graves, and I soon discovered why she held to her silent reverence.

There was one dune which stood amidst all the corpse-pits, born of the storm’s dark passage.  Around this dune hunched a circle of gaunt, horrific things which could only be Ghuls.  Above them, standing upon the height with the crescent moon behind him loomed the one, the Watcher, whose silhouette I had already seen once before.

Fatimah knelt.  The Watcher pointed at me, and I did approach him alone.

So did the great Naram-gal hold audience with me.

Two of the crouching Ghuls crawled aside to allow me passage.  As I looked down and met their gazes each in turn, their upturned faces snarled at me in half-tamed apprehension.  Their features were monstrous, wolfish, with crystal-yellowed fangs which jutted from slender snouts.  One of the Ghul’s faces had been shorn:  where a mortal would have a nose, there were only two dried mushroom-like and pulpy slits.  This one’s eyes were yellow-crimson, double-pupiled, as are the hourglass eyes of goats.

The other Ghuls, unmoving, said nothing, but hunched and watched in silence as I ascended upon the sands.

The Watcher let me approach.  He said in a voice which cast about, a voice which sought and wheeled as the wind-rattling of leaves:

“Grieving one, I am Naram-gal.  You live because Aharon has chosen you as his one.  Grieve not for Aharon, for he has partaken of the feast and now dwells amongst us underground as he desired, his afterlife on earth.  You, having defied one storm but not the last, live only because Aharon beseeched us to speak with you.  He said that you were a soul of love, that you were mad and dreaming.  That you are sick with the dream of a love which never was.  Tell me Abd, exile of Sana’a.  Of what do you dream?”

I was fearful and spellbound as I looked on high to Naram-gal.  What kind of man had he been in life?  I wondered how many centuries had passed since his rebirth.  There was so much I did not know.  But his eyes, shot through with blood and silver-laced with the radiance of the moon, had seen eternity.  There, unblinking and without fear, they gazed through me.  I knew that if I dared to lie, the words I chose would be my last.

What did I dream of, most of all?

I spoke of the nightmare of Cthulhu, and even whispered the name of the dread place, R’lyeh.  One of the Ghuls beside me did whisper, “ftaghn”; another whimpered like a jackal.

But Naram-gal himself only nodded and said to me, “It is well.  If you do not alter the path which you have chosen, madness will enslave you in the moons who are to come.  Or will you choose to become one with us?  Should you ever, the nightmares of the Kulullu then will cease.  But I sense a greater truth has brought you to me.  And what is this?”

And I spoke of my Adaya and our love.  The reactions from the others were intriguing.  I could see that some of the Ghuls still longed for loved ones they had lived for in another life, another world.  Others held shameless hatred in their eyes, others only the nepenthe, the oblivion of willfully forsaken memory … for love, in the wake of death and centuries, for them could never breathe again.

Or could it?

From Naram-gal himself, I could sense … what?  Was it sympathy?  Was it shame?

When I spoke of Adaya’s resurrection, he did tell me that the Ghuls themselves can never rise from the dead.  Such is the accursed price of their own earthly immortality.  Ghuls are neither dead nor alive in the way that we comprehend it; they are the Deathless Ones.  But they do live, in their own curious manner.  They must feast upon flesh when they are living, and cast their incantations of longevity, until they are slain by violence or they crumble into the dust.  And too, Adaya in death could not become a Ghul.  For once a mortal perishes, the realm of death cannot be breached.  Ghuls can be necromancers, and can even animate the dead and make them writhe and dance.  But resurrection?  That was a forbidden path, forbidden by the Lord in Ebon, who Naram-gal did name as Nyarlathotep.

And who is he?

This question of mine only passed in silence.

But there was hope, Naram-gal said to me.  While Nyarlathotep forbade resurrection to the Ghuls; among mortals, he actually tempted men with hints of rebirth and immortality.  In ancient texts of Babilu, old when Naram-gal himself had been a boy, an inscribed passage did speak of the truths of resurrection, of souls being reborn in another flesh.  A body could not rise with the soul which had cast it off locked back inside it, no; for such led only to madness and willful destruction.  But the soul could be deceived, and lured against its will into a second flesh.  A second vessel.  Adaya, Naram-gal did tell me, would never possess her own beauty again, and her face would not be her own.  But her mind, and her memory, and her love would so return.

Perhaps if I brought Adaya back to life in another woman’s body, she would in time forgive me?  What travesties could not be healed in the name of love?

Naram-gal asked of me, “And would you do this, Al-Azrad?”

I said that I would, and I would entreat my Adaya to forgive me and to remain.  As I asked of the incantations held in this lost codex of Babilu, Naram-gal did silence me.  He said:

“The paths into the labyrinth cast before the willing by Nyarlathotep are never simple, Abd.  Already I have told too much.  The Lord in Ebon himself will test your faith.  And we Ghuls?  We do not yet know if you will reveal the secret of our existence to anyone, child.  And should you dare to, you will die.  And I know too, the worse fate for your soul would be to understand that in death you are powerless, and certain never to find your beloved Adaya again.  Ask me little, but take what I offer you.  The greater gifts of wisdom will come from the Lord in Ebon himself.  He will toy with you, and you must wander far to pay his price.  Do you understand this, all I have foreseen?”

I did not.  But I believed then that I could learn to understand.

I asked what black oath, what vow of secrecy I could voice to Naram-gal, to swear to him that I would tell no one of the Ghuls, and my asking this alone did seem to please him.  It is only in the years after I witnessed his destruction that I dare to write of this in the scrolls, and even now I know the Cabal may claim vengeance upon me for my treachery in doing so.

I have taken great pains to ensure that these scrolls will never be found until long after I am dead.

~

But the other Ghuls did seem uncertain of my faith.  I looked back to Fatimah, who had risen to stand outside their circle.  She made no motion to come to me, nor to betray what she herself believed.

This mattered not.  Naram-gal was pleased, and he came nearer to me.  He bade me open my right hand, and he touched there with the heat of an ancient claw.  So did I take the blood oath of the Ghuls that night in the Battlefield of the Saif.  I drank a droplet of my own blood, and as I was commanded, I did let the black tongue of Naram-gal drinketh of my palm.  To which he said only, “A taste of eternity.  Now you are not a child to Fatimah, but a brother.”

Naram-gal then bade me kneel upon the sands.  Crouching, he whispered to me, “The lore that I will give you now shall not be inscribed in any codex of the earth.  This I require of you, else I should be compelled to destroy you as my own errant child.  For now you are mine.  Of the secret you seek, you must entreat the lorekeeper of our clan, our Anata.  Until that time, if you would resurrect your Adaya, there are visions you must behold.  Take this black amethyst, and hold it while you are sleeping.  My wisdom then, that which cannot be voiced, will come to you.  Speak not of this, nor strive to understand, or the aether of the dreamings will fade away from your mind.  Do not question, feel.  And do not be such a fool as to believe that reclaiming your Adaya from death will be a sacred revelation.  No.  You must create your incantation to bring her forth; your spell will be a nonesuch, a love song for her alone.  Reincarnation of the ashen is no matter of arcane formulae, it is an eidolon of love, and your entreaty shall be unique.  We will meet again, Abd, and sooner than you believe.  Contemplate these sorrows as you journey alone to Gerrah.”

And I asked of him, “Alone?  What do you mean?”

And Naram-gal stood tall.  He called out to the woman who stood behind me, “It is done.  Fatimah, come forward for thy blessing which thou hast begged for.”

And Fatimah came forward, an expression of absolute serenity and peace upon her face.  I tried to touch her, and while my fingertips silked upon her sleeve, she did not seem to feel me.  I let her by.

She then cried out, “I am ready, O Naram-gal!  May I be born anew!  As I have walked for a lifetime with your gift of second sight, may I see the moon with my own eyes for the first and only time!  A Ghul, reborn, I will crawl and rise before you!  For the first night since I was the exiled daughter of Ajid, may I see!”

And the Ghuls rose with moans of passion, and they set upon her.

~

They tore her apart.  They ripped of her belly, and fed upon her entrails as she shrieked.  She did not die.  They would not let her.  They drank of her blood, and kissed her with seizing jaws, and poured the mingled blood, Ghul-Fatimah, back down into her throat.  Her flesh, ever healing through this horrid metamorphosis, was shredded anew and still she did not die.

But oh, how she did scream.

And Naram-gal cackled in delight as she submitted to her end, her own rising, and I—faltering, shocked and heartbroken with horror—fled screaming into the desert.

Of the blood-price of my own obsession, I had only just begun to understand.

SCROLL XXVI

The Habrud of Anata,

And How I Did Come to Learn

The Arts of Necromancy

I did reach the city of Gerrah, in the end.  I even espied Gauhar in the streets, trading his last ream of scrolls and bartering for camels.  I was too ashamed to face him, or even to let him know that I had survived; for I knew that he would implore me to know Fatimah’s fate, and that I could never speak of such a thing.  My grief was too great.

And so it would remain for many years.

~

Another year passed as I sought the more elusive secrets of Adaya’s resurrection.  The black amethyst of Naram-gal brought me dreams which I could not remember.  I knew only that they were sinister, and beautiful, and I woke bathed in sweat and scented with the candle-fires of distance spaces, candles which had burned within the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  In waking, the scents of that world would cling to me.

True to my word—in those nights, if no longer—I did not strive to understand the jewel’s visions.  I only let them wash over me, and in the nights I would cry out Fatimah’s name.

I was by then one of the most experienced caravan scouts in the lands to the south of the Euphrates.  I earned gold and spice not only as a singer and a guide, but as a warrior as well.  Something had changed in me, in allowing Naram-gal to partake of my blood.  I was faster, bolder, deadlier.  Something far worse had changed in me in seeing Fatimah torn apart, a Ghul undying.

~

At times, when I closed my eyes, I would for a moment still see my surroundings despite being blind ... bathed in scarlet, as a Ghul would see.  And fear became something foreign to my soul, a part of me which was dying, which I longed to taste again.  I found the remnants of my fear in battle, and in the thrill of killing thieves, but nothing more.

Fear was no longer a force to overwhelm me, but rather a spice to be tasted, and to be reveled in for its rarity.

But I did learn many ways to kill, and with each thief’s death my soul grew more remote, more a mirage than a reflection of my being.

I learned much—too much—of the desert, its caravans, its riches, its fallen kingdoms and towns and tribes and the ancient superstitions.  I learned the tales which were untrue, and those which were of the forbidden Real which lesser mortals dared not whisper of.  To every city I explored I was an exile, welcome nowhere but respected and feared by many.  Still young in years but more ancient than the eldest caravan masters whom I served, I became a malik, a chieftain of the desert, lording over a tribe of one.

I traveled as far north as Thaj of the Grecian pillars and the shrines of Aphrodite; as far west as Tabuk beyond Khaybar, city of the crystal mosque; and even so far south as Marib again, near to where my Adaya was laid to rest.  But never did I return to her, for I feared the temptation of being so near to her remains.  I would not defile the grave, for the jewel of Naram-gal had whispered that such would sever her restless spirit from this world forevermore.

And however near, I never did return to great Sana’a, nor to Zarzara, for my heart’s bitterness was there.

~

The next glimpse of a Ghul I did receive was when I was guiding the Caravan of the Black Scarab from Hadhramaut into the emptiness of the Khali.

Sleeping in my tent, with my back to an escarpment which sheltered my fire’s dying cinders from the wild winds of that night, I woke to withered and leathery claws clamped over my face.

I could not scream.  My honed senses had failed me, and my attacker had cunningly waited for the winds to hide his scent.  Once my eyes flashed open and I tried to breathe, the amber-and-foetor stench of the stranger was overpowering.

A voice which breathed with the echoes of ages whispered into my ear, “Do not scream.”

It was Naram-gal.

I relaxed, holding my breath in a desperate attempt to keep from inhaling the great Ghul’s stench as he released and then crouched over me.  He said, “Well met we are once more, little chosen one.  Have you forgotten what I told you?  The omen rises.  I have swayed the great one of our clan to mentor you in your quest, child Adb.  You will learn the arts of necromancy from my clan’s own Matriarch, Adaya.  Or, in failing as her apprentice, you will die.  She waits for you beneath the world.  It is time.”

And as if I were nothing more than an empty sack, he threw me over his scaly shoulder and bounded out into the desert wind.

~

There was no time for me to question.  Who was this Anata?  Who among the Ghuls could be greater than Naram-gal?  What had been decided in my name?  Was Fatimah, the eviscerated and my mentor, among the Ghuls as one of the clan as well?  And what of the Sage of the Seven Pearls?  Would I find the man Aharon once again?

But Naram-gal ignored my every entreaty.  Cradling me against his hollowed chest, he rushed into a sandstorm and the scarlet blindness of the night.

~

When at last he slowed and lowered me from his talons, I found myself beneath sand-lost stars in the middle of the Khali wasteland.  A jagged hole gaped in the rocky earth, with trickling cascades of sand falling down from its brim.  Naram-gal leapt down into this hole and beckoned me to enter a deeper and stench-filled cave.

So did I come to the habrud, the Ghul lair, of the clan of Naram-gal.

We crawled through warrens carved from the stone of the very earth.  In each burrow that we passed, a lone Ghul sat and gazed at me.  I was expected.  These were the ones who had encircled me in the Battlefield of the Saif, when Fatimah had made her choice to be devoured.  To me the terrors of that night seemed a century ago.

These Ghuls were solemn in the secrets of their existence.  Some feasted on limbs torn from wanderers or hermits, others groomed the ants and the scarabs from the scalps of their lesser brethren.  Skulls of victims served as drinking cups for curdled blood, while painted skulls—of ancestors?  Of the chosen?—were wreathed together with tangles of spiderweb and honored to be hung upon white pedestals of bone.  Everywhere, a strange violet lichen glowed and thrived on the burrow walls, casting its eerie luminescence in a pale imitation of lunar twilight.

In the deepest burrow, the ceiling rose above us, and Naram-gal at last was able to stand.  I followed his example.

An enormous but somehow beetle-like shadow descended, detaching itself from a tiered labyrinth made of tablets and hieroglyphic stones.  This thing neared me, and breathed the scent of my skin.

There stood before me an even more ancient Ghul than Naram-gal, taller and still more gaunt than he.  Its flesh was filled with hollows, where olive-hued mushrooms grew and bloated spiders coursed beneath the skin.

The spider-Ghul crouched, turning its back on me.  Naram-gal followed suit, leaving me alone despite my nearness to these creatures.  The two engaged in a fierce argument, echoing in rasps of the dead tongue of Akkadian.  At last, the spider-Ghul relented, and Naram-gal seemed pleased.  The spider-Ghul spoke to me, and I was taken aback to hear the voice of an old woman, quavering as does a soft wind within the reeds.

She addressed me, “You, Al-Azrad, who seeketh to reclaim your beloved from the realm of the restless dead.  Aharon has spoken well of you.  And surely Fatimah, she swore that you—”

A fool, I rashly interrupted this.  I cried out, “Is Aharon of the deathless?  Is Fatimah among you?  She lives?  Can I see her?”

With the echoes of this, the spider-Ghul regarded me in silence.  Naram-gal grunted a weary sigh and crawled out of the grotto, leaving me to face the wrath of the spider-Ghul alone.  I learned thereafter that he believed the spider-Ghul would devour me for my insolence.  Naram-gal crawled away and left me to my fate.

But once he had gone, the Ghul-crone did smile and laugh softly.  She said to me, “You are a passionate one, are you not?  Aharon is to be believed.  Perhaps we will see which black miracles we can perform within you, after all.”

I said nothing.

The Ghul-crone drifted down onto all fours, and softly circled me.  As she did so, she whispered, “Aharon is, as you might say, ‘well and yet unwell.’  He quests within the Vale of Pnath.  He braves oblivion for the clan, I say no more.  Fatimah?  She is among our kindred, in the netherworld of the Dreamlands.  By the claw of the soaring Night-gaunt, she will journey to Thalarion, to Xura, she will behold the Sunken City.  She has much to learn.  You cannot be with her again.  No.  But should you choose to slip the black jewel of Naram-gal beneath your tongue, and dream of her?  If she then chooses to come to you, that is her right.  Now.  May I speak with you of your destiny, as I tried to do before?”

Abashed, I knelt as she circled before me.  I avoided her eyes and held my hands open, where she touched the palms with her claw.

And she did say, “Good.  I am Anata, Mother of All.  Of all these children, the Clan of the Shattered Jaw, I am the elder Matriarch, mother to Naram-gal.  I have chosen to abdicate my rightful eminence to him, so that I can remain here among my tablets and my grimoires.  I no longer hunt in the lands above.  The moon and I, once lovers, now are strangers.  I know little of your world as it is now, impetuous Abd.  But I do remember love, and necromancy is the art of my Cabal.  I ask of you only this, for I know Fatimah once asked you as well:  your Adaya, would you die for her?”

I said that I would, but as she was already among the dead, I would die for her only if I believed that doing so would bring me to her once again.

This bold answer seemed to startle and then amuse the crone Anata, and as she considered me, I dared to ask:  “If I kill myself, would I wander as a spirit?  In all the wastelands of this world, would I find her?”

Anata answered, “Destiny is not so simple.  Those who die by another’s hand and are beloved, indeed they do wander the desolate world, lingering in their severance from love.  Invisible, felt, such spirits roam amongst us.  They wander the sands unseen for an age, an age which to them seems only a moment.  Beyond Death, what is the measure and meaning of Time?  What is a moment to the dead?  A year?  A century?  For some decades, perhaps, the restless dead doth linger.  And then they rise and go ... whither knows?”

“I believe, for myself, they rise and fade to coalesce before the throne of the Lord in Ebon, Nyarlathotep.  There they are judged, finding eternity or nothing.  Others of my clan insist that there is a Kingdom of Heaven, and that frozen Kadath is proof that gods of mercy and of beauty do exist.  All I know, truly, is that after their one ‘moment’ of anguished wandering, the restless dead do fade from our own world.”

I waited, for Anata had not answered me.  I believed she regarded me then and there not as a fool, but as a child who wanted to understand and yet could not.  It was as if I had asked her if fire burned; and in her fashion, she had answered me.  But there was more.

Pleased with my trembling silence, Anata said further, “Your own life, Abd?  A suicide?  Know you that suicides are bereft of reason in the afterlife.  Should you kill yourself, Abd, you would wander as a spirit for your one ‘moment,’ yes; but forever without your love, without your memory.  If you were to open your veins and rise into the Kingdom of the Restless, and if there your Adaya were ever to find you, you would not know her.  You would see her only as a stranger.  She would remember you, your love, your vows, your anguish, your youth together, yes; and you?  You would remember nothing.”

This was a far greater horror than I had ever imagined.  To find my Adaya, and to be so torn from myself that I would not remember her at all?  I bowed my head, and Anata gasped in wonder as one and then another of my tears fell to the sand.

She crouched, and lapped the dust which held my tears.

She whispered, “A gift, I thank you.  Al-Azrad, chosen of Aharon and Fatimah, do you wish for me to teach you all I know?  The prophecies of Naram-gal are ever-shifting, for mortals are creatures of freedom’s chaos, not of Fate.  Your choices have brought you here, and whether you will survive my teaching, I do not know.  But should you truly want the art beyond all, I can give to you many of the secrets which you will need to chain your Adaya in the lashes of resurrection.”

“Should you desire, I will teach you all that I know of the ars and necromantis.  And the last of the lore which I do not possess?  Much will come from the Lord in Ebon himself, should you prove worthy.  But I know much.  I know where two of your secrets lies.  To fashion your own spell of resurrection, you would need two sets of ancient discs, each graven with the secrets of lost ages.  There was a time when mortals did not live a single life as they do now.  The younger of those discs would lie in the tombs of Babylon.  The second set of discs, those more ancient, lie still in the tombs of the Serpent People.”

“With my teachings and the discs from those two Kingdoms, your mastery would nearly be complete.  Then would you know secrets of resurrection which even I cannot fully understand.  For the rest, you must stand before Nyarlathotep and plead your worth to him.”

The Lord of Ebon was an entity of powers vast, one which I scarcely understood.  Rather than betray my ignorance to Anata lest she disown me, I asked her instead:

“And the discs?  Did you say there are two strings of engraven discs I would require?”  I longed to know why Anata could not comprehend the entirety of the secret of resurrection.  As a Deathless One, did she lack the desperate passion which is the dark gift of mortality?  I dared not ask.  Instead, I implored her:  “And you know of both sets of discs?  Where are those of the Serpent People?”

And she said, “Those are the strings which venerate Anar’kai.  At least thirteen sets there were, perhaps more.  Pray that at least one survives.  You will unbury them either in Irem of the Many Pillars, or beneath the city that is nameless.  There are many such discs, yes, for the funerary rites of Serpent People—the viper-striders—were ever lain to rest with their most glorious high priests in death.  These priests each wore their own sacred discs of necromancy, and they were mummified with such treasure held aloft within their claws.  Find their remains, and the discs of the viper-striders will be yours.”

With every answer, I was tormented by a flurry of greater questions.  “And who are the viper-striders?  Are all dead, do any yet remain?  Where is Irem but in fable?  What city is called the nameless?”

Anata halted me, drawing blood from my hand with her yellow claw.  When the blood welled forth from my palm, it showed an uncanny silhouette of the scarred claw mark left there a year before by Naram-gal.

She closed my hand into a fist, and somehow, my wound began to heal.  She considered the scab which was forming upon my palm.  Licking her lips with her black tongue, she said to me:

“Patience, child.  You will learn as you veil yourself in a chaos all your own.  Such is the way of men.  We, the Ghuls, can guide yet never lead you.  Find your answers in the world afar while there is time and your Adaya yet wanders.”

“And the other discs, of man?” I asked.  “These lesser graven discs of the necromancers, how do you know they lie in Babylon?”

Anata answered thus:

“I do not know.  As I said, I scarcely know your world, for I no longer hunt beneath the moon.  These caverns of twilight are my sole domain.  This is my home, I am the loremistress of my clan.  But the discs were buried in Babylon when I was young, when I was a maiden and my name was sung in love.  Ghuls would have no need of such trinkets, for we possess an immortality of our own.  There are tombs within the Ziggurat of Babilu, what Naram-gal has called the Tower of Babylon.  It stands in ruins, yet so does it remain.  If no mortal reaver has yet found the tombs, then the discs which you require will remain.  And if not?  Then you will cast an unfinished incantation, and well may die; or, you will find in all your years where the discs have gone to.  You kill thieves, yes?  That is what your blood has told to me.  And you delight in it.”

“But why, why are you so fickle with your obsession?  I have given you much, the rest will come in time.  Take what is given to you now.  I will teach you the art, I will share with you the language of Babilu and its ways of incantation.  One night, you may well have the beginnings of your spell to bring your Adaya back to life.  But child?”

And she crouched before me, nearing, so that her ancient and noseless face was level with my own.  Gently, she placed her talons on either side of my face.  I looked into her deep-socketed scarlet eyes.

She asked of me:  “Do you love?  Do you truly want this?”

And I said with all my heart, “Yes.  She is all I have ever wanted.”

And Anata answered, “Then learn with me, Abd.  When you have learned all, leave me.  Find the greater discs of the viper-striders, find the lesser discs of Babel.  From these you will sing your song of songs, you will cast your spell.  Should the Lord in Ebon let it be, Adaya will return to you.  But you may well find that the price is what destroys you, rather than the agony of life without her.”

And so did I begin my life underground, as an apprentice of Anata, Matriarch of the Clan of the Shattered Jaw.

~

Hereafter follows all that I learned of the Ghuls and necromancy in my times when I have dwelled within the deep.  I share these secrets not only so that you, reader mine and slave, will know of the darkest powers; but too, so that you will know your potential allies, the Ghuls, and so have from their clans great warriors and consorts in your destruction of Cthulhu’s Cult.

The more of the Ghuls’ secrets you understand, the more likely you are to honor them, and so be seen as worthy of tutelage.

Keep well in mind that few Ghuls are as merciful or as loving as Anata.  Should you seek out the Ghuls of your own age and not know all that I am to speak of, it is likely certain that they will destroy you rather than take you into the fold.

So of my next ream of scrolls in the amphora beneath this one, unseal the wax, draw forth the papyri, and so fashion the Sixth Gathering, which I have named The Cabal of the Ghul.

GATHERING THE SIXTH

The Cabal of the Ghul

SCROLL XXVII

Of the Eaters of the Dead,

The Seekers for Eternity

Herein I will tell of all I have learned of the honored race of the Deathless Ones, the Eaters of the Dead, the Seekers for Eternity, the Ghuls.  In all my decades of my commingling with their kind—in war, in pursuit, in flight, in parley, in learning and yes, in friendship—I have found them to be not repulsive, but rather primal.

Where once I was horrified by them, they now engender only sadness, and even a desire in my heart.  If my destiny were my own, it is likely that I would walk to the oasis of Zarzara in my elder years as did Aharon, sit upon the sands, and let the tribe of Naram-gal feast upon me and make me one of them so that I could finally be at peace.  The dream of R’lyeh would finally be silenced.

But my path is one of vengeance and desire.  I will have my Adaya, and those who murdered her will know that it is I who will be their ending.  I am the slayer; and you, reader, in keying yourself with my memories shall be the host to my hateful mind.

~

But that is yet to come.  Here, in my own life, my own thirst for revenge is yet to be fully sated.  I know that in my pursuit I needeth the greatest and most tireless of hunters and seekers to guide my way, and so I am proud to live and breathe to serve the Cabal of the Ghul.

They are a worthy race.  I daresay the Ghuls have more respect for one another, and for brave warriors who defy them, than we ‘mortals’ do for our own kind.  As is the way with every man and woman of our kith, the Kingdom of Man, there are vile Ghuls and there are Kings and Sultans among their kind.  Some are esteemed and gentle, some sagely, some fearful and of timid mien.  Others are vicious and savage, bestial and reveling in blood.  Many are evil, but the noble few forever redeem the race.

And are not men so?

~

But know you this:  the more that you honor the Ghuls and understand of them, the more fated you are to learn from them and not be at war with their ancient kind.  There will be times, in pursuit of wisdom and sanctuary upon and beneath the deserts, that you will have no choice but to destroy them.  But always, this should be the path of last resort.  For as the Ghuls live for centuries, they have prophets among their kind, and they are the masters of our memory and lore.  It is they who are the sacred keepers of Khom and Sumeru, Babilu and Akkad.  Every race of man which has been slaughtered and eradicated from this earth has its own survival in the Kingdom of the Ghul.  Even Hyperborea, Cimmeria, Atlantis, Mu, Thuria, Stygia and on ... the fallen empires of mortals live on in their memory.

Consider:

The lost tablets of Eridu, the codices burned at Alexandria, the hieroglyph chests of Thebes and buried Hadoth itself, all these to some extent are counted among the treasures of the Ghul.  There is an entire other kingdom under the earth, between the Dreamlands and the Real:  a netherworld, where the Ghuls reign and gibber in endless caverns, where forests of crystal and fungus cluster down to sunless seas.  Great temples of the ancients there still remain, beneath us and unbeheld, and there reign on the glories which were lost to us.

Fear them not, but respect them.  Do not flee them, but find them.  The Ghuls are the vanguards of your cause.  Bow to them.

And how are you to find that which does not wish to be discovered?

This I will speak of hereafter.  But first, you must know what Ghuls are, their appearance, their weaknesses and their ways.

~

The first signifier of the presence of a Ghul may well be its mephitic stench.  This is not only the fragrance of corpses, but of honey and of spice.  For the cunning Ghuls—those who are not bestial, and there are many such—swathe themselves in fragrant spices, the perfumes of their mortal kindred:  amber, oil of sandalwood, cinnamon, balm of bay leaf, even honey.

The Ghul is stealthy and is rarely heard.  As they keep to the shadows and burrow easily in sand, and hunt forth in the night and even strideth in the sandstorm, they are rarely seen unless they choose to reveal themselves.

When you see a Ghul you will know. Their limbs are knobbed and sinewy.  Their bodies are pinched beneath the ribcage, for the organs of the belly are likely to have atrophied or decayed.  They do not feast as we do; their flesh is fungal and porous, and it could be said that the entirety of their spongy body is actually made of entrails.

But while their outer husks are brittle, the Ghuls are not weak.  They crouch, and paw the ground as do the great cats when on the hunt.  At rest, their bodies slump in ways that a mortal’s would if only their bones were broken.  And while Ghuls can walk on two legs and even go forth enrobed and imitate the gliding gait of man, they run far more quickly on all fours.

Their hands are clawed and somewhat like paws, although withered and scabbed with age.  These hands, or forefeet, can be used either to run or to delicately hold and manipulate coins, pages, relics, even keys.  But many Ghuls shun weapons more complex than a club of bone.  Do not take this to mean that they are incapable of wielding scimitars or even war-bows, for I have seen them do this and bear the scars as proof.  They shun weapons often, but this is more a matter of ritual and pride than one of weakness.

In other ways, they are different from mortal mien.  The ears are pointed, the noses sometimes flat, the lips may drool with slaver or with pus.  Being hairless, Ghuls have no need for clothing.  They are caked with sand and grave-mold.  Some may have their bodies riddled with parasites, such as scarabs, larvae, ants or even scorpions.  Few speak of this, but from what I understand such a condition is not a disease, but rather some form of “symbiosis”—a mutually gainful existence, in which the parasites feast on the Ghul’s regenerating flesh, while the Ghul is in some way cleansed by the presence of the crawling ones.

Riddled or whole, the skin of Ghuls is mottled and brownish-gray, the color of decaying flesh.  As they age, the elders among their kind become greenish, and the mold becomes part of their skin.  Their faces are gray and moist, sheened with the decay of festering meat.  The bones of the skull do not protrude, but are so near to the surface that the effect is as if moist silk had been stretched across naked bone.  The nose may be missing, or a brief snout of canine cast.  There are crystalline fangs and the tongue may be pointed, or holed through with rot or beetle lairs, or missing entirely.

~

Ghuls are very strong, ungainly yet agile, and they can leap very far.  They are excellent climbers all, and some craft ladders of rope or vine to clothe entire cliff-sides or even the sheerest walls of death-pits.  They run on all fours, as I have told; when they rest, they squat.  A Ghul may tire, yet is never breathless.  They do not lie down unless to “sleep.”  I have never known a Ghul to dream, but their desire to do so is so great that their entire existence is an ever-shifting commingling of Dream and the Real.  And so, they dwelleth not only in tombs but in the Empire of the Blackened Mind, and shift from one into the other in trances rather than fits of sleep.

They can experience nightmares, and although they hear not the incessant sense-impacts of Cthulhu’s screams from beneath the waves, they can know fear.  It is my understanding that a Ghul does not feel pain, but they are rarely rash in battle, for they are not indestructible.  More than blades and bludgeons, they fear fire.

~

But it would be a mistake to regard the Ghuls as walking corpses.  They are not dead, and their skin is not decaying, but thick and rubbery.  They preserve and even bathe themselves.  There are wondrous and arcane alchemical salts which they distill and crystallize deep within their lairs, rendering down human fat and boiling blood with essential salts, natron, sugar, tar, and balsam resin.  As I will tell of my time in Egypt, the art of embalming is at the very heart of the mystery of the Ghul.

The Ghuls who know these arts are the elders.

The eldest among them have eyes so bloodshot that they are near to scarlet.  Ancient Ghuls have longer and bonier claws, which may be blunted with overuse.  As they age they lose their noses, and their hind-feet harden into near-hooves.  Ghuls grow throughout their existence, and the oldest among them are immense indeed.

The minds of Ghuls are partial and their reflections corroded.  The creation and birth of Ghuls is an aspect of lore which they jealously veil from even their most trusted thralls, and I still do not understand the ways in which Ghuls are “born.”

The first of their kind were likely created through the funereal rites of ancient Khom, beneath the Pyramids.  Too, they create Ghuls from willing mortals by tearing them apart, feasting upon the bellies of the changelings while infusing them with salts and arcane jellies.  But do they fornicate?  Are spawn born of their women, or is the impossibility of such the reason they steal the infants and children of mortal women?  I will not say that none know of these mysteries; but I myself do not.

I speak of this because it vexes the formulation of my own wonder:  do Ghuls have private and unique memories of their own mortal existence?  Were all once human, or are some born as Ghuls and so remain as such until they are destroyed?  I do know that many Ghuls were once men, women, and especially our children.  But whether this is true of all, who can say?

Whatever the answer to this riddle, there are hints of mortal memory in all.  Some Ghuls retain the power of language, others have their own meeping and gibbering tongue, while the most bestial among them can only howl and cry in rage.  It is said that those who most wish they were still human retain the strongest memories, and so are the gentlest and most loving of their kind; while those who embrace their new existence entirely and revel in bloodthirst are the most mindless and savage.

~

However strong or weak their individual ties to mortal ways, all Ghuls worship.  They revel and dance beneath the moon.  For their rituals they prefer graveyards, ruins and charnel pits, perhaps paying their obeisance to the links between mortal life and death and decay which such places forever signify.

But such accursed places, although frequented by Ghuls, are not their lairs, and are only rarely their hunting grounds.  And so, from whence do they come?  Where do they stalk?

As I tell in my tales within these scrolls, most Ghuls favor the open wasteland.  Many seem to prefer the fragile places in the desert where mortals come and fade, but do not linger.  In such places, the Ghuls can observe the guileless men and decide if they wish to feast upon them; destroy them; entreat of them to become one with the Cabal; make Ghuls of them; ignore them; or steal their children.  Thus, graveyards which are in use and where bodies are still deposited are favored by them, as are oases and the edges of paths made by the lesser caravans.

~

Their lairs are found deep beneath the desert.  You may find such, especially as you delve into the undercroft of temple and tomb; but know this well:  to enter a Ghul lair unbidden is an abomination to their honor, and such foolish delvers are set upon by all and torn apart.

The lairs will only be known to those who are honored with the secret of the Cabal, and who earn the trust of the elders.  The rims of such places are easy to find, should one wander into the nothingness of sand.  The Ghuls throw skulls and bones once the marrow and the brains have been sucked out, leaving them in shattered piles.  These are the marks of territorial boundaries.  Such scenes are not only horrifying to mortals and repel them, but are also observed by Ghuls of other tribes.  In this way do rival Ghul tribes speak to one another of their clans, their numbers and their might when on the hunt.

A Ghul lair is known as a habrud, or stench-filled pit, in the lost language of Sumeru.  From the central pit radiate honeycombs of burrows and warrens.  A habrud can also be the nexus of a crypt or buried temple, with the stones of walls removed and the burrows between carved by their gnashing claws through the naked stone.

~

All of this is well to know, but still there is the most delicate and precarious lore of all:  even when one finds the Ghuls and honors them, how doth one deal with them and live to embrace their wisdom?  The answer to such is ever contingent upon the nature of their elders.

Ghuls are led by pack-masters if they are savage, or elder chieftains if they are elegiac and fond of the ways of mortal kind.  Many are tribal, some are even holy.  Beneath the temples of Thebes and Memphis, the sanctuaries of Sais and Bubastis, there are Ghul-priests as well.  One who delves into the habrud must be quick to learn of their unique ways, and to honor them with the strictest of humility.

Remember well that the eldest Ghul is ever the largest, and therefore the master of them all.  It is he you must win over, and the others are likely—but not certain—to follow his own lead.  And too, a dire warning:  the genders of Ghuls are difficult for us to tell, for the breasts wither away and the genitalia are receded into their flesh.  Many are women.  There is no divide between the male and female as there is in the Kingdom of Men, and there is a goodly chance that the leader of a Ghul pack may be a woman of their kind.  Keep this well in mind, lest you insult the elder.  Should a Ghul elder honor you with his or her name, it may tell you much:  not only their gender, but the culture in which they lived in centuries past.

If the elder cannot be appeased, you must flee.

~

If all is well, you will find yourself surrounded by the curious pack as they struggle to accept the strangeness of your ways.  The weak are curious and will submit to the guidance of the strong.  Do not threaten violence even to the weakest, but neither should you cower.  Do not imply violence either, and never show your weakness.  Do offer food if you are carrying it.  To offer the fruits and grains and the meats preferred by mortals is an insult.  Offer flesh, human, the more rotted the better.  Beast-flesh will do if you carry nothing else, for otherwise you are telling the pack that you are keeping an unfair share of sustenance for yourself.  The sweet rotted flesh of a child is the greatest of gifts.

Should you come to be accepted into a habrud and you have no feast to offer, you are offering yourself.

~

Ghuls who do embrace you will be eager to share their texts with you, and any questions you may have of the elder world in all its glories.  The greatest honor a Ghul can offer you is to ask you to feast with them, of which I will speak in another scroll.

SCROLL XXVIII

The Conflicting Tales of Uncreation

Which Are Spoken by the Elders

Among the Deathless Ones

The origins of the Ghuls are a matter beyond mortal understanding.  This is curious, yet a matter of reason:  for while the Ghuls are the loremasters of mortality and the keepers of the memories of the fallen and eradicated kingdoms, they were not always such.  The primordial Ghuls, when they were newborn and few, were creatures of utmost secrecy.  They were hunted by mortals as an abomination, and even those who first experienced the revelation of the Deathless were not in totality fanatical to their own convictions.

For to desire immortality is one matter, and to experience it is quite another.  I am told there is a cosmic horror which overwhelms the mind when one comes to understand that one will live for thousands of years, an exile, outsider, incapable of being loved by mortal kith, fated to watch kingdoms rise and fall and the world itself be stripped away until the netherworld is all.

For these reasons, they are several tales amongst the Ghuls of their own creation and the first among their kind.  These Tales of Uncreation, revealed to me by Anata, Hetshepsu and Klocha, I will share without being so fool as to attempt their unification as an understanding of one truth.  The truth is lost.

~

The First Tale

~

The first thirteen Ghuls were born beneath the Pyramids, in a sacramental deviation from the Ritual of the Opening of the Mouth.  For those who know little of the mummification rites as they were practiced in ancient Khom, this ritual involved chiseling open the fresh mummy’s mouth with the adze of Horus, freeing the trinity-soul to leave the corpse and soar as Akh, Ba and Ka into the paradisaic netherworld Amen-ti, Dreamland of the fourteen amber and emerald hills.

There were among the priests of the heretic Pharaoh, Akhenaten, a cult of defilers (whom the Ghuls call the Ones Enlightened).  The royal priest-cult of Akhenaten worshipped Aten, the un-god, the horror which is said to rule over the gods as the gods rule over men.  Such beliefs have long since been stricken from the monuments by the horrified Khomites who lived in the centuries after Akhenaten’s fall, yet much of the truth remains in inscriptions upon the walls which line the labyrinths far beneath the mighty Sphinx.

The Ones Enlightened worshipped the black reflection of the void left by Aten’s glory, a sentient hollow among the veils which they named Nyarlat.  And the Lord in Ebon, now known to the venerated among us as the Crawling One from Chaos, Nyarlathotep, did in answer to their prayers come to rise before them.  As it was with Queen Nitocris and the emboldened Nephren-Ka, so too it was for the Ones Enlightened who entreated the Lord in Ebon for the secrets of immortality.

Much lore was given to the Ones Enlightened in the language of nightmare.  In sharing their dying minds, they did create a ritual which was the reversal of the Opening of the Mouth, which is called the Weaving of the Prison.  In this ritual, the soul is still brought forth to live after death, but the mouth is sewn shut instead of chiseled open.  This causes the lingering last essence of the soul to remain in the body while still alive and to regenerate itself sevenfold, causing the “dead” one to return to life as a Deathless One, a Ghul.

Of the thirteen Ones Enlightened, two perished in horror, and were embraced by the Lord in Ebon and so blessed with oblivion.  Eleven endured, of which four signed with their souls the Blackened Codex of Azathoth.  The other seven defied their deathless existence once they experienced it; some were destroyed by Nyarlathotep or the four, but of the fate of them all, I have never been told.

~

The Second

~

The first Ghuls were not creatures of choice.  They were murderers who had bereaved and afflicted the Palace of Pharaoh with unspeakable crimes, and for this they were to be cursed forever.  The magi of Pharaoh had these men and women of abomination entombed alive once a black ritual had been cast upon them.  Unable to die, they clawed at the interiors of their stone sarcophagi, their bleeding and shattered fingers forever regenerating with the black fertility of unlife, until in later centuries they did claw through and emerge.

As their minds in their entombment had become one with nightmare, so were they returned to life not in Khom, but rather in the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  They awoke within the netherworld, and there they bred and created their own kingdom.  These unnatural abominations were opposed by Nodens of the Abyss, who sent his servitors, the Night-gaunts, to annihilate them.  Yet the powers of the Deathless Ones were great, and so did they enthrall seven of the Night-gaunts to carry them unto Kadath and thence into the Abyss, to stand in defiance before hoary Nodens himself.

Thus were the Deathless Ones honored with their rightful kingdom in the netherworld under the Sign of Koth, the god of dreams, who had fled their domain in anguish; and the Night-gaunts were ever their allies.  There did they raise a glorious kingdom, and so too do they come to explore the lesser realms of the Real.

~

The Third

~

Before history and writing, mortals were confined in two castes which by their holy Matriarchs were forbidden to intermingle.  One caste was of those who dared to become civilized, building cities and beginning the reaping, harvesting, and learning of the tablet.  These grew great in mind, yet weak in flesh.

The other caste consisted of the pure, the ever-wanderers, who believed that written knowledge and harvest were folly if the price for such was weakness.

After the last ice and the great melting, the waters fell into the sea, the winds rose, deluge claimed all, and in the next retreat of the waters, many lands which were once fertile became deserts.  In such places, strength was great and need was ever greater, and with little to eat there came a time when the wanderers were compelled to eat of their own dead.

The numbers of the pure became few, and the city-caste killed the wanderers wherever they did find them, until at last the wanderers could not leave the deserts, and were forced to find their own shelters beneath the sands.  In so finding the ruins left by even older ages of men within the netherworld, they unburied the texts, ruins and legacies of the old ones.  So did they learn the black arts of survival, and how the eating of corpses could infuse the life essence into the flesh of the devourer, greatening the lifespan with each consumption.

And so, in the deserts of Egypt, Sumer and Arabia, were born the Ghouls.

~

Such are the Tales of Uncreation.  Pass no judgment upon them.

SCROLL XXIX

Mortis, Rapax ~

The Abominations of the Feast

The revelations of this scroll, while incomplete, form the fundament for my understanding of that which the necromancers among the Romans named the Abominations of the Feast.  Ergo, these are the laws governing the eating of flesh among the Ghuls.

There are many and diverse laws which are held by the level of the pack, others by the clan, and still others—varying between the lands of Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Persia—which are the laws of the kind.  Such distinctions are a matter for my bafflement; here, I only set forth that which I do know of the laws themselves, without distinction of supersedence.

~

I.  It is unlawful for a Ghul to pull a victim away from the pack and feast alone.  The pack hunts as one, and devours as one as well.  The strong eat before the weak, the elder before the younger.  Conflicts which arise during the feast are held in abeyance until the feast is done.

II.  If there is danger, the victims are dragged back to the habrud, or lair, and there devoured.

III.  Veneration is given first to the absent lords and the ancients, the Ones Enlightened, the firstborn among the Ghuls.  This honor depends of course upon which creation legend the clan doth believe in, as I have spoken of in a further scroll.  (Refer to The Conflicting Tales of Uncreation, prior. ~K.)

IV.  The crone Klocha once told me that the only universally revered King of the Ghuls is Nephren-Ka, and the Queen of the Ghuls is Nitocris, as they dwell far below the necropoli of Hadoth ever after; yet she sayeth this if in jest, and she did say nothing more.  How these are honored in the feast I do not know.

~

V.  The strictest of the laws involves the devouring of other Ghuls.  Ghuls of an enemy clan will be eaten after the wounded of one’s own brethren; for:

VI.  After battle, the Ghuls also venerate their own wounded by devouring them.  In such a manner the strong become yet stronger, and the clan—while thinned—is strengthened.

VII.  The brains of fallen Ghuls are never eaten, for this causeth the horrible disease amongst them which is called the Cackling Plague.

In eating the brains of their own kind, the Ghuls become infested with ancestral memory, and a longing for a return to the Kingdom of Men.  These Ghuls will wander directly into mortal cities and entreat the men and the women who stand in horror of them to lay with them, and to take them into their houses.  Such Ghuls are a threat to the ultimate secrecy of the Cabal of the Ghul.

Ghuls afflicted with the suffering of the Cackling Plague are set afire by their clan, purging their diseased memory from the packs.

Ghuls are not forbidden from speaking with mortals, with the understanding that those who behold them but who do not submit to the silence of the Cabal must be brought back to the habrud to be eaten.

Many Ghuls come to long for humanity, and may even converse in necropoli with tomb robbers, grave diggers, dreamers, suicides, and those such as myself:  seekers of ancestral wisdom.

~

The laws concerning solely the hunting of mortals are rather different in their cast.

As is well known, the Ghuls hunt in the night, and lay low in the blistering day.  However, sandstorms which blot out the sun and which cause caravans to become lost may be regarded as prime hunting times as well.  Ghuls will travel in daylight if there is dire need, either for hunting or for flight; but in doing so, they greatly wound themselves.

IX.  The first law of the mortal hunt is simple, and that is to leave no survivors.

And there are more; these are the greatest laws.

~

Ghuls hunt mortals much in the manner that hyenas do:  The prey is encircled, the weak and lagging are taken first, and the others are driven into an ambush to be slaughtered.  In battle, they often vie for dominance and may fight amongst themselves, but wounds in such confrontations are rare.  The success in past hunts determines a Ghul’s standing within the pack, and so the clan.  In the more savage packs, the weak will die of hunger.

~

Newborn Ghuls are made from devouring mortals alive, as I have told of in my tales.  Most such are the chosen of the Cabal, those humans who voluntarily submit themselves to sacrifice for the gift of earthly immortality.  Some few, however, are made Ghuls against their will.  In one clan I have known, of the Sinai, it was law that one in nine mortals were made thus.  I believe this to have been law because the pack was dying, beset by two other rival clans, and its numbers few.

~

Despite their longing to ever remain souls of the desert sands and shadows both of netherworld and dream, the Ghuls at times will brave the Kingdom of Men and select the choicest prey for the glory of the hunt.  I have known Ghuls to track down those who revealed their secrets in not only oases and caravans, but in cities and even in the bright of the day.  In legend, it is said that Ghuls will scour an entire kingdom with sandstorms so that one treacherous fool can be torn away from the kingdom and so into the desert for the feast.  In writing of these secrets and sundering my blood oath to Naram-gal, it may yet be that such a fate will be my own.

But it is not only the sharers of secrets who are hunted.  In the name of vengeance, or to repay a dark pact made with a necromancer, a cunning Ghul may choose to wear the robes of slain prey and walk amongst the streets as a beggar or harridan until the prey has been tracked and stolen.

Not only are the guilty hunted thus, but the innocents as well.

~

There is a fell practice which many fear but few know the truth of, and that is the consummation of mortal infants and children.

There are times when the elder of a clan will prophesize that a unique bloodline must be joined with the pack’s own to ensure the Ghuls’ survival.  It is true there are eccentric bloodlines with many Ghuls among them, the lines of sorcerers of old.

Worthy children are stolen, and their entrails torn out so that they quickly grow to become mature Ghuls themselves.  There is even a legend that the Ghuls may create new clans by returning such children to their households after the metamorphosis, so that the parents fear the child and learn the truth of its fate when they themselves are brought into the clan in later years.  Such legends are called changelings, and the parents are either brought into the secrecy of the Cabal or destroyed.  Of such creatures, I know not of their veracity.

~

Despite all these abominations, the most common hunt is simply one for the feast.  Unworthy mortals are food and nothing more.  They are torn apart, not to be transformed, but only to die; and the longevity of the hunting-pack is greatened by the vergence of the lifeblood.

When such a feast takes place, as I have told, the greatest and eldest Ghuls devour the greatest share.  Scraps are vied for by the others, and the treatment of the weak will vary from clan to clan.  Some of the weakest Ghuls eat only the defecated gore of their own kindred, while others are cared for and fed scraps within the confines of the habrud.

~

Of human flesh, the choicest elements remain:

The genitals.  I know only that there are rites of Ghul fertility, but the deeper secrets of this are a riddle to me still;

The eyes.  They are said to give the devourer second sight, merging the journeys of the Dreamlands with the Real;

The heart.  Such is the touchstone of eternity;

And,

The brain.  Ghuls long to experience the emotions, the terrors and the desires of the slain.  In this manner, they do for fleeting moments touch again upon the hem of memory-veiled mortality.  Of course, they feed only upon the brains of mortals, not the brains of other Ghuls, lest the disease should come.

~

These are the Abominations of the Feast.

SCROLL XXX

Canticles of the Deathless Ones ~

The First, of Naram-gal,

The Metamorphosis of the Feast

There are three great canticles, or song-spells, which I did learn from Hetshepsu, Anata and Naram-gal.  These are three of the many incantations of the Ghuls.

Should you be honored to hear such a ritual, know you are in the presence of the greatest of their Kingdom.  The strongest and eldest Ghuls are those who retain mortal intellect, while shunning the illusion of the soul.  Such Ghuls can read many languages, and can speak with cunning inflection and even mock many human frailties with the lilting of their tongues.  Such cantus-Ghuls may be seen as cruel, for they know they can never return to the soft pleasures of mortality.  Yet they possess the power to destroy those who live, and to choose the worthy from among the frail to be as they are, and so to learn their spells.

The first canticle is sung when the Ghuls feast upon a willing victim’s belly, and while he lays dying, he is saved and made to become one with their kith.  This is the chant which I first heard echoed behind me as I fled the metamorphosis of Fatimah.  I render it in this way:

~

O Nergal, god of death, reaper of remains

Who dwelleth beneath the E-Meslam,

You who crawled forth from the aeons,

From the waterfalls of blood of Belet-ili,

Be cheated of this offering,

This mortal who is our prey!

For this one is of the favored,

Offering herself to us in sacrifice,

And she is to stand amongst us

In the Kingdom of the Ghuls.

~

You, who we devour, O chosen,

Become as one with us

As we rend open thy belly,

As we feast upon thy entrails!

(The victim is held down, the feast begins.)

~

Rise not Ereshkigal, goddess of the netherworld,

Descender of the Ganzir, lavisher

Who dances in veils of blood and shadow

From the many-labyrinthed palace of the Kur,

And be appeased!  Honor this one’s sacrifice,

This fallen one who never

Shall become thy slave.

~

In turn, Lord and Queen of the world beneath,

To you in twain we offer this,

The gidim-soul of one who writhes in agony.

The flesh and mind of this one shall be ours,

Yet the breath of her Qat etemmi shall be yours.

Strip this shivering seed out from the husk,

Chain this gidim-soul in the garden of Ereshkigal

And let the others therein revel in its majesty.

~

There among the kings who are no more,

Hammurabi, Dumuzid, Mashda and Aga of Kish,

Let this soul pass among them as an equal.

So let the gidim stand before vainglorious Gilgamesh,

He who righteously did seek of immortality

And there let this gidim of woman mock him,

For immortality is meant for the Ghul alone.

~

Let this one, whose entrails we devour,

Be as one with us!

We feast upon the belly of this choicest prey,

For she is worthy,

And yet we leave the heart and mind to remain.

By the essential salts of Osir we preserve this flesh,

By the ichor of Anubis and the Isis-tears

We fill the emptying veins of this, the chosen one.

~

Newborn, sing with every resonance of our Cabal!

Let your torments as we feast upon you

Be not death agonies,

But the ecstasy of metamorphosis,

The gift of Naram-gal!

Feel torment no more, thou chosen!

Kneel you amongst us!

Crawl and feast with us,

Raven, grieve, and sate thyself

On that which was of your body and is no more!

(The eviscerated victim is made to feed upon her own entrails in the circle of the pack, and in this manner she doth become a Ghul.)

~

And so the false gods are appeased,

Thy soul is no more.

Your heart, with Osir and Isis, surges on,

And now you are one with us.

So will you learn the true lore of the worlds ...

Of Cthulhu,

Whose dreams in fell R’lyeh you shall not hear;

Of the Night-gaunts, our consorts,

Who soar and bear us through the frigid veils

Unto every kingdom of the Dreamlands,

Save for vaunted and onyx Kadath:

To Narthos, the Bnazi,

To Lirania and Mondath,

Where we shall reveal to you the many wonders

Of the ages of dream, loss, desire,

And of nightmare.

~

You shall learn and lick the hands of Nyarlathotep,

Keeper and bestower of all our secrets.

You will venerate Yog-Sothoth,

He who touches the gates between the worlds

Upon the paired weaves of the underworld,

For so does Yog-Sothoth

Open to you the Dreamlands

And the Kingdom of the Ghul.

~

Come now, learn with us,

Revel with us in glory!

May this one rise,

Rise!

SCROLL XXXI

Canticles of the Deathless Ones ~

The Second, of Anata,

The Portioning of Severance

This is the canticle of Anata, the eldest Ghul in the clan of Naram-gal.  She did share it with me when she consumed the remains of the man who dared to assault me in the outskirt ruins of Babylon, ere my ritual for the resurrection of Adaya.  (While Anata’s presence there is not otherwise alluded to, this incident is told of at the end of this Codex.  Did Anata brave the surface world once more, to protect Al-Azrad whom she loved?  This tempting hint of such a secret is all we have. ~K.)

Although she was born in Babylon, Anata in life was one of the Salt-Singers, the peoples who dwelled in the farther desolation of the ancient Holy Land.  She spake that she did dwell in Zeboim, near to the depraved city of Gomorrah itself.

As such, Anata is the only Ghul I have known to venerate the divine path of carnal numeration, assigning principles of power to the ten abstractive elements of the Elder Tree of Life.  (Whateley has written here:  “Was Anata then one of the practitioners of the art which preceded the Kabbalah?”)

Unique among the Ghuls I have known in this life, Anata believed that this incantation did empower her to apportion the essences or radiances of her prey, strengthening not only herself, but ensuring the longevity and tranquility of her entire pack amongst the clan of Naram-gal.

This incantation is to be canted over the remains of those victims who were not worthy to become Ghuls.  By separating the sacred vitae, the radiances from the unworthy flesh, she turned the feast upon the lowly meat of an untouchable into a rite of arcane empowerment.

Other Ghuls did not believe as she did, even amongst the members of her own clan.  Yet she is the wisest Ghul outside of Egypt that I have ever known.  I therefore include this ritual as one example of the manifold and various rituals of the Ghuls, all of which are spells cast to strengthen themselves and enhance their longevity, whilst signifying the unique culture and belief of the chanter herself.

The incantation is spoken in verses, as each part of the body is consumed.  Following the ten numerary principles of Zeboim, the feast is begun with the victim’s feet, so that the basest of flesh is first consumed and the meat which holds the greatest powers—of the heart, the eyes, and especially the brain—is consumed toward the end.  The meal is shared with the other Ghuls of the pack.

This spell, Anata did tell me, can be cast not only in the feasting upon dead bodies, but also upon those who are held down and consumed alive.  She did revealeth to me that when a man is devoured in this manner, it is common for him to remain alive—especially with constriction of the blood-flow—until the upper legs are consumed and the lifeblood gusheth forth.

I truly believe that this incantation could be spoken and the ritual cast by a mortal, or another Ghul, and still grant the caster arcane empowerment.  Yet the core of its power is not within its reiterative and repetitive verses, but rather in the absolute faith of the believer as it is spoken.

~

(The victim, if alive, is pinned down by the strongest members of the pack.  Otherwise, the body is laid out and the limbs arranged in cruciform, honoring the four directional attenuations of the powers and the elements as honored by the Salt-Singers of ancient Zeboim.)

~

From the lowest to the highest,

Let this meat and sinew greaten

The longevity of the Fangs Crescentine,

The great hunting-pack of the elder Anata.

From the annihilation of the unworthy,

Let the radiances be severed

From their anchoring bones, their mortal chains!

Let the unworthy become exalted!

~

(The feast begins.  Anata is honored to partake of the first portion, and then the remainder is allotted to the others present.  If the victim is alive and must be held down, Anata feasts alone, a process of approximately an hour, until the victim dies.)

~

Cantus I

I devoureth the flesh of the feet,

Which strode over the Kingdom of the Ghul,

Unaware of the glorious netherworld,

Unknowing and unworthy.

So lofts forth the radiance of the crystal,

Shimmering with the transparency of gates.

Yog-Sothoth, ai!

~

Cantus II

I devoureth the flesh of the leg

Of the damned,

Over which the heart surgeth.

So lofts forth the radiance of opal,

Glowing with the rainbow of the Seven Stars.

Nyarlat, ai!

~

Cantus III

I devoureth the flesh of the leg

Of the blessed,

Which strideth not into the Kingdom of Heaven

But walks between the voids,

Into nothingness, unto Chaos.

So lofts forth the majesty of smaragdus,

The radiance of emerald.

Hasturat, ai!

~

(Every victim Anata has ever devoured has, if eaten alive, died prior to the fourth invocation.  The restrainers are freed to feast.)

~

Cantus IV

We devoureth the flesh of the genitals,

The eternal foundation of creation,

Of daemons, seduction,

Ever the most corrupt and pure.

So lofts forth the radiance of chalcedon,

Coruscating radiance of cloud.

Nug a Yeb, ai!

~

Cantus V

We devoureth the flesh of the chest,

Throne of compassion,

Leaving the heart within its cage

For the greater revelation yet to come.

So lofts forth the splendor of topazion,

The radiance of the burning sand.

Sultan of the Yellow Veil, ai!

~

Cantus VI

We devour the flesh of the arm

Of judgment,

The flame-bearer of battle

Righteous in all destruction.

So lofts forth the glow of carbuncle,

The radiance red as blood.

Shal-Nithurat, ai!

~

Cantus VII

We devoureth the flesh of the arm

Of greatness,

The resplendent limb of the smiter,

That which destroyeth only

For the ecstasy of wrath.

So lofts forth the twilight of amethystos,

The radiance which is violet.

Qa-Tsathoqq, ai!

~

Cantus VIII

We devoureth the heart,

The tides of all hatred and desire

Surging with the oceans

In the blackness of the deep.

So lofts forth the glow of the pearl,

The iridescent radiance of moonlight.

Dagonai a Hodroth, ai!

~

Cantus IX

We devoureth the eyes

Which beheld all and saweth nothing,

Oblivious to They who stride

Not within the spheres,

But among the Voids between.

So lofts forth the shadow of khitrai,

The blackness of obsidian reflected.

Azathot-kol, ai!

~

Cantus X

We devoureth the mind,

This vessel’s annihilation.

For never shall the unworthy

Riseth among our kind.

So lofts forth the brilliance of the amaranth,

The dream of the One Who Sleeps,

Iridescence eternal and white.

May he be sated thus, never to destroy us.

K’tulu, ai!

~

(The weakest of the pack are then allowed to lap the blood-remnant of the feast.  The ritual ends.)

SCROLL XXXII

Canticles of the Deathless Ones ~

The Third, of Hetshepsu,

The Worship of the Fractures and the Gates

This is the black canticle which I did hear chanted by the most ancient Ghul Hetshepsu, the Eater of Dust, who I later did meet in the necropolis of Saqqara far beneath the deserts north of Lacus Moeris in fabled Khom.

This is a dangerous and likely fatal ritual, for it is one which is solely intended to extendeth a Ghul’s life, and hath no bearing on the ken of mortal desire.  The manner in which the incantation is cast, foremost, is that a blood sacrifice be made.  An infant human who has been half fed upon, yet not fully consumed, must have a circle of power cast about it ere the spell can begin to be canted.

For the blood is the life, and even more than the menses of a maiden, an innocent child’s blood is the most powerful of all.

~

The spell glorifies the opening of a gate between the Real and the Otherness, the Empire of the Blackened Mind; and from the Seven Suns higher still in their Beyonding, the reflecting of a second opened gate unto the Void which lieth beyond Kadath and which approacheth Azathoth itself.

Casting such a spell with the proper blood sacrifice causes the chanter to be the attenuating focus of not only the first touched gate, but too, the star-lens for the second gate’s reflection.  One’s life force—if, of course, one is a Ghul—is thus unified for one moment with the ultimate bifurcation of the twining Paths of Chaos, whilst the vessel of the chanter’s body remaineth here of the earth.

Having sacrificed thus, a Ghul who dares the incantation will find his life yet again extended by several centuries.  Few indeed are the Ghuls who perish from old age, for these creatures if unwounded live for thousands of years.  But of those last few Ghul-elders who hath reason to fear such a death from ashen atrophy, Hetshepsu is one.

The peril of this spell is that if it is cast without the proper sacrifice, or with any mispronunciation of the Aklo words of power, its undirected energies can rend the Void and open the second gate not only for the reflection of the caster’s essence, but too, for the flesh of the reflected spheres from beyond where the Pipers dance before the Throne.  Thus the flesh of the many Path-spheres can descend.  Which is to say, if the spell is not cast perfectly, there is a chance that the incantation can summon forth Yog-Sothoth.

I have transliterated the Khomite chants of Hetshepsu into Arabic (Dee has written:  “And I, following the Latin of Olaus, into Her Majesty’s Own” (English)), yet I cannot say with certainty that the words herein are perfect.  One’s pronunciation of the Aklo must be immaculate.

Know this canticle as a prime exemplar of the vast powers held by the most ancient among the Ghuls, yet never cast it unless you are a fool who longs for the madness of revelation before the ‘Umr at-Tawil; and then thy death, torn apart among the coruscations of the many reflected spheres.

~

(In thy native tongue:)

Let the shorn life of this child

Be not wasted, let its lifeblood

Serve as my supplication

Of Tawil at’Umr, ‘Umr at-Tawil.

I beseech you,

O eternal and majestic,

You who are gate and key

Within the moment of thine own opening,

Yog-Sothoth!

~

For Yog-Sothoth knows

The gathering of the spheres,

The unity of the gate.

In reflecting the infinitude of the spheres,

Yog-Sothoth is become the gate.

For Yog-Sothoth is the key,

And the guardian of the gate

Unto the Utter Void,

Where the Piping Gods doth sing

The vigintillion names of uncreation.

~

Hear me,

O Lord of the Opening of the Way!

~

(In Egyptian:)

Heru-heb!

Apep, Apep izift!

~

(In the Aklo tongue:)

Yogg-Sothoth,

Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin.

N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah.

Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth,

Wza-y’ei!  Wza-y’ei!

Ygnaiih, thflthkh’ngha

Y’bthnk ygnaiih,

H’ehye n’grkdl’lh.

Y’ai ‘ng’ngah, Yog-Sothoth!

H’ai, L’geb f’ai throdog

Aiah!  Aiah!

Yi-nash Yog-Sothoth,

He-legeb ai’throdogh,

Aiah!

~

(The mutilated remnant of the infant is then devoured, and the spell of the thricefold centuries is cast.)

GATHERING THE SEVENTH

The Nameless City

A Note on the Text

Reflecting Upon the Seventh Gathering

By Professor Kelly

As I decrypt the seven codices of John Dee’s Necronomicon, I find that many of the “fictional” revelations shared within the tales of H. P. Lovecraft have come to be misunderstood (and thus, recast as unintentional untruths) by other authors.  One of the most unfortunate and persistent of these fallacies concerns the identification of Irem with an aspect of the Nameless City.

Irem and the Nameless City are entirely separate places.  The Nameless City was raised by human servitors, slaves to the Serpent People.  Irem, in a later age, was built by freed slaves who fled the cataclysm which swallowed the Nameless and raised the massive Deluge in its wake.  The two cities are far from another, although both are hidden beneath the sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

Irem was dreamt of by Al-Azrad, and he first experienced it through the Dreamlands.  In the physical world, it was only “found” by Al-Azrad years after the current narrative, long after his time in Yemen, then Arabia, then Babylon and Egypt.  Only with his later return to the Rub’ al Khali did he truly discover the ruins of Irem of the Many Pillars.

(Succinctly, this first Codex tells of his youth and Adaya; Codex II concerns itself with Egypt; and Codex III is of the Dreamlands and Irem proper.)

The confusion rises from the fact that Al-Azrad told he first explored Irem within his dreams.

~

The Nameless City, however, was first explored by Al-Azrad soon after his departure from the Clan of the Shattered Jaw.  He was to visit the Nameless City twice in his life:  once in seeking the funereal discs of the Serpent People, and again much later with his own cabal of assassins, coming to slaughter the Cult of Cthulhu.  The first adventure, the search for the discs of Anar’kai, is detailed herein.

Following are the scrolls which tell the tale of the tomb of the viper-striders, and the missing secrets of necromancy with which Al-Azrad fashioned his spell to raise the slain Adaya from the land of the restless dead.

SCROLL XXXIII

Of the Land of the Honeyed Locusts

I know not how many of the falling sands of time I poured into the black art with Anata underground.  I learned all that she could teach me in the conundrums of the necromancers.  I observed the Ghuls in their rites, the chanting of their spells, the mourning of lost ages.  I even beheld the feasting many times.  And even—for I feared if I did not, Naram-gal who had risked so much to bring me to his people would deem me to be unworthy—I once partook of their unholy feast myself.

One evening, after I had succeeded in a deft and intriguing trick of the art, animating a corpse’s remnant after it had been feasted upon, Anata was deeply pleased with me.  She said then that she could teach me no more.  I was told that I must leave, and never speak of the cistern where the Clan of the Shattered Jaw stands hidden within the wasteland.

With fondness and veneration, I took my leave of the Ghul-crone Anata and I did hold court in the labyrinthine undercroft ruled by Naram-gal.  I asked of him where I was to go hence, and he said:

“Al-Azrad, your path is clear.  Rise and wander where you will, sleep with the black jewel that I have given you.  And one night, when you are worthy, you will dream of a sunken spire in the wasteland where there is buried the Nameless City.  Go then, venture where you dare, enter the tombs and seek the discs of Anar’kai which Anata told you of.  Of your tomorrows’ wanderings, there is nothing more that I can say.”

I asked of him this only:  that he share my gratitude with Aharon, and my love for the reborn Fatimah.  Neither had yet returned from the Empire of the Blackened Mind, and with sadness I knew that I was not meant to see them as they were.  Naram-gal promised me that he would bear both of these heartfelt tidings in their time.

And then, asking me to trust in him, he did bind my eyes with black silk.  I knew it was time for my own exile.  I let him lift me, and he did carry me into the air of the desert night.

Soon I learned that I had grown too accustomed to the death-stench of the habrud, and the coolness of its caves.  Although I could hear in the cries of the locusts that it was the hour of sunset, the air still felt as a fire upon my skin.  The dust tasted sweet, laced with faint promises of cinnamon and windborn seed.  Somewhere, miles distant, a campfire was burning and I could taste its ashes.  Had my senses been so heightened, or had they been starved by my time in the netherworld?

Naram-gal whispered, “We go, my child.  Be of the wind, and of the night.”

Leaping with me carried upon his back, Naram-gal bore me far so that I would not know where the habrud of the Shattered Jaw had been.  As we traveled, he warned me that my skin would now be sensitive to the sun, and if I were too soon to embrace the day I might well be blinded.  So had I become a creature of the night.

And why not?  That I had ever been.

~

When at last he set me upon the sands and removed the silk, I opened my eyes.  I stood upon a scarlet dune.  Beckoned by the winds, I looked into them, and beheld the last cusp of a crimson sun as it faded into the west.  I could have been anywhere, but my swift eyes regarded great cliffs to the south.  These cliffs were spun with riblike shadows, and garlanded with patches of tashir thorn and stubborn blots of iocab tree.  I knew few places where such plants would grow together.  Sea-breezes were near.  I suspected that I was near to Hadhramaut, and therefore near to where Naram-gal had stolen me away so long ago.

And how many moons had passed since then?  Could I still recognize the stranger, the young man who had known so little, the desert guide and warrior I had been?  In feasting upon the flesh of men, what had I become?

As I considered these riddles and looked to the south, Naram-gal said, “Fear not yourself.  There, and near to you, an answer.  Understand.”  He pointed with one wasted claw.

Some twelve paces to our right, there were scorpions in march upon the sand.  A she-vulture chased after them, beak spread and black tongue pointed.  Her wings were raised.  I admired her guile, as she bent and snapped off the stings of scorpions with her beak, gnashing what remained.

Naram-gal did say, “Remember me thus, young Abd.  See how the she-vulture feasts?  The venomous ones, believing themselves to be mighty with their poison, fall prey to the cunning after all.”

“I know that you believe the Cult of Cthulhu murdered your Adaya.  And so may it be.  Yet if you seeketh vengeance, I will neither ally nor dissuade you.  There is far more that you have yet to understand.  If you will seek vengeance upon those you hate, be cunning as the vulture, child Adb.  Do not pursue the scorpions until you know how to strip them of their stings.  Seeketh Jerusalem, far to the west, and there dream of me.  There will I come to you and set you upon your path as the avenger.  But be warned, such a murderous hunt as you contemplate would be a course of many years.”

I said that I was grateful for his wisdom, and it was true that I still sought to avenge my beloved.  I had sworn that I would hunt Adaya’s slayers—and the treacherous Najeed himself, if I could, for I had become not only a fighter of prowess but a necromancer as well—but that my first purpose was to be reunited with my beloved.

And after the resurrection, who could know what might transpire?  If Adaya lived and desired only my love, perhaps we two would live in peace together.  Otherwise …

Naram-gal looked at me sadly, and he said, “You are not a man of peace.”

We turned away from the hunting vulture, and he and I sat upon the dune.  We marveled at the rise of night, an endless majesty of stars.

A sliver of one falling star cast itself across the west, a blessing of beauty.  I had not seen the skies in what seemed like an eternity.  I breathed in the silence, opening myself, no longer understanding who I was.

Was I now only my obsession?  What would love be, to a man who was now as black-hearted as myself?  Was I evil?  What would my Adaya, who had only ever known our childhood and our innocence, believe of me?

Naram-gal regarded me in solemn wonder.  Whenever I was tormented or in reverie, when my mortal passions were swelling at their highest tide, he always then was fascinated simply to sit in silence and behold me.

An hour may have passed.

When he was prepared to leave me, he said:

“You will live, Al-Azrad.  Shelter our secret in your heart.  I regard you as my son.  You have done well, and should you find that your resurrection of Adaya bringeth failure, you are welcome to wander into the desert.  There I will find you, and there will your belly be torn by my kindred.  If you choose, you will become a Ghul and dwell as my heir in the habrud of the Shattered Jaw.  Should you ever long for our eternity, all you need do is swallow the black jewel and dream of me.  The next time thereafter you wandereth in the wasteland, there I would find you.”

I thanked him, honored by his tribute.  I had no intention of following the path of Fatimah and Aharon.  I was certain that my resurrection of Adaya would be the victory of my soul.  I needed only to find the Nameless City lost for ages, to unbury a tomb of the viper-striders, to steal the precious funeral discs of Anar’kai, to journey thence to Babylon, to search the ruins of the Tower of Babel, to find the tombs beneath, to unseal them, to discover the lesser discs of the priests of Nyarlat …

~

My time with Anata had blinded me to the futility of my quest.  She was a creature of elucidation, of masteries.  Anata would pose a problem of necromancy:  the animacy of a child’s corpse, the art of seeing through the eyes of the dying, the swallowing of a dying man’s memories.  But now, alone in the trackless wasteland, how was I to accomplish all that was required of me, so that I might learn the last arts of necromancy which were beyond Anata’s own wisdom?

As I realized how impossible my path had become, I beseeched Naram-gal.  “And now what am I to do, father, without you?  And now?”

And he did say, “Trust in the jewel.  In sharing my arcane stone with you, you are gifted with the fringes of my dreams.  The Dreamlands, which you call the Empire of the Blackened Mind, are not home only to Nodens and Koth and the frail gods of frozen Kadath.  No.  There looms one greater, who you know of through the incantations of Anata.  And will you tell me his name?”

And I answered, “Nyarlathotep, the Lord in Ebon.  Bringer of secrets, guardian of the ways.  But is he not the god of the Ghuls alone?”

Naram-gal cackled.  He said, “What you believe to be gods are simple things, the living idols of mortal want.  They do not exist.  There are vast powers in this world, child Abd.  This world is but a mote of ash.  There are countless worlds, and reflections of dimensions.  Think of these cosmoses as a desert of ashes, each world a grain.  The powers who stride that desert of all realities are ageless and ravening.”

“To them we are insects, and though we are miniscule, we are not nothing.  They feast upon us, they haunt us.  For these powers have their own purposes, and the purpose of Nyarlathotep is to offer wisdom to the seeker, adventure to the passionate, and the forbidden to the questioner.  In return, he asks only for  adoration.  For what purpose?  Who can know?  But he is the Lord in Ebon, neither god nor of the Ghuls alone.  He whispers to all who hope to find him.  If he comes to you in nightmare, and you do kiss his hand, so will he come to you in the Real as well.”

My head swam with so many conflicting riddles.  How could there be more than one reflection of reality?  I said that I did not understand.  And Naram-gal said:

“Oh, child.  I cannot force you to one destiny.  You are mortal, and that majestic frailty means that you are free to follow whatever path blessed or corrupt you choose take.  I say only, if you begin to fail in your quest for the spell to raise Adaya, call upon the Lord in Ebon with your heart.  Dream of him and hold my stone.  For he will aid you, should you choose to adore him.”

And I asked, “Why did Anata speak so little of this?”

And Naram-gal said, “Because my mother Anata loves you, Al-Azrad.  She could not bear to see you among the damned.  She protected you, taught you all that she could without having you swear yourself to enthrallment before the Lord in Ebon himself.  He beareth greater wisdom still, which would aid you.  But in seeking him, in asking for his gifts and in receiving them, you might come to find that you are no longer free:  not merely a servitor in flesh, but in mind and dream as well.  Should you let Nyarlathotep overwhelm you in revelation, you may find that you do not even have the power over when you choose to die.  All such twisted victories can come as the price of worshipping Nyarlathotep, our dear father who protects us.  You must know that if you seek too much of him, he will grant your every wish, and so you will be damned.  Call upon him as you must, but first, try with all your heart to do everything that you can without his boon.  Do you understand?”

Too many answers, so many more questions than I could bear.  I had never seen Naram-gal so kindly, so close to tears.  He did love me in his way.  For him, I said only what I could:  that I would try to understand.

It would be enough.  It had to be.

Naram-gal kissed my brow, and he did leave me.

SCROLL XXXIV

Of the Lord in Ebon,

And How I Did Receive

His Vision, the One True Dream

Of the Elder and Nameless City

Much time passed before I did find my way at last to the Nameless City.  I ventured to join the northward caravans, but the invisible mark of Anata seemed to be upon me.  People feared me, even if I did protect them or earn their trust with kindness.  As time was lost and the moons wove on, I became an exile from even the caravans, an outsider of all.

I became a hermit, an anchorite of the wastes.  I lived in caves and wandered from oasis to oasis, eating honey and locusts and the manna of the desert, ever unburying the lore beneath the sands, ever wandering.

I would journey alone to towns as I had need, trading some little of my manna and using all the skills of scavengery which my dear Fatima had taught to me, seeking arcane scrolls and my own answers.

I learned some little of the Nameless City, which was so ancient that it was a place without a name even when the generals of Alexander had schemed over Arabia a thousand years ago.  And the city, ever a legend, had never been found.

The one legend I had reason to believe in, because it echoed in some points the teachings of Anata, was little more than a memory of a dream:  The city had been raised by serpent-spirits from underground, before the Deluge, long before Babylon or the Pyramids or even Jericho.  It had been cast into ruin and abandoned before Pharaonic Khom had been born in the name of the Scorpion King.  Raised upon a mighty spire and walled with cliffs to every side, it had survived the Deluge solely because of its locale.

Where could such a place be found?  In reading so many legends, I found that those which I trusted more were from the south of the Khali, while those that were wild fables came from the west and east.  I came to believe that the truer accounts were closer to the source, and so I believed that the city would be found far to the southeast of Gerrah, and far to the northeast of Hadhramaut.

~

Every night I was alone, I would dream, cradling the black jewel.  I longed to dream of my Adaya, and have her come to life in the palace where my purer self still wandered.  But the halls of the Palace of Nothingness were barren, and I feared to descend the ornate staircase on my own.  Ever since I had dreamed of her in the cavern of flame and suffered the forbiddance of Kaman-Thah, I could not find Adaya in my dreams.

But one night, in the torment of my loneliness, the stranger did come to me.

He was beautiful, the Lord in Ebon.  In sleep I stood wading in the shallows of the River Skai, lost in the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  It was twilight, and as the day faded from all the Kingdoms of Dream, violet stars began to glimmer out from the clouds, hung like moistened jewels upon the silk of the coming night.  Brief waterfalls fell in mossy tiers along the Skai, and tranquil pools smothered by lilies glowed between them.

The Dreamlands.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I then knew, were an echo of this paradise.  Everywhere blossomed the verdure and riot of life, the air itself was filled with hovering beads of water.  Rainbows glittered in the mist, and shy Buopoths came down to drink, hiding themselves behind the tresses of mighty willow trees.

I first beheld the Lord as he walked across the waters to join me.  He was darker than the men of Egypt, darker than the men of the spice-lands of Punt and Ta Netjer.  His eyes were utter black, yet the irises were rimmed with gold.  He was dressed as a Pharaoh of ancient Khom, with a perfumed and silk-woven beard, and a black khepresh crown was poised upon his head.  And as he came to me, tall, slow, majestic, I felt myself benumbed:  tremoring in the presence of one greater than any god.  Against my will, overwhelmed by his glory, I knelt to him.  He deigned to let me kiss his open hands.

And he said, in a voice both sonorous and grave, “Abd, rise.  You were named Al-Azrad by yourself in the time before Ghanara, do you remember?  Did you mother never sing to you your true name?  This is the first of the gifts that I will give you.  Your given name is Samir, which means ‘speaker in twilight.’  Your mother the Shepherdess was Soraya, ‘seven stars.’  So did your father name you both.  So rise, Samir, for I am a friend and I have come to ease your sorrow.”

I trembled so.  I stood in the shallows, he upon the water’s surface.  I could not meet his eyes.  Weeping, I stepped back and fell upon the bank, surrounded by lush grasses.  He came to me.  The mist beaded off the river’s rushes as he strode through them.  The Lord in Ebon did sit beside me.

And he said, “Simplicity is a barrier.  I am going to speak to you in the mother tongue, the language without words.  Give me once more your hand.”

As I did so, as he touched me, a thrill of ice leapt between us.  In my mind’s eye he wove the lovely image of the Real, the Khali of my homeland, as it had been ten thousand years ago.

~

Grasslands wove all around us, and the strands of leaf were twelve feet in their height.  Mighty sloth-like beasts ambled through this windswept wilderness, foraging from one tree to the next.  Wherever a beast rose against a tree-trunk, it would rise, and the long tongue would pluck the seed pods from the tree’s emerald crown.  These creatures were as tall as four men standing upon one another’s shoulders.  The Lord in Ebon, moving the grasses with a wind sprung from his hands, stood beside one of the beasts unseen.

And I said, Where is this wondrous land?  Where are its people?  When I spoke, I spoke only with my mind.

Chimes resonated somewhere.  The sky overflowed with a trillion stars, coruscating with all the colors of a fabled dragon’s trove.

And the Lord in Ebon said within my mind, You are in the before.  Do you not see?  This is the wasteland of the Khali, your home, before the freedom of the savage men.  Beneath us lies the netherworld, the Serpent Land.  Come!

And taking me by the hand, Nyarlathotep leapt with me into the sky.  Overcome by delight, beholding the miraculous tapestry of a world bereft and windswept far below, I laughed.

~

And the Lord did raise me unto a mighty spire, made of the most ancient stone, poised upon a great plateau with sky to every side.  Nyarlathotep pointed to the utmost pinnacle of that place.  There, touched by the light of every star, stood a wondrous city of fragile minaret and cloud-reflecting spire.  In all the wild tales of caravans, never had such a glory ever been imagined.  The city glistened like an enormous trove of pearls piled upon the sky.

And the Lord’s mind sent to me, In your own time, you will find this, Samir-Abd.  When you wake, you will know where the ruin lies.  Picture this place buried beneath a thousand feet of sand.  Find the city, Samir.  Find the canticle of your beloved, find your destiny.  Go forth!  Wake!  Rise!

~

And I woke, and such a feeling of loss and death washed over me that I cradled my knees against my chest, and sobbed.  I laid there all the night, against my weary camel, whispering to no one.

Whispering of my Adaya.

Whispering of the glory of the Lord in Ebon, the lovely Nyarlathotep.

SCROLL XXXV

Unto the ... ?

(?)

~

(Dee makes a note of this lacuna, but the scroll itself is missing from his translation.  This may be one of the many reasons why the Nameless City in our own age still remains undiscovered.)

SCROLL XXXVI

Of the Nameless City ~

The Swallowed Labyrinth

Whose Name Is Now in Nothingness,

And the Coils of Its Deeping

I knew.  I knew where the Nameless City was.  Far in the nothingness, far beyond Hadhramaut in the quarter named the Great Emptiness, east of the Wild of Endless Storms, there I would find it.  Buried for ten thousand years, the secrets of the Nameless City would be mine.

I refused all aid, I was reckless in my certainty.  Day and night I journeyed.  A sandstorm arose, and the Jinn cried out in its winds to drown the moon.  But the storm was but a child to the ones I had endured; and I was mighty with the surety of the dream of Nyarlathotep upon the River Skai.

I masked my face as Fatimah had taught me, I mounted my camel and through the night of the storm I struggled on.

~

The moon turned red with soaring sands, then black, then into nothing.  I knew I should turn my course, and therefore I did not.  I dismounted, I cut my beast and soothed this cruelty with my gentle singing.  With my jambiya to the slit beneath the hump of fat, I drank my moaning camel’s blood.  Only in the morning, when I was certain that I had found my destiny, did I free the camel to flee across the waste.

For I was there.

I stood in a low and desolate valley, ringed all around with thorn.  In that circle, only the waste remained.  Nothing would grow there.  Far to that great circle’s edge, upon the southern horizon stood one exposed and blunted fang of ancient stone.

Coming nearer, I could see that this stone was curved and very old.  It was not jagged, but smoothed away by time and the sands of centuries.  Standing beside it and looking south, I could see low walls splayed out in cruciform, arrays of the foundations of mighty towers.  The towers themselves no longer stood, but in their age of glory they must have been vast indeed.

If I had not braved the sandstorm’s eye, I never would have found the ruin.  The passing storm had scoured away ten feet of sand, and so only had the utmost height of the Nameless City been bared to the ashen sky.

I knelt and touched the smoothness of an unburied tower wall.  The surface was pitted basalt, older than Khom itself, resonating with the souls of ancient days.

I looked for inscriptions, for statues.  All was smoothed away by time.  Finding nothing more, I walked further south to the city’s dune-lost edge.  To the west of the last dune, a naked reach of the city’s bedrock lay exposed.  It loomed like a shelf up from the sands, some seven feet in height.  Could this be the summit of a cliff?  Surely the city had been raised upon a plateau of some kind, to be so vast in the middle of this endless waste?  How else could such a city not be swallowed by the sands?  I stood musing, realizing that I was standing a thousand feet in that city’s air, with my feet upon the sands which had entombed it.

The dream of soaring and the Lord in Ebon came back to me.

Yes.

I searched the cliff face.  There were some few faint impressions where the divots of handholds or stake-holes had once been.  Tracing these smoothed hollows down into the sand, I found a tiny void of empty air some three inches high.  This I knew—for the Lord in Ebon had shown me this place before—was the very top of a cave mouth’s emptiness.  There, in the still-loose sands, I dug with great fervor.

Twilight had passed me by, unnoticed.  As I rested and drank water, night came again.  I dug more fervently.

The three-inch void became a hollow as I exposed the buried cave.  As the temperature of its stone began to change, a chill air rushed out and over me.  How deep must the tomb-shafts beneath this ruin be, for the air there to be so cold?  I reminded myself that this must be the great cliff spire of my vision, hollowed out with tombs and the pearlescent city surmounting all.  Such a plateau would be ideal for defense and majesty.  But surely such a city would need to dig very deep indeed for its water.  Were there cisterns below the tombs?  Perhaps even a reservoir?

I widened the hole and crawled within the cave, swearing to myself that I would not tarry long.  I had water still for seven days, and honeyed locusts as well.  If the sands at the cave’s entrance collapsed as I rested, I could try to unbury it again.  But if another sandstorm arose and I was inside the cave and far from its only mouth, the storm would seal me in.  I would die horribly in the dark.

But the vision was all, a fire within me.  I had waited years to find such a wonder.  And Anata herself had sworn not only that this place existed, but that here would be buried the secrets of my beloved’s resurrection.  How could I wait a moment longer?

~

I lit one of my few torches:  scraping flint to steel, pouring sparks upon resin-coated straw, puffing the tiny cinders into a fire.  I crawled deeper into the cave, away from the moonlight, believing that I would find only a narrow tomb.

But this cave, it was nothing of the kind.  It was a sacred grotto of the ancients, widened into smooth and artificial spaces.  As I descended ever deeper, a carved ceiling arose until it soared a full twenty feet above me.  I marveled at the chisel marks where the wind could not erase the ages, where the iron-basalt stone had somehow been carved with triangular glyphs and decorations.  How old could this tomb be?  And who was buried here?

A voice sang within me, in answer:  The Serpent People.  The viper-striders.

I then looked to the walls, searching for inscriptions, archways, perhaps even the ashen remnants of mummies within alcoves.  In the farthest corner, some eighty paces from the cavern’s mouth, I found an alabaster pedestal half-buried in the sand.

Planting my torch in the sands beside it and digging out its base, I found that the pedestal was itself graven in entrancing petroglyphs.  These sigils were curved stick figures, abstractions of men with the heads of cobras.  They appeared to be wielding blades, or perhaps sistrums.  These figures reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphs which I had seen in Sana’a with my child-friend Akram, in scrolls which replicated by their drawings the beast-headed men of legend from Thebes, Thinis, and Coptos.

But these strangely curved portrayals were far more ancient, of a marvelous yet sinister cast.  The style was cunning, a unique and unknown art based on interlaced crescents and triangles compositing greater figures.

The figures swirled across every surface of the pedestal’s base.  Where was the beginning of this carven scene?  I grabbed my torch up from the sand, and peered at stranger figures still, which were carved in the pedestal’s farthest face near to the wall.

In digging the sands away from the rear of the pedestal, I somehow pressed a stud which served as a throne to one of the bas-relief figures.  The stud clicked, and the pedestal seemed to consume it whole.  I heard an immense grating below me of massive counterweights, stone upon stone.

~

The floor of the cavern trembled.

Where I stood, a whirlpool of sand began to churn all around me.  The sands of the “floor” were rushing down, sucking at my feet, as if I stood inside an immense and emptying hourglass.  I cried out and leapt back, but my footing in the shin-deep sand was poor and I was dragged down screaming into another chamber, some six or seven feet below.

I fell on the top of the new-made sand heap.  More sand rained down around me, and in my panic and desperation to keep my torch out of the cascading sands, I tumbled and fell down the pile head over heel.  Cursing, licking at my thumb which I had burned, I rose to find myself in a narrow corridor.

Here the air was bitter, cool and stale.  I coughed as the sterile reek of ages peeled up around me as a wind, gusting up into the pedestal-cave and out into the night so far above me.

I knew I should have leapt from the height of the sand-pile and there climbed out from the corridor, but I still estimated that I had thirty minutes left to my torch’s light.  And I had two other torches as well; a blessing, for my satchel had fallen down with me. I was fascinated to stand where surely no man had ever stood for at least ten thousand years.

Shouldering my satchel, raising my torch higher to keep the stinging smoke from my eyes, I followed the narrow corridor.  The farther I strode from the sand-pile, the dusts of the floor smoothed out into ripples of sparkling ash.  Thus, where the sands were smoothed, I could sense that the corridor was angling gradually down.  Hastening to explore as much of the tomb as I could before my torches’ depletion would force me to retreat, I continued down the corridor.  I would find as many of the funereal discs as I could, those priceless treasures of the name which belonged to nothing, Anar’kai.

Mesmerized, I almost forgot the immense peril I was in.  A shift of the winds in the desert above me would seal my fate, and I would be imprisoned in my own eerie tomb and never found.

~

The corridor came to an end.

There, in the flickering shadows of my dying torch, were the rudely-chiseled heights of a narrow descending stair.  Creeping further and looking down its steps, I knew that I had never seen its like.  This stair spiraled down in tight coils, and its steps were but two fingers thick, but also each two fingers in descent.  (Whateley has written here:  “A 45-degree angle of descent?”)

Here there were many holes in the wall for my left hand, and with the torch in my right fist and my left fingers along the wall, I precariously made my way down into the depths.

I lost all sense of direction.  The staircase coiled like a serpent, turning a full circle six or perhaps seven times.  At the bottom I found only a circular chamber, and the grimmest and loneliest silence that I have ever known.  My own breathing seemed deafening, the crackling of my torch like gouts of thunder.

I whispered a prayer in a dry throat, if only to hear my own voice.  It echoed thrice eerily in the tiny space, the amplified whispers mocking me.

Looking all around, I saw that the room was not just circular, but spherical and half-filled with sand.  So very strange:  what use could such a chamber serve?  The walls were smooth, except for one.  I saw at my feet, just beside the final stair, a small space no more than eight inches high.

As the first such void had revealed the cave mouth to me in the desert far above, I suspected that this space must be its echo.  This would be the top of an alcove.  And did not Anata tell me that the viper-striders had buried their high priests in such a place?

Again, I planted my torch in the sand and began to dig.

SCROLL XXXVII

My Discovery of the Discs of Anar’kai,

And the Remnant Buried Beneath Them

What I found is difficult for me to say.

First I found four discs of an unknown metal, strung upon a pitted and ancient ring.  They were covered with glyphs and sigils, very minute, spiraling in hundreds of lines which I would later need a crystal prism to magnify and study.  But this could be done, in time.  And I had decrypted many an ancient tongue in dream, slumbering with the jewel of Naram-gal.

Victory!  I had found some few of the funereal discs of Anar’kai.

But the writing upon the discs was far too minute and alien to read there, and time and good fortune were conspiring to abandon me.  Nevertheless, I felt tempted—nay, compelled—to tarry over my newfound treasures for some minutes.

My fascination with the minute glyph-spirals was nearly my end; for my dying torch flickered, and I suddenly realized it had less than a minute of life.  I frantically lit another with flint and steel and straw.  Thus I would have another hour of feeble light, if that. I had only one unlit torch remaining, and still needed to make my precarious return up to the surface.

I dug a little deeper and found something else beneath the discs.

At first, I believed I had found a scroll bundle.  It was gray and exquisitely fragile, and from the holes in it I could see what my discovery truly was:  hundreds of thin sheets pressed against one another, like the interior of the nest of a paper wasp.  Digging further, I found a hole in the papers’ layers, and realized it was not a hole at all.

It was an eye socket.  I had dug and revealed half of a face, and that face was not human, but serpentine.

The face was no sculpture, no.  This had been a living thing.

I cried out, my finger darted away from the hole and snagged on the top of the eye socket.  The entirety of the horror’s head crumbled.  I gasped, and so I breathed in the dust of that vile thing’s collapsing skull.

I coughed, and then I vomited, precious water.  What had I inhaled?  How long had that thing been dead?  And what had it been?

~

I had seen enough.  I fled back up the staircase, stumbling on its precarious and swirling rises.  I stumbled out to the corridor, and ran along it with discs in hand, suppressing my panic, until I finally came to the pile of sand.  Above me loomed the taunting void of my escape.

Looking up, I was fearful, nearly hopeless.  The sand-pile was still growing with falling sands, and its summit was only four feet from the rim of the portal above it.  But that meant that the pile had grown quickly indeed as I had been exploring down below.  As I watched, more sand was pouring down.  How long had I tarried in the tomb?  Soon, the square hole above me would be choked away and there would be no escape.

I climbed into the sand of the pile’s base, and found to my alarm that the pile was so loose and unstable that I was buried up to my knees.  What would be a minor leap and a four-foot grasp was now a jumping vault of more than six feet, from poor footing.  And how could I master such a leap and hold my torch at the same time?

More sands fell.  Despair began to overwhelm me.

Cursing my own stupidity, I risked all.  I looped the discs of Anar’kai about my neck.  I took off my sandals, so that I could run faster and leap higher in the sand.  I threw my torch up through the hole, praying that it would not go out.  It did not, although it hit the pedestal above me and rolled away.   I could see its flickering gouts reflected on the smooth ancient wall far above me.

I strode down the pile, smoothing and tightening the sands as best I could.  I walked twelve paces down the corridor, and turned.  I would need to sprint as best I could.

Taking one deep breath, I ran up the pile.  I leaped.  Clawing up into the air, I nearly missed the hole’s stony edge.  My fingers bled open as I scratched at the crumbling stone around the hole, but found no purchase.  Defeated, I fell.  I tumbled half down the pile of sand.  Radiance flickered fitfully above me.  My torch, lying on its side in swirling sand, had begun to stifle and to die.  Soon I would be in absolute darkness.

In trying one wild jump, I had scattered much of the sand, and more was falling.  The pile was scattering.  Now, it was a seven foot leap between myself and the lip of the stone above me.

In wild desperation I ran again up the hill, stumbling, and leapt before the sands could swallow me.  I caught the lip of the stone above me once again.  This time, I found a jagged outcropping hidden beneath the trickling ashes.  Gripping this knob with two fingers of my left hand, I swung myself upward.

I cried out at the pain but held on.  My other hand flailed and found the hole’s upper lip.  I used my weight as a pendulum and hoisted myself higher.  Exhausted, I pulled myself up at last.

No hope.  I began to fall.  Sand poured down into my face and choked me, filling my mouth.

But I was relentless.  I slung one leg up over the brim, and had scant purchase with bare toes upon the edge.  If I had not spent so many years fleeing from the bladesmen in Sana’a, climbing market tentpoles and leaping across rooftops, I am certain I would have fallen there and died, too exhausted to try again.

But I climbed up and out, my clothes and hair filled with dust.  I gagged and vomited up strings of earth and blood.  I rolled, found my torch and grabbed it.  This was foolishness, for I was half-blinded with the sands and in fumbling for the torch I had forced its head deeper into the ashen floor.

With a last furtive puff of smoke, the light of the fire died.

SCROLL XXXVIII

Of the Veiled Abomination

And My Flight from the Nameless City

Nothingness.  Blindness and nothing more.

My breath hastened as I fumbled for my flint and steel.  Crouching down, I laid out the last of my straw and scraped little showers of sparks into the darkness.  Although I believed I could feel my way, I did not want to return to the cave’s exit in utter blackness.  Worse, my struggle up from the hole before the pedestal had spun my senses so, I had no bearing of where I was.  I could feel my way to the pedestal and then know my true direction, but did I dare to crawl so near to that hole which I could not see?  Falling into it again would surely mean my death, a horrid end in the sightless dark without water or hope of salvation.

My hands were shaking too hard to light the fire.  I calmed myself as best I could.

After some minutes in the dark, I lit the straw at last and passed the fragile flame there to my last torch.  Bold radiance flared and I saw just how perilous my stance had been:  I was facing the hole, and my hands were not three inches from its brim.  Coughing away the torch’s gouts of black and angry smoke, I backed away from the hole and the pedestal with all haste.  I turned, touching the discs of Anar’kai against my throat, eager to find the cave mouth where I had entered.

From nowhere, I heard an echo of rasping laughter behind and far below me.

~

I turned.  The sands trickling into the hole were no longer hissing, but falling in heavy clumps and scoops of ash.  Someone—something—was scrambling up from the hole to rise and stand before me.

A silent whisper filled my mind:  Find the city, Samir.  Find the canticle of your beloved, find your destiny!

Have I said that I had lost the power to fear?  Ah, I felt it now.

Enslaved to my terror, I could not run.  My limbs betrayed me.  I could only walk backward, slowly toward the exit, as I held my breath and gaped where the man—or thing—was rising from the hole.

There was nothing there.

I took in a ragged breath.  And what was that?  An echo of my exhalation, a seconding of it?  Surely a trick of the grotto’s acoustics was toying with me?

My limbs began to free themselves.  I walked backward ever faster.  In front of me, I could see no creature at all.  But I could hear and see impressions being pushed into the sand.  Footprints were being made, but there were no feet to make them.  Each print was enormous, and the feet had not toes, but rather talons.

~

Instinct overwhelmed me.  I turned with my arms outspread, and I ran.

The cackling again.  Whatever it was, this invisible Thing, it delighted in my horror.  I could hear it breathing and limping behind me, its unseen bones crackling as it strove to quicken its hunting gait.

I sprinted the last of the distance, scrambling up the sand piled at the cavern’s exit and once more out into the blessed moonlight.  Casting my torch aside so that both my hands were free, I ran as if the hounds of the infernal were at my heels.  The discs of Anar’kai clashed against my neck and jangled against my cheeks.  The ancient metal ring which held them snapped, and I wheeled to a halt, frantically snatching the fallen discs up from the ruins and running on.

There was a guttural, wet popping sound from far behind me.  The cackling of the invisible Thing turned into screaming, and then to a roar.

Looking back only once over my shoulder, I could see a cylindrical, imprisoned sandstorm whirling where the cave mouth had been.  Something enormous was growing there over the sands, flowing over the cliff, pressing the tumbling ashes down with its mighty bulk.  Serpent-like tentacle tracks showed where the invisible limbs were growing, scooping sand, whipping the ash into the air.

As the thrown ashes pelted down, they outlined the form of the Thing which was rising up out of the earth.  It was changing still, shape-shifting from whatever humanoid form it had first assumed, into something amorphous and wrought with a maniacal complexity.

Pulsating spheres, connected by weblike membranes.  Tentacles, and mouths.  A hundred eyes, a thousand.  Sphincters pulsing and gushing forth invisible tides of slime.

I caught the merest glimpse of that ancient Beast, and I screamed, fleeing the Nameless City and the Horror I had awakened from the deep.

As I screamed until my throat was torn, some mad echo of the twice-woven words of Nyarlathotep, the Lord in Ebon, sang and echoed within my raving mind:

Go forth!  Wake!  Rise!

GATHERING THE EIGHTH

Elegies of Babylon

SCROLL XXXIX

The Untold Truths of Babylon

I ran all the night.  I could hear the roars, the slurping gulfs of stretching and tightening membranes as the Thing pursued me.  Only when these were echoes, and then silence, did I slow to a trot and then an exhausted and wild crawl.

~

Only the grimmest of my survival skills brought me out of the waste and unto Hadhramaut once more.  My sandals were lost, I had wrapped my feet in rags and the sands had burned my toes to blackened stumps of scabby flesh.  Much of my water evaporated or I had spilled it in my flight.  When sanity returned, I found myself under the fires of the day, stumbling in a half-crawl like a beast, with the vultures wheeling overhead and waiting for me to fall.

I found the shade of an overhanging outcrop of meager stone.  I tore the back away from my robe, urinated upon it, and wrapped its moist sackcloth around my fevered scalp.  I caught a monitor lizard which had burrowed into the shadowed sands, tore out its belly and drank its blood.

~

Waiting for nightfall, I caught my bearings, and was relieved beyond all measure to see that I was near to a canyon through which passed the Path of the Shedded Coil, one of the tenuous caravan routes which led south toward Hadhramaut itself.

I stumbled alone through the windswept hours, and collapsed where I found the Gray Oasis near the spice-town’s outskirts.  There, I drank of the pool and swallowed so much water that my belly twisted and I vomited forth all, as well as blood.  I slept for an hour and tried again, and at last I began to believe that I would survive my time in the dread Khali.

The Nameless City.  That which stretches and cannot crawl.

Could I ever dare to walk the inner desert again?

Not all was lost, however.  The discs of Anar’kai were still with me.

Of that which I learned from the discs, and the art of necromancy, much is contained within these scrolls.  The language of the viper-striders is not one which is comprehensible to man.  I would stare through my magnifying prism at the glyphs when I was near to sleep, and holding the discs in one hand and the black amethyst of Naram-gal in the other, I would dream.  The kindly yet taunting Lord in Ebon would come to me, and speak to me of all that the glyphs did mean.

~

In those nights alone at the Gray Oasis, dreaming thus, I learned some little of the viper-striders, who called themselves the Sheshek’ul’thrai.

In ages past when men were few in number and feared the beasts who thundered across the grasslands, the viper-striders enslaved our ancestors and made blood sacrifice from their many births, glorying in the primal vitality of our frail mortality and our superstitious nightmares.

Our ancestors lived only to give birth, and to allow the Sheshek’ul’thrai to feed upon their children.

I call those people slaves, but these people who were chained thus by terror did worship the viper-striders as their gods.  How could they not?  The Sheshek’ul’thrai were mighty, they created artifacts made of metal and moving crystals which cast rays of light that could burn a man to cinders.  But they were the last of their kind, a race millions of years old, and nearly universally infertile.  Fewer than a hundred still remained when they did beckon the human males to lay with their women every year, and so to multiply … not to bring forth infants for the sacrifice, but to create a race in legion who would build the great guardian city on the mighty cliffside, over the last caves where the Sheshek’ul’thrai remained.

So was raised the Nameless City.

Temples cut the sky, glorious towers were raised upon the plateau above the grasslands.  Ages passed, glimpses of which I still do not understand.  There was the Deluge, there were tempest and whirlwind.  The moon turned blood-red for an age and with many earthquakes the waters receded.  Only a wasteland remained, a mile-deep wilderness of mud.  Over the years, this crackled and turned to powder, and then to sand.  A mighty desert covered all.

So were born Arabia, Yemen, Sumeru, Akkad, and all the rest, the deserts of our birth … barren, strangely fertile.  We live in a world of high and restless oceans, and our shores are a thousand feet above the lost earth which once had been.  The windy sky above that grassland is now the sand beneath our feet.

~

And this was not all.  From the discs and my walks in dream with Nyarlathotep, I did learn the secret of resurrection from the glyphs of Anar’kai:

Once the body dies, it is rendered unto ashes.  The remains can be animated, twisted into horrible dances in a mockery of life, but such Risen are only emptied vessels.  Life cannot return to a barren garden.

But the essence of intellect woven on webs of memory, that which lingers after death and which we call spirit, or a soul, lives on.  In this, Anata did not lie.  These restless spirits do wander our world, grieving and never understanding what has befallen them, until they fade away.  To heaven?  To oblivion?  To chaos?  I do not know.

But the viper-striders possessed a glorious art, with which they rewarded the worthiest of their servants.  A young and living body can have the mind and soul stripped from it with horrors of revelation, casting out the spirit and leaving the breathing vessel as its husk.  To such a mindless body can be anchored the memory-webs of a restless spirit.  In turn, the spirits of the dead can be snared and tangled inside the emptied body.  The body is still the younger, but the dead essence of the other returns thus to the glory and wonder of life.

~

All of this I did learn, as I healed, hid myself from men who I was now apart of, and journeyed north to the ruins of Babylon itself.  I knew the secrets then of resurrection, but the viper-striders’ art had a twist to its glorification, brilliant and depraved:  they did not weave dead souls into the bodies of mortals, no.  They wove mortal souls into the bodies of their own dead.  So did the honored humans, the mad minds of the resurrected, find themselves imprisoned in the flesh of bipedal serpents.  That was the secret of Anar’kai, the last high priest among the Sheshek’ul’thrai.

Was it his mummified corpse which I had discovered?  Had my disturbance of his rest awakened the curse, the Thing which had climbed out after me?

~

However miraculous and arcane were the secrets of Anar’kai, I needed more.

I needed to know how to resurrect a dead soul in the flesh of a mortal woman.  Adaya my beloved would only live thus, for there were no Serpent People to use as vessels.  All were not only dead, their mummies had turned to ash.

Of this art, if Anata’s half-truths bore their fruit, I would learn all I needed to know from the lesser discs of human priests, buried beneath the Tower of Babel.

My time with Fatimah and the Seeking Vulture had brought me much wisdom of ancient Babylon and its legendry.  Some little, what you the reader must know in your own journeys, I will speak of here.

~

After the fall of the Nameless City, of all the great cities of the ancient world which were built by men, only one rose mightier than Irem:  and that was Babylon.  This city was nothing if compared to the greatest labyrinths within our world—the ice-wrought mazes of Antarktos, the basalt spires of the tentacled ones, or R’lyeh itself—but within the frailer Kingdom of Men, Babylon was all.  It was in its golden age a hive of humanity, a glorious chaos of all mortal dreams, sins, pleasures and self-destruction.

Yet Babylon itself was a child of an elder place.  The foremost and sacred city before it was named Eridu.  In Eridu, there was raised the great ziggurat of bitumen which gloried in the worship of the silencer of dreams, Enki, the enemy of Cthulhu.  But Enki was a false god, and the floods swallowed Eridu.  For Enki did not exist, and when his priests cried out, no one came to save them.

The Deep Ones destroyed the city, slaughtering the men and children and taking the women down into the airy grottoes beneath the waves, where they mated with them; and this I will speak of in its time.

~

As the waters of the Gulf of the Arvan Rud rose once more, ages of men were forgotten.  Floods and devastations wiped out entire generations and every inscription of those years was lost beneath the waters.  But ever on the edge of the water was built a new great sacred city.  Many ruins are forgotten.  After the deluge of Eridu, the waters and the shore of the Arvan Rud crept north, until the shore came to rest where Babylon lies today.

The dream of Eridu’s Abzu-temple did live on, and so was reincarnated further upriver and inland.  Men who believed that “God spoke to them,” fraught with the revelations of Cthulhu’s nightmare, were regarded by their peoples as holy men.  For all dreamed as one, and only these holy ones beheld in unity the vision of R’lyeh.  This second-constructed echo of Eridu’s temple, in time, became the Tower of Babel.

It is so:

The city of Babylon came to encircle the Tower in time.  In that age the Tower was the Etemenanki, the heavenward spire of Marduk, another of the falsified gods of men.  As the kingship of Babylon grew mad with nightmare and turned to blood sacrifice and all its wretched depravity, the worship of Marduk fell into disrepute.  The lords were slain, and the powers behind the thrones crept back into their shadows.

Another age ended, another rose.

Although Marduk’s rites were still held upon the Tower’s highest spire, the Tower’s mighty base was hollowed, and far more sinister rites were held within the depths beneath it.  There, in the black recesses beneath the Tower’s core, priests in robes of vermilion worshipped the sacred miracle which spoke to them in nightmare, that which they named the Kulullu of the Abzu.  And the Kulullu commanded that these dreamers bow to worship not only the power from beneath the sea, but too, the powers among the stars:  the Great Old Ones.

~

As the core of the mortal hive, Babylon was ever controlled and vied for by hidden powers.  At times it was ruled by the princes who were actually the Yuggothai, the Mi-Go in disguise and veils; at other times, its priest factions were enslaved in thought by the Yithians or the viper-striders.  Near to its end, the city of Babylon was held in uneasy truce by the Cults of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep and the King in Yellow.

But with each invasion, devastation, overthrow and secret tyranny, the records of Babylon were taken away to nether cities, destroyed, shifted and forgotten and written again.  The true history of the city, lost in caverns, bears no resemblance to what even the wisest sages now believe.  What I have learned has come from the visions in the Shining Trapezohedron, the tablets of Hadoth and Irem, the whispers of Klocha and Fatimah and the petroglyphs chiseled away from temple walls in the underworld by the Ghuls themselves.  I know enough only to know that I see through the first of seven veils.  Babylon the Great is the whore of secrets, eternal and unknowable.

~

There is much confusion in what I have told.

Such is my feeble remnant of the truth, and it is labyrinthine.  These complexities gave rise to the legend of the confusion of tongues, and the mystery of the mighty Tower of Babel.  But Fatimah, Anata, and the Lord in Ebon did conspire in my dreams to further enlighten me.

These secrets I dwelled upon as I made my way ever north, away from the inmost desert of the Khali.

~

With three camels, fully equipped for the expedition, I rode north from Hadhramaut, skirting the desert’s core.

I knew where the ruined Tower of Babel was, and where the Hanging Gardens had come to lie.  With the lore of Nyarlathotep enmeshing upon the tattered fringes of Anata’s partial wisdom, I knew there were two places where I might find the nether portal into the tombs of the human priests.  I would excavate the Hanging Gardens, and then the Tower itself.

How could I fail?  Already I began to dream of the many vessels my Adaya could possess.  I would choose a beautiful woman indeed.  My pride began to overwhelm me, and so it became hubris.  Having survived the Nameless City and its Horror and the fires of the Khali, I believed I was prepared for anything.

In my obsession, I had forgotten only this:  great in mind and frail in body, we searchers dwell in the Kingdom of Men; and wherever there is buried treasure, there is greed.  In finding my way to Babylon, I was walking into an assassins’ nest.

SCROLL XL

Of My Coming to the Ruins,

The Way of Ten Thousand Teeth

And the Mosque of the Undervaults

The Babylon of our age is a city in ruin, but still it is home to many souls upon its fringe.  The ruins beside the river are its heart, but none dare to dwell there; the inhabited dwellings surround this in a ring.  Therefore, the remnant of occupied Babylon is a city in the shape of an emptied circle, ringed about a void of ancientry.

A century before now (Clarice Whateley has penciled here:  “Circa 630 A.D.?”), the city was still ruled by the Persians.  But the legions of the Crescent came in conquest, and the Path of the Prophet was laid there.  Seized and fallen, the ruin of Babylon was a heap of sundered treasures and buried secrets.  As the holy warriors drifted to battles elsewhere, Babylon was left as an emptied hive for treasure seekers.  Caravans still touched upon its fringe.  Gold and spice still journey now through its umbrage, but with the warriors departed, control of the spice-trade often rests in the night on the shoulders of mercenaries.

In my confidence, I believed my lack of wealth would be as nothing.  There would be no need to bribe my way into the ruined city.  I could steal through the outskirt ruins off the caravan tracks in the deep of night, alone and undetected.  Entering Babylon would be simplicity itself.

I proved to be misguided.

~

The road into Babylon from the south, from the many ruined pillars along its course, is named the Way of Ten Thousand Teeth.  Coming therefrom to Babylon’s southern devastation under the glow of a gibbous moon, I was met by those callous foreigners who call themselves the “guardians” of the city.  These men were little more than bandits, jaded and covetous reavers led by a moon-wild and fearful malik by the name of Omuz.

Omuz, with his haunted expressions and furtive eyes, seemed content to let his captains bar my way.  These two men, Tashet and Akhri by name, demanded tribute to let me pass.  I said to them that I was under the shadowy aegis of the Cabal, and offered to their appraisal first my amulet of bone.  Omuz gasped and made the Hands of Horns in my direction.  He ordered his men to let me pass, but it seemed that Omuz could only command his men when their greed had already been held at bay.

My instincts told me that blood would be shed that night, and very soon.  My jambiya was concealed within my head-wrap, its pommel a cunning “jewel” upon my hair.  If a fight were to occur, I would dare to side with Omuz against the others.  For he had seen and understood the symbols upon my amulet, and I suspected that if we were to come to blows, his fear of the Ghuls would prove to be greater than his fear of the disobedient Tashet and Akhri.  He might fight by my side.

Beyond these three leaders, however, there were some twenty lesser men.  These watched my defiance of Akhri’s call for tribute with great interest.

Tashet dared call me majnun, one haunted by the Jinn and so made mad by sacred visions.  I did laugh at him, and told him this was truer than he would ever dare to believe.  Akhri—too late, I could smell that he was drunk and mad with spice—grew rash and wild, and drew a scimitar and held it to my throat.

This was a delicate time.  Beyond these three, there were the twenty other men in the command.  Some few seemed respectful, others wary, but most were curious only to see if Omuz’s authority could survive the disrespect of both his captains at once.

I was ordered by Akhri to dismount from my riding camel.  This I did.  Tashet commanded that I submit to search, and this was overruled by Omuz.  And so I refused.  Murmurs arose within the ranks.  I asked Omuz, over the shoulder of Akhri, whether it was proper to hold one poor merchant at blade point and not offer him a shelter for the night.  If I was to be detained, was I not a guest?  Had tribal honor come to this?

The men murmured at this, for some were Bedouin, and others tribal outcasts.  Few of them were at ease with my confinement.

Biding my time, I suggested a truce of ways:  I would go with them, and submit to their search of my camels; but not until I was fed and my camels watered.  I would feast with them, and then they could search all my goods and take whatever tribute they deemed to be the equal of my gratitude for their hospitality.

Akhri scowled at this, for he knew that he had been outmaneuvered.  He sheathed his blade.  But his eyes were filled with hatred.  And so did I let myself be taken.

~

Allowed to lead the most heavily burdened of my camels, I was walked to the Mosque of the Undervaults, which stands upon the foundations of a greater ruin at Babylon’s southwestern edge.  My camels were tethered and watered by four of the men, while four others stood guard.  Five further men left to patrol the Ten Thousand Teeth once more.

The rest of us descended the holy stairs, and there underground—where the coolness of water reigned and amber censers filled the air with their enchanting glow—I was made a guest of blessed night.

Such was hospitality, even in the age of ruin and holy war.

But the night was not at an end.  Despite my guile, I had underestimated the senseless fervor and the bloodthirst of Akhri.

~

There were eleven of us in the Undervaults.  As several of the men strode about and lit the censers and lanthorns and hung them upon the elaborate silver curvatures which arced from the mighty pillars, Akhri himself knelt in solemn prayer.  Some of the others—Tashet as well, but not Omuz—did the same.

When his prayers had been spoken, Akhri stood and walked in a measured circle around me.  He asked me my name.  I told him, “To myself I am Abd Al-Azrad, but the name of my soul has been spoken as Samir.”  Several of the men murmured at this, pleased at my sincerity.  I knew I was walking upon the edge of a blade, and that my respect for the rituals of gratitude and hospitality were being scrutinized and dissected by brazen Akhri.

The man wanted to hate me.

He asked, “And so your soul has been spoken of, O Abd?  And by who?  Who is your god, wanderer?  Yahweh, the salt-sower?  The Prophet himself?  Mithras of the syndexioi?  Shiva, Parameshvara?”

There beneath the Mosque?  The question was audacious, even vulgar.  But I was outnumbered by the faithful, and I stood by their graces in the vaults beneath their one place of reverence.  Touching my Cabal’s amulet, I bowed slightly to Akhri and said, “Forgive me, friend.  I am of the tribes and the Desert Mother.  I worship no god.”

To this there was only silence.

But Akhri the viper had found some meager fissure in the armor of my civility, and at this he pried with eager claw.  He put his hand upon his scimitar once again.  Omuz said, “Akhri, not here.  Never here.”  But Akhri ignored him.

And Akhri said to me:  “You ask sanctuary and blessing, here of all places, and insult us thus?  Who has burned away your fear?  You should fear me, and well, yet you do not.  Greater warriors than you have cowed from me.  Who in your heart protects you?”

There was nothing else I could do.  The other men, uncertain at first, were souring and changing their stances from rest to stern alertness.  While Omuz was their commander, his temerity and silences did not seem to rest well with the mercenaries.  It is Akhri whom they looked to, and with Akhri’s indignation building into rage, the others were casting eyes of disapproval upon my ways.

So it was that I said, “I wish you no harm, only sanctuary and passage.  I have come to Babylon to learn wisdom, and mayhap I will find my way.  You, Akhri, you will allow me to learn the error of my ways in solitude as is proper, will you not?”

Akhri’s nostrils flared.  His eyes went wide, and he drew his scimitar and held its point before my heart.  Two of the men cried out and ran up the stairs, either to warn the others or to flee what was to come.  Omuz drew his own blade with reluctance, as did Tashet; and the four of us stood upon the lapis-mosaic floor with great currents of  indecision welling all about us.

Omuz said, “Akhri, do not do this.”  And Tashet, “Is this an unbeliever?  Of the prophecy?  Is it he?”

And Akhri, to me:  “You will answer.”

I spread my hands, and I said, “I do not fear you, Akhri.  Neither will I destroy you, provided you do me no harm.  But my Lord is proud and hateful, and if you demand that I call unto him I shall.  He, I believe, will have no mercy for you but the revelation of the Chaos of the Abzu.  For my protector is the Lord in Ebon, Nyarlathotep, and no one else.”

This name meant little to Tashet or to Akhri.  But Omuz fell upon his knees, and cried, “Ai!  Ai, the darkness is come!  Know that I have not looked upon your servant in hatred, O Nyarlat!  I am innocent!  I am!”

The other men were incredulous.  I could feel the fulcrum of power shift, as the sacred warriors all about me cast their disdain upon fearful Omuz and favored valorous Akhri all the more.

I turned away.  If I was going to be able to leave this sanctuary in peace, the last moment I could do so was fleeting and well upon me.  As I began to walk to the alabaster stair, Akhri cried out, “You worship a false god here?  In our sanctum sanctorum?  Infidel!”

And I could feel the air hiss and the candleflames lean as the fool Akhri raised his scimitar to behead me.

The man was a bold warrior of his god, I am certain; and he had no reason to believe I could outmatch him.  But I was a changed man who walked as an outsider between the spheres of man and blackest revelation, and the powers of Anata and Naram-gal—while fomenting and uncertain—already were within me.

One of the arts which the Ghul-crone Anata taught to me was this:  There is an incantation, simple in its abomination, which can be cast upon the body of a dead child.  It causes the mutilated body to rise, and to flicker into animacy, a blurring dance of death.  The Thing thus raised can blur between there and here as if a reflection leaping between two mirrors, an unholy celerity of motion.  Then the body of the child crumbles, wasted and abandoned.  But if the speaker of the incantation is to cut a sliver of rotted flesh from the child’s fingertip, and swallow it and its essence before the unholy animacy fades fully from the vessel, from that moment the power of speed lives within the chanter and there waits for its release in words of power.

And so as Akhri raised his scimitar, I cried:

“Ak’nath ol-krai’eth, Ashmodai!  Akhal Kulullu, ishir!  Ishir-at, al Shol-Niggurath!”

As I spoke the first word, knowing only that Anata had told me that such would protect me, I saw a fascinating thing.

~

There was a moth, a desert gypsy of the pale, which was circling one of the lanthorns and its flame.  Its wings blurred with the rapidity of its fervor.  Sparks fell all about it, and it wheeled around the lanthorn’s candle, believing the flame therein to be the sun.  The moth had been frantically careening around the lanthorn in ever-tighter circles, but as I spoke “Ak’nath” ... it floated there slowly, hovering in a prison made of air.

Its wings were so slow then that I could see them moving, gentle as the fingers of a reader who is turning the pages of a codex.

And I turned, speaking the second word, “ol-krai’eth” ... and I could see Tashet and Omuz behind me, frozen and unmoving.  Tashet’s eyes were wide with doubt and horror, regarding Akhri with his scimitar.  Omuz was still on his knees and had buried his face in despair.

I turned fully, speaking, “Ashmodai!  Akhal Kulullu ...”

And Akhri himself was frozen as a statue, petrified.  A string of slaver was suspended from his mouth, hovering in the perfumed air.  His face was contorted in rage and hatred.

It was all I could do to stifle my wonder, and complete my incantation.  I looked to the other men, petrified as well; and the fires of the candles were motionless and pure.  The incantation of Anata flowed through me, the essence of the blurred speed was filling my belly with its fire.  The celerity of the death-child was mine.

~

It is a curious thing, to kill a man.  In my youth I had feared death, and believed myself incapable of murder.  But I had stolen the obsidian jambiya of Ghanara, who had beat me as a child; and I had seen the gashed throat of my Adaya.  I had killed men who had threatened my cherished mentor, Fatimah, as bandits in the desert; and I had even delivered the mercy blow to a man who had been so brazen as to spit at the feet of Naram-gal before the Ghuls were to tear his body apart.  And yes, there were so many thieves.

By this time in my life, I was no murderer.  I had never killed in cold blood, and I had never assassinated anyone.  I fought only those who threatened or dishonored those I loved.  But now?

Now, the fool Akhri was at my mercy.  He had begged for this, believing me to be an old, gaunt powerless fool who had slighted his blustering pride.  Surely he meant to kill me beneath the mosque in the name of a holy law, and in doing so was likely to cast Omuz into shame and take the command of these men for himself.  If he were to do so, would these mercenaries become something worse?  Murderers of the innocent?

These, however, were mere justifications as I stood there marveling at the power of my incantation, with the men of the mosque frozen in suspended time all around me.  There was a greater reason to slay Akhri, and a black one:

It would be bring me deep and satisfying pleasure to take his life.

~

I drew my hidden jambiya from its hiding place in my head-cloth.  Delicately touching its razor tip to the soft flesh between Akhri’s chin and throat, I shouted the last of the vile words:  “Shol-Niggurath!”

Time accelerated.

My jambiya’s blade sliced up through the flesh of Akhri’s throat, up into his mouth.  I heard a popping sound as my blade’s tip impaled the base of his tongue, went up higher, and punctured the roof of his mouth and so into his brain.  Tashet was shrieking, and dropped his own blade in horror.  Omuz was rocking back and forth.  The other men wailed in despair and terror, for in their regard, I had become a blur and had spun and impaled Akhri in a single motion with an invisible blade, too fast for the eye to see.

Akhri could say nothing.  He was dead.  His scimitar clattered to the floor’s mosaic stones.  I withdrew my jambiya from his skull, and the seal which had held him together was lain open.  An enormous gout of gurgling blood sprayed forth in two cascades, one burbling over his lips, the other jetting out through his opened chin and staining his robes with a viscous and spreading pool.

Emptied, he tottered and fell.

Having heard the wild cries of the beholders of my act, the other men ran from outside or the mosque above and rushed down the alabaster stairs.

Omuz cried, “He whose soul-name is Samir, the mantle of black is upon him!  O, the Ghuls and Nyarlat!  He is chosen!  Do not touch him, do not touch him!”

But Tashet shouted, “He murdered Akhri!  Slay him where he stands!”

~

It was then that I learned—we all learned—that I had been followed into the mosque, by shadows all unseen.  The watchers of the desert, ever hopeful for my success and for my safe passage unto Babylon, had hidden themselves and walked from the wasteland at my side.  I knew it not, but the revelation of their presence was to come in that very moment.

There was a chorus of horrific voices, rasping hatred and the hungering.  Gray forms of Ghuls scuttled down from the ceiling, spider-walking down the pillars.  From the stairs, more of the gaunt things rushed past the mercenaries of Omuz and prowled upon all fours.

The pack of the Shattered Jaw, the sandstorm daemons, the hunters of Naram-gal had come for me.  So arose the Deathless Ones, and their wrath was terrible to behold.

~

Of the slaughter, only a little will I tell.  None of the men were slain at first, but all were bloodied by tooth and claw as the Ghuls overwhelmed them.  Tashet died of fright, crumpling to the floor with a gout of choking foam bubbling from his lips.  His eyes flickered white then rolled and saw no more.  Men released their bowels, and wept, beholding the truth of the supernatural for their first and only time.

But these mercies proved only to be a taunting.  For all of these men, death had come.

Two warriors who had managed to wound the Ghuls with their own blades had their bellies opened and the cords of their intestines pulled out in meaty and wild spools onto the floor.

None escaped.  Only Omuz remained untouched.  One of the Ghuls, too wounded to journey far, was devoured in solemn honor by his brethren.

There was a great feast that night, as all the Ghuls of Naram-gal made a banquet of the fallen within the Undervaults.  Only Omuz was given the honor of being eaten alive and filled with the essence of Naram-gal before he could die screaming.  So was Omuz reborn a reluctant Ghul, and he became a silent one, a stalker within the pack of Naram-gal.  In later years, he was to become the worthy apprentice of Anata, my successor and my friend.  Such is a tale for another codex, should I live so long as to write it.

I thanked Naram-gal for saving me, and he smiled sadly as he looked to me and said, “O child.  The shadow is now upon you.  You called upon the Lord in Ebon to show you the way, and you let him carry you upon the wind.  Did you find the Nameless City?  Did you find any of the discs of Anar’kai?”

I had, and I did show these treasures to him.  And he said to me, “Go forth, then.  Go forth into Babylon, and find the tombs of the shadow priests who lie buried in the tombs beneath the Tower of Babilu.”

And so I did.  Rushing forth from the mosque, praying that none would see me, I did take some few supplies from my panicked camels and race on into the ruined city itself.  As I did so, I could see the denizens of Babylon’s ruin beginning to wake.  Some were looking to the mosque, others covering their eyes.  But no one chose to cry out or to behold me, and no one spoke.  It was then that I knew that those few who dare to live in the ruins of Babylon were no strangers to the horrors of the night.  However blind the mercenaries may have been, those who lived within the city itself knew not to interfere with the ways of the dark things which could be seen by the believer, the things which stride in deepest night along the streets.

None of these poor souls deigned to find me, or to “see” me.  To these wise souls I did not exist.  None touched me.

~

So did I enter Babylon, and so did pass Akhri the Unworthy from the Kingdom of Men.  The pack of Naram-gal secured my way, and legends still are told now in the time of my elder years here in Damascus, of the tongued and claw-stretched blood smears which were discovered beneath the Mosque of the Undervaults.

No one, you see, shall come between myself and my love of the dead Adaya.

SCROLL XLI

My Journey

Unto the Earthly Paradise No More,

The Hanging Gardens

Having been given their feast, the Ghuls of Naram-gal did depart, neither my own brethren nor my destroyers.  I pondered long if I would repay my debt to Naram-gal by coming to sit in my elder days among them and allowing them to take me, to make one with them.  Would my Adaya embrace such an eternity?  Or would she turn away in horror?  I reflected on how changed I had become since she had known me.  In becoming strong, I had carved away the weaker aspects of myself; in vowing that I would bring Adaya back, I had shorn from her the choices of the afterlife.  Whatever she might want, I wanted her.

What was I becoming?

But the greater part of me that survived, the strongest of me which endured and allowed me to slay and live on and never be a victim of the depraved, that part of me was now the ruler of my soul.  There was no choice; I would find the tunnels into the tombs of the shadow priests of Babylon.  I had come too far.  The lesser discs would be mine.

~

I knew from all I had learned that Anata had spoken true, that the Tower of Babel was hollowed and the tombs were laid beneath it.  But the sages among the architects had written in their tablets of another corridor, a tunnel which passed from the palace of the king and secretly into the nether temple itself.  This, the Way Unto Shadow, was the corridor most likely to remain untouched.

The Way Unto Shadow was said to possess three entrances:  one within the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself, which was certainly now buried and in rubble beneath the sands; one in the Nether Temple, which had been deliberately destroyed when the Tower of Babel above it was razed in the Persian age; and a third, near to the palace, a secret entrance which emerged into the Hanging Gardens of paradise.

This was the path which I would first seek.  I had met no living mortal who spoke the language of Akkad, save Fatimah; and she was now among the Ghuls of Naram-gal.  Ghuls and spirits spoke it, yes, and to Naram-gal itself it seemed to be his native tongue.  But as the tablets of the sages had been inscribed in Akkadian as well, I had reason to believe that the secret of the Way Unto Shadow belonged only to me.  No one else alive could read and know of such a thing.

~

Fleeing the Mosque of the Undervaults, I felt an urgent need to come to the Hanging Gardens’ ruins before that dawn.  There would surely be turmoil and panic when the mosque’s undercroft was investigated by the other mercenary soldiers at first light.

I could not be caught.  Defying the demands of sleep, I hid myself in an alley and there I prepared for the journey through the ruined city’s ways.

Waiting for an hour, I stole back to where my camels had been tethered.  One camel remained tied.  Two of them had broken their ropes in the panic and fled into the night, and these I was able to track to the western fringe of the ruined city’s edge.  Reigning them in, cutting free my packs from their flanks and letting the satchels tumble to the sands, I dragged out whatever I could carry which would aid me in my flight.

I packed my clothes, food, water, weapons, and a short ironshod walking staff which I had carried as a goad upon my riding camel.  Thus equipped, I fled toward the ruins in case anyone dared seek vengeance on me.  Such jackals as Akhri have no bravery, but they travel in numbers and name themselves among the bold.  Who can be too careful in such a world?

Making my way east through the unlit streets, I passed from the shadowy hovels of the poor into a cemetery no longer used.  There I hid in a sundered tomb and slept for some few hours.

Before sunrise, I did stride undisturbed into the abandoned city’s heart, where the palace and the Tower were.  There, the river choked itself on rippling hillocks of mud and riotous black reeds which crawled up the stones, crumbling them with their thorny and seeking roots.  The river waters were swollen, filled with moonlight and the silhouettes of fishes.  Bloated strands of grayrushes whorled sleepily beneath the surface.

I crossed the river of Babylon upon the blocks of a mighty tower which had fallen across the water’s breadth.  Leaping from one slippery stone to the next, I made my way near to the pathetic and ravaged remnant of the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar.

The palace was a scorched ruin, completely submerged in tides of black mud and tumbled fragments of itself.  Nature had reclaimed the glory of kings and made of it a swampland.  Stinging insects and tiny scorpions with red sigils emblazoned upon their backs greeted me at every step.  I had sheathed my feet in another pair of leather-strip sandals which I had gleaned from one of my packs, but the mud sucked at my every footstep and centipedes crawled up over my shins.  Once, my foot slipped beneath a cesspool’s edge and stuck down into the mud so far that my toes scraped against an unseen boulder.  Air bubbled up from the void of the shifting stone, the waters roiled, and the collapsing mud started to draw me down.  Stifling a scream, with both hands around my thigh I wrenched my foot free and fell backward.  Blood and mud spattered onto my face.  I wrapped my foot with linens, for I did not want to stop there and cauterize the wound.  There was no time.

Limping, I made my way through the ruined palace’s wild hills and into the forgotten ruin itself, that of the Hanging Gardens.

~

The Gardens, once one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, were lost for a reason.  They dated back to the richest of Babylon’s many golden ages:  they had been the love-folly of King Nebuchadnezzar the Second, he the great one who was regaled by subject and enemy alike as Nabu-kudurri-usur, Bakhat Nasar, the Seizer of Fate in Victory.   Conqueror of Judaea, besieger of Tyre for thirteen years, defiant enemy of the Khomites, Nebuchadnezzar the Mighty had made Babylon a city reborn upon a tide of blood, a labyrinth born of conquest whose streets were paved in gold.

His palace, however, was as nothing compared to the Hanging Gardens themselves.  The tale of the Gardens is this, and I am certain it is true:

They were made for Nebuchadnezzar’s bride, his beloved Persian princess Amytis, so that she would not die of a broken heart.  For King Nebuchadnezzar had borne her away from her father and the lovely forests of her homeland.  Nebuchadnezzar needed her, adored her above all else; but away from the waterfalls of her homeland and her sisters and her father’s love, Amytis did begin to desire the world afar, and her heart to waste away.

My sympathy for the King is great, for I believe that I understand him.  In answer to the plight of Amytis, Nebuchadnezzar swore that he would recreate her homeland as a second paradise in Babylon itself.  In defiance of all possibility and reason, this he did.  It is said five thousand slaves toiled upon the Gardens for three years, and that many of the finer details were placed by the art-gifted hand of Nebuchadnezzar himself.  Amytis, moved by the devotion and sympathies of her King, did watch him from the Palace’s tower balconies as he toiled with his slaves upon the sand.

In time, against all likelihood and the mockery of the gods, the Gardens came to be.  In the name of love, the Seizer of Fate in Victory reigned triumphant once again.  He took his Queen Amytis by the hand, and together they descended into the Gardens and there found joy in an illusory Persia, an earthly paradise.

~

And how were the Gardens in their mien?  They comprised an outdoor palace in themselves, a tiered and labyrinthine monstrosity filled with lush plants and cascading waters.  Such folly, such extravagance of wealth and waste made a mockery of even the most lavish towers raised round the gardens there in Babylon, the greatest city of man.

More was told to me by the Ghul-crone Anata, who did behold the Gardens in her former life with her own eyes, and the wonder in her voice was living still:

A mazework of canals and zigzag rivulets fed the Gardens, defying gravity and pulling the river’s waters through holes cored into the walls of Babylon itself.  Cunning screws made of wood were cranked by hundreds of servants all day (Whateley has written:  “An early precedent to the Archimedean screw?”), and so the waters were drawn up to the tiers’ summits, there to cascade down again as waterfalls through the Gardens themselves.  Every day and night, these servants labored to run the waters of the Gardens through their course.

Many of the waters were lost to the day’s desert heat, and so the Gardens were ever sheathed in a crystal mist, forever rising and retreating.  The Pyramids of Khom are a mighty work, but the ingenuity of their craft was as nothing before the vine-laden machinations which drove the Garden’s waterfalls.  The Gardens were the marvel not only of Babylon, but of the world entire.

And they were secret, despite the veiled servants who toiled therein.  Only Amytis and Nebuchadnezzar would frequent the Gardens while the servants crawled and hid themselves, forever toiling, leaving unwalked the paths of solitude where the King and Queen alone would stroll, whispering to one another their songs of love.

~

But too, the Gardens were a gift to the city itself.  They were surrounded by walls and spires, and many a tower balcony would be filled by the speechless nobles and merchants, who gazed in wonder down upon the King and his lovely Amytis as these two walked between the rainbows and the palms.

Such is the glory of woman, and of man.  And now?

~

And now.  Here I will tell of the Gardens in their rediscovery.

I had come, I had killed and suffered the horrors of solitude, near-death and the revelation of That Which Riseth from the tombs of the Nameless City.  By the will of Naram-gal, by the tutelage of Fatimah, the wisdom of Anata and the black mantle of the Lord in Ebon, I alone had endured.  I had come to the Hanging Gardens.  I stood and looked out upon the work of the King of Kings.

How then fared the Gardens’ majesties once I did find them?  Dust and ashes, pillars and aqueducts buried in the waste.  The Gardens had been pushed by the river into a long strand of unrecognizable ruins.  Not only had the river swallowed the Gardens whole, it had recoiled over the centuries and rejected them, creating a serpentine inlet where no plants would grow and the hollow was filled in with a flood of mud and rubble.  This mud had petrified and crumbled, parched over the years until the “entrance” into the Gardens was nothing more than a circular plain floored with broken triangles of dried mud, hiding a subterranean wilderness of silt, pillar and ruin.

And yet, one remnant of the Gardens lingered on.  I could see this, hidden by the silhouette of a mighty fragment of wall which stood at its apex thirty feet tall.  This one standing ruin was the gateway to all the rest.  The tides of mud had not shattered all of the Gardens’ pillars; they had dislodged many of them and pushed them upright upon a slow-moving river of silt and rubble.  These mud-strangled pillars now stood in a meandering line, grim silhouettes of hollow stone shadowed up against the radiance of the moon.

From the tales of Anata and the tablets of the sages, I knew where best to search for the secret entryway into the Way Unto Shadow.  It was said that the Gardens had been girded on every tier by these great pillars, thirty to a hundred feet high; and interconnecting these pillars were mighty aqueducts, framed by elevated walkways to either side.  Thus did Amytis and the King not only walk the stairs through all the Gardens, but too, they walk above them and gazed down upon them.

The surviving pillars were unfractured, but their immense height would not be known to anyone who simply beheld them where they stood.  Conquest and cataclysm, the river’s power and desert sand had all choked the Gardens into the earth, and now there was only a mound of sand and debris, from which jutted these pillared ruins some twelve feet high, like rotted teeth in a dragon’s jawbone.  And that is all.

But I alone was there to brave this particular mound of ruin, whose summit was crowned by the shattered arch of the aqueduct not even six feet off the ground.  This aqueduct, I believed, was the only foundation to the Gardens which had not been shifted by the river of mud.  If there was any chance that the secret Way Unto Shadow could still be reached, the portal into it would be there.

In searching this aqueduct’s two surviving arches, as the sun began to rise, I did find what the tablets had said might still remain:  a seal beneath four feet of sand, which opened to lead into the hollow of the pillar of itself.  This I found only by digging, and by the time I had sweated and toiled for three hours, the echoing cries of merchants and goatherds were to be heard from the ruined city’s fringe.

Around that first pillar I dug two holes.  I could find no seal, no secret entrance into the underworld.  But in digging my third hole at the base of the second pillar, I found a seal at last.  I laughed with exhausted relief, breaking apart the mud with the ironshod tip of my walking staff.  I pried more of the mud apart, leveraging its fractures.

The dried mud clumps crumbled as I threw them aside, and the deeper I went, the more sands began to trickle over the hole’s brim and to swallow my work.  In dread I was haunted by a memory of what had happened to me under the Nameless City.  But I would not be overcome by any fear.  Ai, I had come too far.

By digging more quickly and using some of my precious drinking water to harden the hole’s edges above my head, I was able at last to discern and then clear away the entirety of the secret seal cut into the pillar’s flank.

It was a door, tiny and caked with clay.

I carved the clay out of the seal’s border with my jambiya.  With the staff, I pried the seal open and a brief, stale gasp of air moaned out of the hollowed pillar’s darkness.

The tales were true!  The Way Unto Shadow certainly lay beneath me.

But my joy was short-lived, for in prying open the seal I found that the pillar’s interior was in ruin.  I could discern carved handholds, where the veiled servants had once climbed up the inside of the pillar to toil wherever there should be need for water or repair.  But now, the chute in the pillar’s hollow was choked with rubble and sand.

I dared not dig my way into it, for surely even if I cleared this secret shaft, it would spiral at least sixty feet down; and already, the sand I had dug out was crumbling my hole’s rim once more.  As I pondered, a great stone of rubble at the hole’s edge tottered and fell.  I dodged aside, but it hit my leg and gashed it.  As I cursed, the void where the falling stone had been decayed, and a torrent of sand and dried mud fell in upon me.

I lifted my hands away from the seal to protect my face.  The sand washed over me and crushed the seal closed again.  Had I kept my fingers upon its edge, my fingertips would have been crushed or shorn off entirely.

The way was shut.  The Way Unto Shadow eluded me.  I had failed.

~

That night I cauterized my wounded foot, as well as the gash in my other thigh.  I bandaged myself, and mused that the Hanging Gardens were forever lost, their secrets of love and illusion buried forever beneath my feet.

Such is the curse of ages; such is the only glory left of ancient love.

But I?  In love, I was no mere King of Kings, and Adaya no mere Queen.  I would triumph in the end.

SCROLL XLII

My Delving of the Tower of Babel

I woke in the morning, sour, hungry and dismayed.  I refilled my waterskins with the questionable waters of the river itself, straining what I could of the straw and grit and algae.  I was running out of supplies, and the legacy of the Undervaults would soon be haunting me.

I was hunted.

Surely the many bloodstains left there in the chambers beneath the mosque had already caused a furor of alarm in the other soldiers; their first cries would tell much, however they kept their silence; and rumors would fly to the Babylonian peasants and merchants themselves.  The soldiers had feared to venture beneath the mosque at night, but in daylight even such men may—in numbers—find and take heart in their own collective semblance of bravery.

All of the mercenary soldiers would now be on alert.  Where were the bodies of Omuz, Tashet, Akhri and all the rest?  Whose last tethered camel had been found lashed and panicked outside the gate, and why had so much spice and gold been left unattended in its packs?

I knew, of course; but I wondered how many other soldiers there were outside the ruins, and whether any of the “blind” peasants who had been too afraid to acknowledge me that night would still hold their tongues to silence.  Should those peasants be threatened and questioned by the soldiers, they likely would be tortured and forced to tell all.  The bravest of the mercenaries, however few, surely would already be searching for me.

Would any of those horrified soldiers, searching for the “murderers” who had committed the baffling crimes beneath the Mosque of the Undervaults, dare to venture forth into the central ruins of Babylon?  And if any men were to come there, what would they think of a wounded madman hiding asleep in the thickets which crown the ruined Palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself?

I could kill many, if I must.  But I could not kill them all.

And this time, there would be no Ghuls to save me.  Naram-gal and his kith would have returned to the desert, their need for secrecy greater than their love for me.  Such was the creed of the Cabal.

I was running out of time.

~

I waited until long after midnight, keeping vigil and hiding myself and tending to my wounds.  I saw one patrol of seven soldiers, struggling through the swamps between the river and the palace.  But one of their number was stung by scorpions, and the others who watched him die in an anguished fever had seen enough.  They bundled their companion in two cloaks, and with much toil and despairing cries and curses, they crossed the river and then fled back toward the mosque.  I never did see them again.

Songs then rose in the distance, a caravan coming into Babylon’s eastern fringe.  But that was all.  I tended my wounds, I waited.  Night came.

~

And after that midnight, I ventured out from the thickets.  I had failed at the Hanging Gardens.  I would not fail again.

My second search would be for the ruined ziggurat itself, for that is where the second entry into the depths of the temple was said to lie.  As has been told, the Tower is properly called in the lost tongue Etemenanki, “of Heaven and of Earth”; but it was known to fable as the Tower of Babel.  It was a mighty ziggurat, built higher than wide.  (Here Al-Azrad tells once again some little of the Tower’s legends, but his details differ slightly. It is likely that this section of the scroll was rewritten in later years~K.)  Its summit had been crafted of far more fragile stones, pearlescent marble and alabaster, a wonder of delicate pillars where a sun-shrine was raised upon its height; but that shrine was lost in a great sandstorm in elder centuries.  And too, the shifting of the river did swallow the base of the Tower hundreds of years thereafter, crumbling and tilting its foundation and causing the entirety to be shot through with fissures in the baking sun of the ages.

It was again Nebuchadnezzar, the lover of Amytis, who was wealthy and mighty enough to seek to rebuild the lost Tower itself.  And thirteen hundred years before my birth, he did so.  He was driven in this endeavor not only by his love for his Queen, but in worship, and in this too I did empathize with the King of Kings.  For he was in truth the beguiled servitor of Nyarlathotep, and he had been promised by the Lord in Ebon that if he were to worship in the temple deeps and bring all of the ancient tablets of his treasuries hence, and read of them in the temple depths, immortality would come to him and his bride.

And Nebuchadnezzar did learn from these tablets that the Temple of Etemenanki was built where it was for one great reason:  it covered a great fissure of oracular gases, and in its core there loomed an ancient and crumbling shrine, beneath which the fissure itself loomed inside the earth:  the oracle.  This shrine, which I have never found, was restored by the King’s favorites.  It is said that once the shrine was repaired and the tablets all brought forth, Nebuchadnezzar’s slaves who labored there were all slaughtered by the King’s guards.  Then the guards were in turn murdered by a royal executioner; and the executioner was strangled by the King himself.  Therefore, the secret of the inner shrine was known only to him, and to Queen Amytis, and to the thirteen priests of shadow which he selected from amongst the wise men of Babel to worship there.

The Lord in Ebon himself reveled there and was pleased, and the rites were spoken.  What did the Queen believe of all this horrid sacrifice?  Was she so in love with her King and the idea of their immortality that she too worshipped there in adoration?  Was she drugged with arcane spice and made to lie there in slumber, as her soul journeyed through the Empire of the Blackened Mind?  There are many whispered tales; I do not know.  But the Lord himself has shown me in a vision what the fissure itself had held:

The oracular chasm was home to an un-god, a Thing which licked the blood of slaves from the fissure’s walls and reveled then in the slaughter and the songs sung by the shadow priests.

And so did crawl up from the deeps the Fluting One, that horrid Thing which Nebuchadnezzar and his shadow priests did worship in the name of Nyarlathotep.  The Fluting One was primordial and wise.  It spoke with its terrible mind of many things.  In reverence, Nebuchadnezzar knelt before it and the Lord in Ebon was pleased.  Nyarlathotep did come, and did promise the King that if the Fluting One were to be fed the blood of another thousand-and-one slaves, the un-god would grant the King and his consort immortality.

The price would be dear, and madness would wrack the mortal leavings of King and Queen; but what greater gift than eternity can a mortal ever desire?

~

So it was that ever more wild orgies of slaughter took place beneath the temple’s core.  And when the time came when the King himself was feeble and near to death, the Fluting One did demand its final sacrifice. The Ebon Man came one last time.  The Codex was opened unto the King of Kings.  Nebuchadnezzar the triumphant, the Seizer of Fate in Victory, cast his soul-name into the Blackened Codex of Azathoth.  It is told that he and his consort thus ascended in their essence and did become the exalted Ancient Ones, honored among those sacred few who stand forever in the Endless Hall beyond the Great Gate of Yog-Sothoth.  There in immortal love, the King and Queen wait for the End of Days and their final revelation.

So it is written in the tombs in the necropolis of Saqqara, near to Lacus Moeris, where the Ghul Hetshepsu reigns over his blind kingdom under Khom.

~

There is more to tell.

Once the King and Queen ascended in apotheosis into the Endless Hall, the Fluting One crawled back into the deeps.  When the Tower of Babel crumbled, the oracular fissure was sealed.  Over the centuries, the glory of Babylon itself fell forever.  The Temple of Etemenanki again decayed, teethed away by river and sandstorm and the incessant cruelties of Time.

As had been the fate of the Hanging Gardens, so the fate of the Tower:  a great flood silted and crumbled the southwest corner of its base.  The entirety of the structure began to erode, and in Babylon’s own crumbling, the Tower fell prey to dune and silt as the river ebbed and flowed.  But the shrine beneath its core remains untouched, though nearly gnawed away.

When Babylon the city-heart had ceased to bleed, when the Kingdom of Babilu at last lay dying, and the shadow priests perished one by one, their corpses were honored with a final grace.  Each corpse of those blasphemers had liquid gold poured down its throat, and the mouth sewn shut forever.  These corpses were sealed each to a secret tomb beneath the temple, very near to the shrine itself.

~

Many have heard the legends, and the echoes thereof, which tell us that the architecture of the tower was not Babylonian in nature, but rather inspired elsewhere.  Be it known that the outside of the tower was a labyrinth of arches and of stairs.  This detail of its structural beauty, seemingly irrelevant, is the secret which brought me to discover the Tower’s core.

The foreign architectural faces of the Tower were merely a facade, only a few feet deep.  This layer of marble archways covered a massive core made of fired bricks and massive stones.  Poorly anchored—for the marble, when drilled through with support rods, did grow frail—this facade was destined to fall away.  Much of this facade was torn away by flood, and an earthquake ravaged all the rest.  Thus was the Tower of Babel in ruin laid bare as a gigantic black monolith, an unadorned pyramid of stony shadow.

What remained of the facade was only a faintest glory:  a few stubborn shards of marble around each archway, a few alabaster inlets upon the steps.  But regardless of how the Tower had been lain low, these clues were enough to show me the way.

~

That night, I crossed from the ruined Palace of Nebuchadnezzar and descended toward the east.  There, many unknown ruins still stand in massive piles, unnamed and unexplored.

The Tower’s own ruin was a hill, and the ziggurat’s remnant appeared only as the angle of two massive black walls.  Dried creepers and trickles of salt stood petrified upon its flanks.  Nine-tenths of the Tower’s entirety had been crumbled and taken by the river, or lain as buried piles about its base.  But I knew that the tombs and shrine were deep indeed.  Not only was the Tower hollow, but the tombs themselves had been lain so deep below the temple’s interior that they were actually underground.  This detail conflicted with many readings I had made, for many sages believed that the tombs were inside the temple and so lost, not under it; but in dream the Lord in Ebon had told me that these were lies.

The tombs were intact, and the lesser discs of the shadow priests were waiting there for me.

~

By the time I did come to the ruined Tower’s base, and recognized it by the tiny marble shards still clinging to its walls, I was confident that I would find my way inside.  I climbed the one surviving stair, and having been made wise by seeing the seal in the pillar of the Hanging Garden, I knew to look for a similar secret place:  a near-invisible inset square at the base of a wall, its edges filled in with river-clay.

When, after five hours of searching I found such a seal beneath a veil of dead creepers and vines, I laughed once more in relief and delight.  This seal was half-buried by dried mud, and blocks of rubble masked all but the very height of it.  But I was filled with strength at my discovery, and I did throw the blocks aside, dig at the sand, pry away the clay borders with my jambiya, and leverage open the seal itself with my ironshod staff.  My failure at the Hanging Gardens had been a lesson, a secret revealing what I must do to find the one true way.  If I had not gone into the Hanging Gardens and dug at the pillars of the aqueduct, I never would have learned how to discover the secret seal into the Tower of Babel.

Opening it at last, I grinned as the trapped air of the temple’s depths washed over me.  The Tower, I knew, would be hollow in its way.  It would be drilled through with a hundred descending air-shafts, through which a man could barely crawl.  Even though the main shaft into the oracular shrine of the Fluting One was surely buried too deep and impossible to find, one of the lesser air-shafts did indeed lie beneath the seal.

This is the entrance I had found.  The tombs did lie beneath and deeper still, waiting for me.

The crawl would be perilous, and I could carry very little within.  I drank some of the foul river water.  I kissed my Ghul amulet and lashed it to the discs of Anar’kai from the Nameless City.  These treasures together I corded around my neck, tighter than ever before.

I selected the finest of my torches, brought it to light, and put flint, steel and tinder in a pouch within my robe.  The shaft proved to be so narrow that I would need to crawl, and if I crawled with the torch held out in front of me, I would burn myself and choke upon the smoke.  Instead, I turned myself around.  I put my dagger between my teeth, and crawled backward into the shaft with my torch held out before me.

So did I struggle on and down, through the descending shaft, with burning eyes and labored breathing, until the shaft finally let upon a subterranean corridor.

Stretching, lowering myself from the shaft’s gullet and into the narrow hall, I finally stood where no living man had been for over a thousand years.

My torch nearly died, stifled by the staleness of that air.  The corridor ran in two directions, and I selected the more descending path.  This way went deeper for some twenty paces and then bent at an abrupt angle, forming two narrower corridors.

To one side, there was a cistern filled with bones.  To the other, another hall descending into darkness.

There did I find the tombs, and there too did I find the cistern of the spider-beetles.

SCROLL XLIII

Of the Spider-Beetles,

And the Terrible Secrets

Of the Tombs Beneath the Temple

Babilu.  I must tell you of all I discovered in the deeps:

~

The corridor to the left, the hand of the damned, let upon seven tombs with seven seals.  The three nearest to where I stood were plundered, for I could see that the seals were shattered and that robbers had crawled inside of them.  I had reason to believe that the discs of the shadow priests which I sought would be made of orichalcum and of gold.  Surely any tomb reaver, even one unversed in ancient tongues, would see that the discs were precious and would steal them.

Therefore, rather than search the three opened and defiled tombs, I proceeded down to the fourth.  Its seal was easy to break, being made only of clay.  I shattered it and crawled into the sepulcher beyond.

I did not find a sarcophagus.  The mummified body of the priest was laid upon the floor, on its belly, with a stone upon its broken spine.  I lifted this aside, and saw that the priest’s hands had been bound behind his back.  The ropes were parched and frail and at my merest touch, they fell away into dust.

Although the body was surrounded by a ring of gold amphorae, alabaster vases, silver vessels and jars filled with desiccated spice, I left these minor treasures where they were.  The true prize, the lesser discs of necromancy which the priests were said to have each been buried with, I could not see.

The body needed to be lifted.

Holding my breath, I carefully laid my torch upon the floor, and I turned the withered body in my hands.

I cried out in fear when the corpse fell apart within my grasp.  The broken spine snapped apart.  The legs fell away and ashen powder puffed up from the sockets of each hip.  The torso I still held cradled in my arms.

The face of the priest was gaunt and black, the cinnamon-hued flesh having been slathered with resin which had turned into a crumbling crystal veil.  Triangles of this substance fell from the filled-in eye sockets as I brushed the resin away.  The mouth had been sewn shut, and the torso was strangely heavy.  Looking down, I learned why:  the belly had been cored out by heat, and where the flesh of the belly should have been, there sat an enormous mass of solid gold.  This, then, was the leaving of the liquid gold which had been poured down the corpse’s throat.

Why had such horrible things been done to a dead body?  The shadow priests had died one by one of illness and old age, long after they had chanted their spells, long after their sacrifices had allowed Nebuchadnezzar and his Queen to ascend unto the sky-gates of Yog-Sothoth and so to the Endless Hall.  Surely the Babylonians who had buried them here had been following their King’s command; and so I knew such people had feared their King even after he was lost.

But had those superstitious people feared the priests as well?  Moreso, it seemed.  But why had the embalmers honored these priests’ remains with such difficult burials, and why the pouring of gold?  Why were the corpses bound thus?  Their backs broken?  Did the people who had buried them know of the oracular shrine beneath their feet?  Had any of them ever beheld the Fluting One?

So many questions, never answered.

But there was something far greater, for when I said a prayer for forgiveness and used my jambiya to pry open the stitched mouth of the corpse, I found that something else had been inserted after the pouring of molten gold.  There, resting upon a black remnant of tongue, sat the orichalcum discs of necromancy.

The discs!

I cried out in victory, and tears sprang forth from my eyes.  I cut the sides of the papery mouth and pulled the discs forth.  Curiously, they were quite similar in shape and in art when compared to the discs of the viper-striders which I wore, the treasures of Anar’kai.  But these lesser discs were covered not in spiraling hieroglyphs, but rather in writing.  To my relief, I could see that the inscriptions were in Akkadian and Babylonian.  I would be able to read them easily once I escaped from the foul tomb, and so learn the last secrets of necromancy, and add the wisdom of the Fluting One to the incantation which I was going to create and so bring forth my lost Adaya.

I reclaimed my torch, I strung the discs upon my chain with my other treasures.  I rose and departed, leaving the desecrated body where it lay.  No vengeful spirit rose, no curse was laid upon me.  I was tempted to open the three other tombs yet sealed, but why?  I had little time to waste there in the dark, and the treasures I had sought were mine at last.

~

My torch was reaching the halfway point in its burning, and although I did not fear for my life nearly so much as I had when hunted by the unseen Thing beneath the Nameless City, I still did fear that I might wake something terrible in performing my desecration.

I had the lesser discs, however many other copies there might be.  It was time to leave.

I returned to the corridor intersection.  The other branch of the tunnel tempted me.  I looked around the corner, but there the tunnel ended abruptly in a pit, the cistern which I had seen.  There, down in the void beneath me, I could see enormous stacks of skulls and bones.

This pit proved to be the brim of a great shaft, in which were thrown the skulls and gnawed bones of the worthy.  An aside in the written Chronicles of Nebuchadnezzar had alluded that those slaves who were sacrificed to the Fluting One had their remains tossed into a pit, that rats were poured upon them, and that human-faced abominations called “Rat-Things” were made there by the shadow priests to serve as their familiars in the worship of Nyarlathotep.  The pit was said to be two hundred feet deep, but the pile of bones reached almost to the brim where I was standing.

~

Pulling my torch away and preparing to leave, I was attracted by a curious phosphorescence emanating from somewhere above me, upon the cistern’s graven ceiling.

Looking up, I could see thousands of pale white ghostly bulbs clinging to the cistern’s over-vault.  These glowing clusters trembled, as if touched by a wayward breeze.  But the air was still.

I backed away.  I heard a sound above me, the rustling of dead leaves upon a garden of moistened grass.

The bulbs above me sighed as one, each of them—hundreds of them, thousands—sprouted legs.  The scuttling little horrors crawled in a frenzy down from the ceiling, rushing to stifle the blinding light of my torch.  They thirsted for the heat of the torch’s fire, for fire meant that something delicious was there to hold it.

I had seen such spiders before in the habrud of Naram-gal, where they would attach themselves to Ghuls’ under-arms and throats.  There, they would bloat themselves, feasting on the Ghuls as ticks do upon a man’s skin-folds, and in drawing blood from the Ghul—or so Anata had told me—the spider-beetles were infused with some of the Ghul’s black nature.

Eternity.

And so these things had lived here, cannibalizing one another, cleaning the dried flesh from the slave-bones, for centuries.  But now I had come, and they did descend the walls to feast upon me.

~

I lifted my torch and began to run, but already some of the creatures had dropped upon me.  I felt the first sting as one bit into my shoulder, then another upon my scalp.  As I ran for the air-shaft, I beat my head with my hands.  I stumbled, screaming, and I fell.

The swarm of the spidery things crawled up my legs, hundreds more.  I tore at my robe, and burned my own legs with wild sweeps of my torch.  The many spiders that I burned popped and fizzled, the juices boiling out of their bodies.  I could see that they had been spawned in the shape of scarabs, each the size of a fingernail; but their bodies were withered and glowing white, and each had not six legs, but eight.

I had seen enough.

Regaining my feet, holding my torch and pinching spider-beetles to death with my other hand, I ran and stumbled to the air-shaft.  There, crawling up into the narrow tunnel, I shoved my back against the ceiling, popping dozens more of the things where they were crawling upon my robes.  I slammed my legs against the walls, and dozens more of the things died.

I crawled frantically up the tunnel.  I crushed many of the spider-beetles, I burned others, I burned even my cheek and my own hair trying to keep the stinging horrors from my face.  My torch burned out, having been used frantically as a bludgeon, and I cast it away.  With two hands I could crawl faster and perhaps even save my life.

There in the absolute darkness, I could feel one of the spider-beetles enter my mouth, and another did burrow into my nostril.

The one in my mouth I was able to crush between my teeth, tasting the acrid smokiness of its ichor before I could spit the still-twitching ruin of it from my mouth.  But the one in my nose had reached the back of my throat, and gagging, I did swallow it.

~

Years later, I would learn from the crone of Elephantine Isle, Klocha, that this infestation would be my body’s end.  The spider-beetle would not pass through my body, no; it would seed my intestine with eggs, and some few of those inside me would not ever leave my body.  They would burrow out from the intestine and into the marrow of my bones, an agonizing process in my old age of some years.  For these creatures are as deathless when compared to spiders as Ghuls are to men, and there in their cyst-nests inside my bones, they would hatch; and the brood they gave birth to would paralyze me and eat me alive from within.

And Klocha did tell me, if ever I should live to be more than seventy winters, I should take my own life to spare myself the agony of the hatching.  But I know not my age, and I believe by my reckoning that as I inscribe this scroll, the time of the hatching is coming nigh.

It is now not a matter of years, but of moons.

SCROLL XLIV

(?)

~

(This scroll is missing.  From references to it made by Al-Azrad in the later codices of Al Azif, it appears that its text pertained to the spell of Adaya’s resurrection.  Specifically, how Al-Azrad came to fashion his own incantation from:  his lore; the words of Anata; the discs of Anar’kai; the visions of Nyarlathotep; dreams enjoined with Naram-gal’s black jewel; and the lesser discs he discovered within the tombs of the Tower of Babel.  Although of interest, this scroll is likely reiterative of much that is already known, and the spell-chant itself is preserved in full in the following scroll.  Should this text ever be rediscovered, I will translate it and replace this passage with its secrets. ~K.)

SCROLL XLV

Of the Dream, in Ecstasy

That night I did escape from the depths beneath the Tower of Babel.  I lived.

Exhausted, I climbed the aqueduct above the Hanging Gardens, so that the scorpions and worse could not feast upon me.  I salved my spider-stings with honey, and I did dream.  The poisons of the spider-beetles coursed through my body, and my mind was afflicted with a wild delirium.  And yet, the dream of that night was one of the most beautiful that I have ever known.

It was so:

~

I sat at the very top of a mighty temple, under the cooling summer-lilt of a dark blue midnight sky.  Fireflies danced around me and the sound of flutes drifted up from the fire-specked shores of an emerald-hued and tranquil lake far below.  A reflected moon, more ancient and pearlescent than our own, shone beneath the lake’s waters.  Clouds raced wildly both in the sky and in the deep’s reflections, although the breezes were light and slow, and filled with the breath of flowers.

Around the temple’s base rolled the gentle hills of a wondrous city, with streets paved of onyx and carven jewel; these roads led out to imperious gates cast all of bronze, which were each flanked by twin statues of leonine colossi.  The houses of the city were of glazed brick and chalcedon, and each demesne there was encircled by a walled garden, each poised about its own crystalline lakelet.  There, in the many waters of the lakelets, more of the moon’s reflections were at play.

I stood and looked behind me, into the open sanctuary carved out of the temple’s height.  Upon an altar carved from one enormous jewel of chrysolite, there stood the sea-green stone idol of a wizened water lizard.

Contemplating this in the silences which that night cast between the arias of the flutes, I could hear the shush of sandaled feet nearing in from behind me.  I turned once more, and saw that a beautiful naked man with jet-black skin, the Lord in Ebon, was ascending the temple to speak with me.

He came to me, and I held out my hands to welcome him.  He took them.  That enticing, icy chill coursed up through my fingertips and into my veins and into my very breath.  We embraced.  He released me, and stood beside me in gentle greeting.

Did I hate him?  No.  For nepenthe is a lovely lure, a shadow of death upon the mind, which destroys anguish and leaves only its ecstasy.  I do not know if I forgave the Lord in Ebon for my travails beneath the Nameless City, or if I simply could not remember what had transpired there.

We spoke to one another that night, I with my song-voice and he only with his mind.

~

I:  “Where are we?”

And he:  Behold, the city of Sarnath.

“And this idol?  Who is this fell Beast who is worshipped here?”

This is the prison-flesh of Bokrug, the war-prize of Mnar and the slaughter-ground of Ib.  Bokrug will wake and destroy this city in its time.  But not tonight.  His time is nigh, and often in this, the last peaceful age of Sarnath, I come here to muse in reverie in consort with my chosen.  This night in particular, of the racing clouds.  It is a fitting place.

“Often?  How can you come to one night many times?”

I journey not only through space and worlds, my dear child.  I journey through Time, and the reflections of Times which never were.

“Is this the past?”

For you, it is.

“Are we in dream?”

The one true dream, yes:  the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  But think not long nor tarry upon this thought, lest you wake ere I can tell you all that I desire to.

“And what have you to say to me?”

It is time, worthy Abd Al-Azrad, whose soul is named Samir.  You have braved many a year of darkness, in turmoil and solitude.  You have slain, you have grown into a man, you have sung in the desert, you have walked upon the storm.  You have loved Fatimah as a mother, and been loved by Anata and Naram-gal as a son.

Your mind has scarred and healed despite the vision of that which you woke beneath the Nameless City.  You have braved not only the tomb of Anar’kai, but the tombs of the shadow priests themselves.  All of this is not for nothing, for you are now worthy and exalted.  You are a great man, and it is time for you to earn that which your obsession has purchased for you.

“I do not understand.”

Do you not?  You sleep, Samir.  You stir in your dreaming.  Rest easy, breathe deep.  Listen to my heart.  Do you hear it?

“I cannot ...”

Calm yourself.  Touch upon breast.  Do you hear?

“I feel it beating.”

Do you hear it?

“I do.”

It is well.  Now listen unto me.  It is time to reclaim the restless spirit of she, who will only wander your world’s deserts for three moons longer if you do not snare her into flesh.  If you fail to enslave her spirit, she will fade from you.

“Adaya?  I should release her to her heaven.  She is of the people of Judaea.  Her wandering, she may believe she is accursed, one with Gehinnom.  I love her.”

You do.  Would you be with her once again?

“O, yes.  But what if she wants—”

And so you shall.  Listen and do not speak.  It is time for you to be reunited with your Adaya.  The last shard of this gift I will give to you, but know:  this truly is happening only because you wish it, and because you have sacrificed so much for your beloved’s memory.

~

“Yes.  I have been so alone.  O, Adaya!  It is time!”

I knew the Lord had spoken true.  I cried out in ecstasy, I lifted my arms to embrace the wind.  Cloud-shadows raced over the moon as I encircled it within my lifted arms, and my laughter was flung out to the sky.

I turned, eager to overflow and share all my delight.  The Lord in Ebon marveled at me, his smile tinged with—what?  Was it longing?  Was it envy?  Was that even possible?  As I gazed upon him, he frowned and crossed his arms.

I turned from him once more.  Displeased however he might be, my joy was sacred and I did not desire it to fade from me.  I looked out over the beautiful city once again.  As I looked out, strange vaporous lights leapt off the green lake’s surface, wafting up in spirals around the rays of moonlight.

Looking outward, refusing the Lord in Ebon’s gaze, I did ask:

“What must I do?”

Think you of Babylon and its legacy.  What are the ruins now famous for?  Flesh.  You will find a whore, and purchase her as your slave.

“But why?”

Do you not know?  O, child Samir, think again.  You need a vessel, whose mind you will obliterate; whose soul you will draw forth, hollowing a reliquary in which the spirit of your Adaya shall reside.

“Carving the mind and soul out from the body?  Will this not kill the slave?”

It will destroy her mind and cast away her soul, but her body will breathe on.  Make certain that the mindless body of the vessel is beautiful, Samir, for its appearance will be that of your Adaya, returned to you.

“I still do not understand.”

The flesh of the whore, hollowed, will become the place where your beloved is imprisoned.  There is no resurrection.  There is reincarnation, the miracle of life, returned for the first time to the second flesh.

“But another woman’s soul must die, and Adaya must possess her?  Is there no other way?”

There is no other way.

“How can I do such a thing to an innocent woman?”

Have you heard nothing?  Make certain she is a whore, and if you know she is a thief or a murderess, all the better.  Justify what you must do by making certain that you choose the vilest and loveliest of women.  Are all women free of sin?  Seek the unworthy.  Can you not do this, Samir, for your love?  What makes you believe that the slave you choose will be an innocent?

“I do not ... there is good, my Lord.  In all people.  I do not believe that I can ...”

If you could not, I would not be here.  In your heart of hearts, you know you can.  You must, in the name of love.  Did you believe, after all of your years of suffering, that this art of the reincarnation would be simple?

“Then let us say that I might dare this.  How do I cast the spell?”

Speaketh the words of power.

“What are the words?”

The words?  What will you make of them, Samir?  Consider your readings:  scroll, tablet, inscription; remembereth the locust.  Remember all Anata and Naram-gal and I have told you.  Consider your dream-readings of the viper-striders, as told upon the discs of Anar’kai.  Consider your readings of the discs of the shadow priests of Nebuchadnezzar, the treasures which you have just brought forth from the Tower of Babel.  Consider this all, then wake and write your spell.

“Write my spell?  Is it not written elsewhere?”

O, Samir.  Who do you think writes spells, but the greatest of necromancers?  You are growing great among them.  Adaya shall be the first and the most beautiful of your works.  Here now is one truth, which you knew well in your waking hours but have now forgotten as you linger here in dream:  the great spells must be written by the caster himself; the nuances of facets of such must be true to Adaya and yourself alone.  Attenuate your desires into poetry.  Now, Samir?  Now do you understand?

“I am afraid.”

Then let your Adaya rise in the whore’s flesh, and let her comfort you.

“Will you give me strength?”

Come my son.  Kiss me.

Go forth!  Wake!  Rise!

SCROLL XLVI

The Whore of Babylon ~

The Purchase and the Claiming of the Slave

I woke, and it was morning.  My skin burned, where the many bites of the spider-beetles had turned to welts.  I took the black jewel of Naram-gal out from the palm of my hand, and held it between thumb and finger against the rising of the sun.

When had I grasped the jewel?  How long had I slept there atop the aqueduct within the Hanging Gardens?

Another mystery:  there was a mass of gold before me, and its shape was certain.  It was the mass which had been poured down the dead priest’s throat.  Had I not left that in the belly of the mummy within its tomb?  How could I not remember having carried it up the air-shaft?

No matter, now.

This was not a time for fear; this was a time for boldness.  Questions are for the weak, and answers are made only by the bold.

~

I left the ruins.  I strode north, as far away from the Mosque of the Undervaults and the soldiers as I could go while remaining within the precinct of settled Babylon.  There, it was true.  A great trade yet flourished where the caravans came out of the east.  With a sliver of the gold, cut from the mass with my jambiya, I purchased perfumes of myrrh and cosmetics of cinnamon, malachite and kohl.  I purchased a silver mirror.  I painted my eyes in the manner of the Khomites, I scented my chin.  I smoothed the powdered cinnamon into the welts of my cheeks.  I did make myself fragrant and beautiful, and I walked out where I knew that the whores would be standing and waiting for their pleasures to be sold.

I made one last purchase as I approached that street of crimson:  a dram of liquid sugar, in which was suspended one amber droplet of cobra venom.  This, I was promised, would make anyone who swallowed it swoon into a deathless and dreamless sleep.

I spoke with many women on that day; to some, I even sang and did win their hearts.  I bartered out confessions, and one even told me her true name.  From these women I chose the only temptress who confessed to me her greatest secret, that she was an exile because she had once killed a man ... her own father.

I did not ask why; I feared that she may have been proven justified in doing so.  She was a murderess, and beautiful, and she would become the vessel of the rising.

~

I left with her, and we passed through many doorways and into silence.  We went behind one last cedar door and into a hollowed domicile, whose floor and walls were hidden by many silks.  A trade of gold for pleasure did begin.  Little did this woman know that she had become my slave.

She was beautiful with emerald eyes; of fair skin, and her trade-name was Hadjara.

The full tale of that night, her seduction, I need not tell.

Was I evil, to have chosen this one temptress?  No, I do not believe this.  I was not evil, I was of two minds.

I had carefully selected the most wicked of the women I had spoken to; eleven others I did not choose.  I pray they went on and lived lives which brought them at least a little joy.

I found that as I came nearer to my destiny, I could set my mind into spheres:  one, the lesser sphere acting to do what must be done; second, the greater sphere forever remembering that I did this in the name of love to be, to be reunited with my Adaya.

~

I did eradicate the slave’s mind with visions, pressing the jewel of Naram-gal into her mouth.  Over it, I poured the sweet elixir of cobra-amber.

I forced her to swallow this, covering her mouth as she tried to scream.  I know well that the Lord in Ebon did eradicate her mind with his wondrous visions, so that she would become the empty vessel.  But still, there was much to do.

Baring her flesh until she fell asleep, and then baring my own, I began the ritual of the rising.

SCROLL XLVII

The Canting

By Which I Brought Forth the Beloved,

Adaya, from the Land of the Wandering Dead

This is the song of necromancy and possession, which bringeth the dead into another vessel, which is called by the unenlightened the miracle of reincarnation.

As the Ghul-crone Anata and Nyarlathotep himself made very clear to me, there is no one spell to enact this ritual, for this is an incantation born of love.  Only the beloved may so be brought forth, for it is the ardor of the chanter which giveth power to the entreaty of the restless soul’s enslavement within the second flesh.

To cast a spell of thine own, you would require at the very least a further verse of incantation, at the juncture which I shall illustrate in my own.  There you must pay obeisance by name to whichever of the many illusive gods of resurrection which you sincerely believe in with all your heart.  Whether that god truly exists or not is nothing; your faith is what drives the most primal among the words of power.  Naming that god focuses your belief and your desire to see the beloved and the dead one manifesting herself in the emptied flesh that lies beneath you.

Although here in my own canting I have changed the names which I learned in my explorations—Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Yeb and the Nameless, the Things worshipped by the viper-striders and all the rest—I here have named the human gods of many cultures, those whom I once in my childhood did believe to be real and holy.

This is because I was casting the spell to resurrect a mortal woman, and not a creature of darker ken.  My words were further informed by the inscriptions upon the orichalcum funereal discs of Anar’kai from the vaults far beneath the Nameless City.

Be it known that you must create your own canting, and believe in it with the spirit of your youth, for the necromantic possession to take hold in the flesh which lies beneath you.  The mere aping of my words without conviction or comprehension will bring you nothing.

Nevertheless, these are the words I sang in Babylon, through which I returned the restless spirit of Adaya unto life, incarnate in the body of the whore:

~

O Enki, greatest of all the gods,

Enthroned beneath the scarlet star

In the Abzu-temple of Eridu,

You who slay and who passeth judgment

Upon ungrateful man and fallen god,

O Bel Belim, lord of lords,

Keeper of the earth-gates

Which divideth the Abzu and Kulullu

From the Kingdom of Men,

I beg of you:

Turn away from my prayers!

Close thine eyes, veil thy face,

Bereave me of my adorations

For the blasphemy I am to bring to life.

~

In the name of love eternal,

Allow me to choose my own oblivion

And to twist the Kingdom of the Dead

To embrace my beloved once more!

As you are Muballit Mite, the reviver of the dead,

As you have in love used the very power that I ask,

Pray grant me your blindness of mine act!

I beg of you, abandon me,

Hear not my invocation.

In your blindness, in silence,

Allow the truths of nature to be broken!

~

(The name and entreaty of thine own god of the resurrection and entreaty to him or her would be included here, as I have spoken of before.  The spell is nothing without the necromancer’s own conviction.)

~

In the wake of Enki’s flight,

Inanna, goddess of victory,

Huntress of all desire,

Give me the strength

To call Adaya forth into this flesh,

For I do love her, and she

Was ever the warder of all my sorrows.

When I was a child,

She alone did care for me;

When I was chained

Drowning in the nightmare of R’lyeh,

She alone did comfort me;

When I longed to die,

She alone did saveth me in tears.

And so, I now beg of you:

Grant me the gift of sacrifice,

That I might fulfill

The sacred debt I owe to her.

Let her rise before me,

Let her brave her own descending from eternity.

Bind her adorations to this earth.

~

And to your sister the eyeless,

Enrobed in veils of serpent-skin:

O Ereshkigal, queen of the dead,

Placate the plague-lord Nergal

With the blood of your kisses,

On my behalf beseech him

To unshackle this one soul.

If he demandeth vengeance,

May he claim in death in years hereafter

Myself as his basest servant, forevermore.

Give me this one life with my Adaya!

~

Kings and Queens among the gods,

Leave me to my blasphemies.

Adaya, arise

From the pleasure garden of the Kur,

Swim from the pool of poison seeds,

Strideth over the serpent,

Fade and rise between the scorpions,

Thieve the black key of Nergal

And tear open the seven gates

Of the netherworld,

And so ascend to me!

~

And to you, whore and sacrifice,

Wasted thing who now lies beneath me:

Soul of the carnal vessel,

Unworthy prisoner in the flesh,

I cast you into exile.

Ia, to madness you are free!

Let the essence of my beloved

Pass into this body,

The forsaken.  Daemonion,

Hear my cry!  Enslave this lesser spirit

Of the unworthy as thy sacrifice!

Pazuzu, storm-bearer, black-wing,

Seize this soul as thine own feast!

And too, swallow the scraps before you,

Take these sweetmeats as thine offering!

~

(To the daemons who are unseen, the Jinn, you must offer three of the fingers of the vessel.  Sever these with a dagger, as I did, and array them upon the floor-silks.  You will behold the invisible mouth swallowing the body’s leavings, and lapping the blood up from the silks.)

~

The scraps of the vessel are devoured,

The soul of the harridan annihilated.

And now, my beloved comes!

My beloved Adaya cries out for me!

Let her reborn desire be subsumed

Into the body of the vessel, and so reclaimed!

~

(A piece of the deceased’s corpse, such as a fingerbone, a tooth, or preferably the brain, must be forced into the vessel’s mouth and swallowed.  I did use a tooth, which I had extracted from Adaya’s corpse ere to burying her at Zarzara as a keepsake of my beloved, as is the tradition of the tribe of the Shepherdess.)

~

With my kiss, possession:

I bring this vessel a greater life.

O Naram-gal, Anata,

Fatima and Aharon,

I vow to you if this rite should fail,

This vessel shall be abandoned

As a husk of madness

To the wasteland, to your hunger,

For no longer human shall it be.

But if I should conquer,

By the lash of the Lord in Ebon,

Nyarlathotep,

Let this flesh be now fulfilled,

Become the vessel of my bride!

Rise unto the breath of life!

Let thy chaos mingle in fertility!

Let the blood run forth anew!

Awaken!

Ia, Shub-Niggurath!

~

(The vessel wakes.  To complete the ritual, begin to fornicate with the mindless body, so that the generative essence of life passes into it.  When you fill the vessel with your seed, the eyes which open in the body will be those of the beloved.  A kiss, swallow her screaming within thy mouth. So is the dead one chained and made a child, a black miracle of Nyarlat, a possession of and locked within the second flesh.)

SCROLL XLVIII

The Rapture

The rite brought forth the rapture.

As I held down the constricting and mindless vessel beneath me, all breath left her.  The flesh of the vessel chilled and paled, and she clawed out against the silks and against my cheek.  In collapsing she tore down one of the wall-silks over her breast and face, and then she did lay still.

Nothing more.

Had I killed her?  Had the dose of the cobra venom, the droplet from the amber phial, been too much for her?

I called the whore’s name, “Hadjara?”  And nothing still.

Then I touched her heart.  The beat fluttered beneath my fingertips, as if a songbird had been caged beneath her breastbone.  Then the blood surged through her and her pallid flesh coursed with color and heat.  Gooseflesh crawled up her belly and her forearms, and she twisted out from under me.  The body fell to the floor in seizure and lay taut, the muscles quivering.

She tried to cry out, and found that she could not.  And the silk clung to her face.  She was not breathing.

I stood, I lifted her to the pillows once more and knelt over her, fearing to lift the silk away from her face.  As I lifted my fingers toward her throat, the silk hollowed with a rush as she took in a ragged and gasping breath.

I was petrified with fear.  By whose name should I call her?  Was she Hadjara, the mindless and the dying?  Was the spirit of my Adaya instilled therein, coiling and making a prison of her mind?  Or had my Adaya not come at all?  Had a daemon possessed this mindless vessel where it lay?

Another gasping breath shook the body.  The body arched, her arms tangled over her head, contorting in a wild spasm.  A moist and guttural sound twisted out of her, the most anguished and despairing cry which I have ever heard.

And then, a sigh … of pleasure?  Of death?  She fell back once more, drifting back into the pillows.  The hues of life flushed her legs and belly, bringing the rose of youth and fire once again into the cinnamon of her skin.

Denying the fear which lorded over me, I softly pulled the tangled silk away from her face.  I exhaled a silent prayer in wonder.  The whore Hadjara, her hair had been kinked and sand-hued in its tresses, shorn to accentuate her cheekbones.  But this, this breathing body’s hair was lush and raven, cascading back over her shoulders as had the locks of my beloved Adaya in her youth.

Her eyes fluttered open, but they had rolled up into her skull.  Only the bloodshot whites did glisten wide.  Their orbs darted back and forth and her eyelids flitted, feverish and fragile.

I massaged her cheeks.  She groaned, but her eyes did not descend.  The tears fell from her ducts, her hands clenched and gathered up knots of silk.  She began to thrash and I stood, to pressure her down and keep her from falling once again.  She resisted me with an unholy surge of strength, and threw me back.  I struggled to stand, and her fists beat against the wall.

As I rushed to her, she clutched at me with both her hands.  I cried out:  “Adaya!”

Nothing.

“Adaya!  Is it you?”

Her eyes rolled down at last, and the sight of her took my breath away.  For these were not the sea-green eyes of the whore Hadjara, no.  They were the black and depthless eyes of my Adaya, flecked with their radiance of gold.

As I knelt once more and gazed upon her in wonder, powerless, she pushed against me and cried out, “Akram?  Akram, help me!”

At first I did not comprehend.  But then I knew:  she was reliving the moment when she had been murdered, when our child-friend Akram had been there beside her.

She shrieked, “He is killing me!  Where is Abd?  Yahweh, help me!”

I shouted, shaking her, “I am here!  I am here!”

And she writhed, but she blinked and did seem to see me.  Fresh tears ran from her eyes as she placed her shaking fingers against my cheeks.

“Abd!  Oh, Abd, I love you.  What is happening?  I cannot … help me, I cannot see ...”

I lowered my face, inches before her own.  “Look at me, Adaya.  Look at me!”

But she was blind.  “These eyes, these are … who … who am I?”

And I murmured in despair, “O, my love.  O, my love …”

Adaya, blind and anguished, gasped and collapsed beneath me.

“Abd, my love, please, the pain.  The agony.  I cannot …”

“Stay with me,” I whispered.  “I have walked the worlds, the very ages for you, I cannot lose you again.  I cannot bear this!”

“I … no.  He.  The dream!”  Her mouth formed in an ‘O,’ as she struggled to scream.  Instead, rapid breaths escaped her and she began to twist as one who is bleeding and dying of a wound most terrible.  “My mind!” she cried.  “My mind is opened!  I am … I am two, entwined!  Help me!  Cth—ftaghn!  Ph’nglui mglw’nafh …”

And Adaya at last could see me.  Her eyes were become her own, life.  She did look upon me in horror and amazement, and whispered to me, “Abd, Al-Azrad my beloved, release me I beg you.”  Then screaming:  “Let me go, set me free, I beg thee!”

“I cannot.  Adaya, I cannot let you!  I need you, I—”

“I cannot bear this!  Not like this, this body, this pain …”

“Forgive me!  All I have done, I have done for you in vain.  I cared only for what I longed for.  I did not know what could come of this.  Please!  Forgive me!”

And she whispered, so quietly that I could scarcely hear her in the stillness:  “O Abd, I can see!  He sees through me.  He … He is coming now.  He.  Death.  O, Abd, through my rising, death comes for thee …”

“Adaya, look at me, no, I love you.  Please, how—”

And she did whisper, “I died.”

Rising, wild as a Ghul feasting upon a man alive who is fighting for his life, she spun in manic contortions.  Her limbs tangled, her arm popped out of its socket and her legs spun in knots upon the floor.  In grief and agony and terror she screamed, “Aiah!  Aiah, aiah!”

“Adaya!”

“Ia!” she cried.  “Ia!”

I could bear no more.  So many years, a lifetime of obsession blind to what would be, selfish above all and in defiance of all nature, I had done this.  I had brought my Adaya to this torture of pain and madness.

As she screamed and began to claw at her face, as the blood rose in jagged gashes and the foam choked out of her throat and mouth and bubbled onto the silks, I babbled the incantation which would open the gate of Death, and release her soul from the tortured flesh of the emptied slave Hadjara.

“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah.  Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth, wza-y’ei!  Wza-y’ei!”

And so, for a second time—slain by my own will, my savage pride—Adaya began to die.

~

Her pain ended.  I sobbed, and crawled over her.  I pulled her stilling hands away from her bloody face, I wiped the foam from off her cheek.

Giving her last breath, she sighed, “I love you … be with me forever …”

“How, my love?” I beseeched her.  “How?”

And she could breathe no more.  I only know her last words because they formed, frail and voiceless, upon her lips:

“Help me to return to you.  Help me to find you in your dreams.  Dream of me, help me …”

And the body drifted down into the tangles of moistened silk, and was at peace.

My Adaya was at peace.

And I?  I now was a murderer of love.

~

I arrayed the body at rest as gently as I could.  I wanted her limbs to lay gently, her spine to not be twisted in the agony.  In death, the eyes of black and flecks of gold brightened once more to green.  The hair crept inward and faded to sandy brown, and only the dead vessel of the pale woman I had murdered, Hadjara, lay beneath me.

~

I hid until nightfall.  If any despite the secrecy of that dwelling had heard the screaming, they were too fearful to confront me.  Was such a nightmare common in Babylon?  Did they fear me so much, a necromancer, that none would confront me?  Had Hadjara been as nothing in this cruel world?

The shadow of Nyarlathotep protected me.  No one came.

I bundled the body gently, and I washed it, too ashamed of all I had done to ask the dead Hadjara for her forgiveness.  Would she wander the world in torment, a restless spirit?  Had my Adaya ascended to heaven, or would these two women I had slain whisper in death to one another, and despise me?

Was there a heaven after all?

I carried the body out into the desert, leaving Babylon to the north in deepest night.  I had a promise to fulfill, however horrid it might be.  I carried the silk-wrapped bundle for miles, until I could not hear the howls of jackals there beneath the moon.  The scavengers would not have her.  But I laid her body upon the highest dune, and there I chanted the words of the gift-feast, making of her flesh a tribute to the Ghuls and their sacred ways.

~

I would need to return, to steal back into Babylon for my gold, my supplies.  I would need to purchase a camel if I hoped to elude the soldiers and escape.  But not yet.

I could not bear to return to that hopeless city yet alone.  As I walked away, tracking down the dune away from Babylon to find the river and fill my waterskins, I did hear the mournful chanting howl of Naram-gal behind me.

By his people, the vessel of Hadjara was taken.  My debt for those who had saved my life in the Mosque of the Undervaults was paid.

But what of Hadjara herself?  Adaya?  In truth, I had tormented and killed them both.  I would never again be pure.  Is forgiveness only deserved by the worthy?  Or is it the worst of men, the fallen men, who are the ones who have the most cause to pray for their own salvation?

High on the dune, the feast had begun, I was certain.  I walked on and the sand sprayed up behind me with the wind.  Of my beloved, nothing remained but memory.  She had begged me to set her free and for her love, I had done so.

The agony of the Real had been too great for her.  But in dream ...

In dream ...

Forever she would dwell within my heart.  I hoped with all my will that if I were to dream of the endless Palace of Nothingness, our trysting world of birdsong and twilight, there I would be able to close my eyes in gardens of paradise, hold out my hand, and find my smiling Adaya there to take my fingers and to guide me to the cavern of flame where the Khomite priests had denied us our adoration of the Dreamlands.

Could such be?

Only the echoing howls of the Ghuls were to answer.

And so did end my dream of love, the resurrection of my Adaya.

GATHERING THE NINTH

Before the Lord in Ebon

SCROLL XLIX

The Pure Heart Becomes the Darker ~

My Discourse of the Unveiling of Truths

In Defiance of the Lord in Ebon

To this night I remember little of my last night in Babylon.  When the reverie of grief began to lift from me in its veils, I found myself astride one of my camels, with another tethered and following behind me.  I had the black jewel, the lump of gold, seven waterskins, my maps and writings, a scimitar, a bandolier of throwing knives, my staff and my own supplies.

How had I returned to Babylon?  How had I reclaimed my gold, my scrolls and all the rest?

When I struggled to remember, only utter blackness and the echoing laughter of Nyarlathotep sat enthroned within the void of my memory.

~

There was nothing that I could feel.  My body demanded that I endure; I ate, I slept in the day, I looked to the horizons of the moon as I traveled in the night.  Once, I believed that I spied the silhouette of a Ghul racing over the dunes of the northern wasteland, but the sands were rising into a storm and it is well when I looked again that there was nothing.

I journeyed north and west, into new lands far from Babylon and Sana’a, to the city of Palmyra, or Tadmur, the city known to caravans as the Bride of the Desert.  Once there, settling myself in anonymity and ever watchful for any who might have followed me, even there I did not know peace.  The voids in my memory were no worse than the things that I did remember; all was pain and the shame of a coward’s obsession.  Only the wanderlust, the journeys in the sand, seemed to bring me a thin shard-measure of peace.  I considered even traveling as far as Damascus, and there becoming an astrologer.  Or perhaps, even, I would sing again.

But there were wonders in Tadmur, scrolls and relics which Fatimah would have swooned over.  I would journey to Damascus in its time, yes.  But why not tarry here in Tadmur?  I had struggled and tormented myself with wanderings for many years.  My body, however I myself did not desire it, demanded solace.  And knowing that I might well spend the rest of my life alone, I delved into the only glory which seemed to ease my nightmares and troubled dreams:  wisdom.

Tadmur proved to be a lovely sanctuary, thriving and yet strangely tranquil in all its flows and tides of onrushing mortality.  It was—and is still, although its age is ending—a city of birds and winds, of sages and stargazers.  I have found much indeed to treasure in the scroll markets, recording what I need to know in my own librams and then reselling the least of all that I had gleaned; and too, keeping the most priceless of ancient works for my own.  I shaved many a sliver of gold from the mass I kept in my leather satchel, and every time I made a purchase I was certain to offer of myself a different name.

In time, the walled circles of the city began to confine me; and if I was going to purchase more of those scripts of wisdom, I would need to reveal myself to some of the sages a second time.  This I could not bring myself to do.

However my desires, I would believe myself to stand outside of the Kingdom of Men forevermore.

~

I considered spending the rest of my life in the tranquility of Tadmur.  There the women are beautiful, the songs sung by orphans—boys who were so like Akram, and the girls a torment to my memory—were less anguished, more sweet than those sung in mystical Sana’a.  But neither the songs nor the women could ease my heart.

Instead, I lost myself in those tides of dreamers and false prophets, marveling at the many ways of men.

The city had been conquered by the warriors of the Prophet, yet its peoples were left to worship as they would.  A curious thing.  In the privacy of their own gardens, the Tadmuri did worship Baal, Astaroth, and even still the memories of Athena and Cybele.  Somehow, although I knew these gods and goddesses to be merely illusions, the fervor and diverse faiths of the Tadmuri gave me hope.

Who am I, the hopeless, to deny the faithful the solemn joy of their beliefs?

For myself, I did marvel at the ancient pillars inscribed there with the wisdom of Queen Zenobia of old.  I learned from her engraved scriptures that there were tombs beneath the city, which were said to lead through catacombs which reached into the netherworld itself.

Despite all, scarred and tormented as I was with horror and with heartbreak, I was tempted to learn the truth of this.  But it was difficult to think of such adventures, knowing that any Ghuls I might meet there would not be my protector-friends, but strangers and likely savage against my cause despite my amulet of the Cabal.  For the tribes of the Ghuls are many, and many are at war.

I remained in the city alone with all my scrolls, and drowned my sorrows in the regalings and legendry of elder ages.

Although I made some few friends among the scroll-sages and even their daughters, I found in the deep of night that when I would pause in my studies and gaze out upon the moon, I could feel nothing.

~

I considered taking my own life, but I remembered well the horrific revelation of Anata:  that if I did so, my wandering spirit would be mindless, heartless, and while it was possible that the spirit of Adaya might find me, I in turn would not know her.  She would suffer a tragedy once more, knowing that I had slain myself and thereby made it impossible for the two of us to ever be reunited in eternity.  We would be divided until the end of time, dead and dreaming, lost forever in our own isolate worlds and never to touch again.

I could not bear for her to suffer that nightmare.  Not after all I had done, the blasphemies I had committed to be with her.

~

The nights were long.

In setting Adaya free from the flesh of Hadjara, I did not feel joy; only the vast loneliness of a man defeated in every way.  In seeking purity, I had become corruption.

Still, I have ever been a prideful fool.  I began to regret not what I had done, but that I had not denied my Adaya her liberation.  I could have enslaved her within her flesh.  If she could but bear the agony, I could have found a way to ease her suffering and keep her at my side.

Yes?

Such cruelty.

I did not believe this with all my heart, but in my suffering I did pretend that it was true.  I believed if I had kept her, I could have compelled her to understand.  Once the horror of her rebirth had faded, despite her agonies, perhaps she would have loved me ever on.

In deluding myself thus, I did sorrow and consume much spice to ease my grieving.  It was in Tadmur that I once again found a merchant who possessed some of that rarest essence of the Mi-Go, the Yuggothai:  the violet frankincense.  This I did pay dearly for, and entire nights were lost to me as I bathed my soul in as much nepenthe as it could bear and still reside within me.

The last night of the frankincense, I did burn all that remained, and in sleeping exhausted under the reflections of a golden gibbous moon, I did dream once more and find myself in Sarnath once again.

~

This I dreamed, in the ever-greater reality of the Empire of the Blackened Mind:

~

The temple where I had stood when first consorting with Nyarlathotep had crumbled.  Much like the Tower of Babel, its once-majestic tiers were now nothing more than one enormous mound of rubble, a dream destroyed.  Of the great idol of the lizard god which had stood in spellbinding translucence upon the temple height, nothing there remained.  Marveling at the enigmatic doom which had come to Sarnath, I crouched and balanced precariously upon the rubble, and dared look down.

Green mists were coiled around the night, the clouds and flowers and silhouettes of palaces had all been choked away.  The moon herself was invisible, save as a bulbous yellow smudge bleeding behind the emerald sky.  Beneath her, where the rays of moon-glow had once danced, the lake was bubbling and in turmoil, as if its deeps were churned by a great heat.  Strange lights danced over the lake’s surface.  The flowers were no more; the flutes were silenced.

Off in the distance, the marshes had bled forth into the city and made of it a quagmire.  The mighty walls of Sarnath all lay shattered, the brazen gates sundered and tossed aside.  The porcelain houses were leveled, the gardens burned, the lakelets filled not with the moon’s reflections, but with blood.  And in the rubble-strewn streets I could discern the horrible scarlet smears of meat, in many different sizes; these being the death-grounds where men, women and children all alike had been pulverized into gore, as if a Beast of enormous wrath had rampaged through the city and reveled in their slaughter.

As I gazed all about, I wept in disbelief.  I covered my face with both my hands.  A straying gust of wind swirled about me, spraying dead leaves up around my naked legs; and I did raise my head once more.  Far below, where the stairs to the temple height had once been lain, I could see the black figure fast approaching.  He was walking up through the air, feet touching nothing, unhindered by the rubble and not stirring the emerald mist where he had trod.

The Lord in Ebon ascended unto me.  And as before, we did speak of many things.

I cried out:  “What has happened here?”

And he, with his mind:  What indeed, always and forever?  The Doom hath come.

I could not speak to this.  I was trembling with rage, for—although I did not know it, until that moment—I blamed the Lord in Ebon for all the agonies of sorrow I had suffered.  I screamed at him, I beat upon his chest.  “You killed her!”  I shouted.  “Murderer!”

He caught my fists as they flurried upon him, gently and with great strength.  The too-familiar chill of his skin iced through my fists, and eased them once more into open hands.  As he held me there, he looked down upon me in love.

It is not over, Abd-who-is-Samir.  Your Adaya has denied the trials of the second flesh.  But in escaping the vessel of Hadjara, she has been set to wander upon this world for all eternity.

Strength escaped me.  I faltered, and would have fallen from the great height had the Lord in Ebon not gripped my shoulders and held me fast.  I asked of him:  “Forever she wanders, then?  Have I denied her heaven?”

What is heaven?  Listen to me, Samir.  There is another way for Adaya to live again.

“She will not suffer,” I said.  “I have tortured her enough.  By my hand, she will suffer no more.”

She wanders alone, Al-Azrad.  She is cold.  You are the one who snared her into that fate, by opening Yog-Sothoth, the gate of Death, and releasing her thence.  You are the only one who can save her.

“And how?  There is a way for my Adaya to live again?”

There is.

“I do not believe you.  I will never hold faith in you again.”

O, Samir.  He released me, all the more gentle.  His expression was one of pain; I would never have believed that I could wound him.  Having done so, I felt not only righteous anger, but satisfaction.  And shame.  So many feelings coiled and warred within me that I was overwhelmed.

Your powers are great now, that which was impossible now might hope to be.  She could live with you in the Dreamlands, should she choose to do so.  She could come to you.

“How could such be?” I asked.  “We … no.  There was a time, a dream, I … a Palace of Nothingness.  There was birdsong.  And twilight, and endless halls all carved into shapes of majesty.  We tried, we descended unto the cavern of flame, and there the Khomites, Nasht and Kaman-Thah, did deny her.”

That is because they ward the Dreamlands from those who are brought to descend against their will.  But if she should choose to venture forth, to be with you?  This might be.

“But the priests would bar her way once more, for she is dead.”

No, said Nyarlathotep.  There are three ways into the Dreamlands which lie deeper than the cavern of the priests.

“Three?  And how are such infernal ways to be found?”

The Lord in Ebon drew a mist about me, a silver radiance of pleasure.  As he did so, weaving his hands upon the air, he said:

Let there be moonlight once again, for where the Doom hath been rendered in its judgment, to the innocent, to my Samir, there shall hope arise.  Think of the Ghuls, my love.  Those of Arabia and Sumeru are weaker, younger, knowing less of their own creation.  They dwell in the earthly paradise of deathlessness beneath the sands, but the Ghuls of Egypt—of Khom—live entranced and in two worlds as one, both the netherworld and the Dreamlands.

Think, Samir.  If you could enter upon the Empire of the Blackened Mind while awake, in your own flesh?  This is what the Ghuls do.  If you could enter thus by a cavern deeper than that of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, what would happen?

“I do not know.”

I do.  You would sunder the Seal of Koth, you would make the two worlds one.  You would live in the trance of many-all, breathing both in the Real and in the Dreamlands while awake, shifting between the two as ever you desired.  And Adaya, if her spirit was to be revealed and shown the way?  Of her own freedom, without pain, she could come to you.  She could live again in the Empire, only ... and only if she were to make the same journey of the deeper ways, in denial of the priests.

“And how then would she and I live, in but a dream?” I asked in contempt.  “Through the power of the gods of Kadath?”

They?  They are weak.  They could grant you this, for some few centuries.  But only I can grant such a gift unto you both.  Should Adaya come to you of her own free will, and be your bride, I could grant you the greatest gift which mortals of your kith have ever known.

“And what is that?”

Do you not know?  Eternal life in wisdom, Samir.  Immortality in the Endless Hall, enthroned beside Nebuchadnezzar and Queen Amytis, as Ancient Ones.

I did not want to be lured by such a dread temptation.  But love is not a fool, it is the life of an ideal.  As such, it cannot die, however bloodied it might be.  And in being an ideal, forever purer than what we know and yet enticingly forever near our reach, love is the one promise I can never bear to disbelieve.  Love is thus the fruit of Tantalus, forever I believe it can be mine.

I can seize it.  Nay, I do not believe.  I know.

I did not ask:  What would be the price?  But I did ponder this, and asked it within my mind.  And so, opening his mouth for the first time, did the Lord in Ebon answer me.

“You must serve me,” he said.  “Already, in the name vengeance, you are preparing to do so.”

“What vengeance?” I asked.  “Upon whom?”

But then I knew:  the Cult of Cthulhu.

Yes, his voice echoed in my musings.  There is … an imbalance, Samir.  The One, enthroned by Chaos, Azathoth.  The flutes speak in the echo of his will.  He wills this planet to be destroyed, in the precision of its moment:  near to the end of time, nigh to the collapse of this one cosmos.  Yet the ravening Cthulhu seeks to rule and then destroy this world in quickening, to empower himself.  In feeding, he will grow mighty upon feasts of dreams.  He leaps from world to world, devouring dreams in the scatterings of all the aeons, forever seeking a way to live beyond the end of the cosmos itself.  Should he ever triumph, he would defy the destruction of All, he would master time and space and become Azathoth’s new herald.  In doing so, he seeks to overthrow me.

Of this, I understood very little.  But I was still awash in hatred and anger toward my Lord.  And I asked of him:  “Can you be overthrown, O Lord?  Is such possible?”

To my surprise, he answered me.  Again he spoke with his mouth, and for some reason that made me believe him all the more.

“It is … unlikely,” said the Lord in Ebon.  “Yet I abide in the palaces of mine own will, for the laws of Chaos are mine to interpret within the chronicles and strictures of eternity.  There are one thousand and one worlds where I strideth amongst the dreamers.  In each, I am setting my own chosen—and you stand as the worthy amongst them, my Samir—against the Cult of fell R’lyeh.  The rise of Cthulhu must come, for in every aspect of improbability, and in every possible future, it is fated to be so.  Nevertheless, the rising of Cthulhu must be delayed.”

I risked a faltering step, and stood back from him.  In choosing a higher vantage from the rubble, I stood eye to eye with Nyarlathotep.  He smiled, a patient and solemn gesture which angered me yet further.  This Thing had caused me to bring my beloved back from the dead, and the horror of it had destroyed her.  Instead of wandering lost and formless for an age, she would roam the trackless waste forever because of what I had done.

What I had done, in the name of Nyarlathotep.

With her remembered heart beating as an echo of my own, I stood higher.  I looked down on the Lord in Ebon and I did not falter.

And I said:  “You require one so weak as I to do your bidding?  You wish the Cult of Cthulhu to be slaughtered, and the rising of R’lyeh to be slowed?  Can you not do this yourself?”

He smiled more.  And, My purpose is not to war with Cthulhu.  I will say nothing more of such a secret.

Smiling myself, I dared more.  “Have you a master, Nyarlathotep?”

His smile faded.  For a moment, before he could govern his mask once again, he bared his teeth.  Careful, Samir.  I could destroy you.

“I believe that you will not.  Why do you wish for me to do this for you?”

To restore the imbalance, and to prove to … another … that creatures such as yourself are not made to be meaningless.

“And why would I do this?”

To live again with your Adaya in the Dreamlands.  And, should you please me greatly, it is I alone who can carry you both into the Endless Hall to live in joy as Ancient Ones.  Remember, she must come willingly.

“You speak so freely of her will, my Lord.  Do you not?  Did you not see what she suffered as I brought her forth from the dead?  She could not bear the torment, the pain of being spun into another woman’s body.”

I know.  To her it was an abomination.

“Did you know that she would suffer so?  Why did you not tell me?”

The Lord in Ebon said nothing.

“And if I were to draw her deeper into the Dreamlands …”

She longs for that, Samir.  I know this to be true.

“Already you are changing what you know.  What other secrets will you not reveal to me?”

My gifts are my own, said the Lord in Ebon, until you prove yourself to be worthy of receiving them.  If you would save her, then serve me.

“I will not.”

And if I were to tell you true, that it is Najeed who murdered her?  And that he did so at the bidding of the Cult of Cthulhu?  And that I know where he did flee?

I had long suspected this, but still, the revelation did take my breath away.

When I could speak again, it was only:  “It was he.”

So it was.

“And why?”

Because she knew their secret, Samir.  Your Adaya was nearly a young woman, and not so innocent as you long to believe.  To a songstress and a temptress, however a child, Sana’a is a city more of revelation than of mystery.  There are many things she did not tell you.

I laughed, but it was a brittle sound of hurt.  “Then tell me,” I said in reckless spite.  “Tell me but one of these secrets, and for now I will serve you if not tomorrow.”

You dare a gift, said Nyarlathotep.  And daring one, this shall I bequeath you.  There are many ageless powers, Samir.  Some, They would fathom, to be as powerful as myself.  There are the Great Old Ones, and there remains Yog-Sothoth.  If you would know the powers which will allow you to kill the Cult in all their legions, and have your vengeance upon Najeed?  Then you must bow these mighty powers to your will.

Though weak, you are not insignificant.  Tomorrow night, should you still swear yourself to me, I will begin to teach you of Them.  Knowing such, in years to come, you will be certain to find your way unto the nether where lies the Seal of Koth.  This is the path to your Adaya.  She refused the flesh, yet she doth long to live forever at your side.  Know this, for it is true, and her salvation is solely a matter of your own conviction.  Or do you consign her to oblivion?

The wind rose once more, and the dead leaves cascaded all around us.  Already I knew that I would leave Tadmur and Sarnath, and that I could not take my life without dooming myself to an existence forever without Adaya.  No.  Instead, there would be purpose to my life, and I would be reawakened, rekindled, reborn.  I whispered, “Revenge.”

Yes.

Najeed would not only be tortured by my own hand; before his suffering, he would know who I was, the boy I had been, and the memory of the girl whom he had slain.  I would destroy the Cult if I could, but for myself, the hunt would be far more personal and a solitary thing.  I would ruin Najeed, I would break him and he would beg, and only then would I see him die.

I sat, and the Lord in Ebon considered me.  Looking out over the lake and the emerald darkness of the night, I asked him:  “What must I do?”

I will tell you what you must know.  Najeed lives, diseased and shattered.  He hides himself in the land of Khom.  I will help you to hunt him.  In return, you must slay the minions of the Cult of Cthulhu wherever you may find them.  There are assassins, priests, necromancers who will know you by the mantle of shadow I now place upon thy brow.  These shall be your servants, should you choose them.

And too, you will find the way into the Dreamlands, the deeper netherworld under the cavern of flame, guarded by the Ghul Hetshepsu.  Too, if you are worthy, you will find the most favored of my chosen.

“And who is he?”

She.  She is Klocha, the crone of the river’s breaking.  If she deigns to find you worthy, she will teach you all that you must know to find a way for Adaya to follow you into the Dreamlands.  And there shall she reign, as your Queen.  What say you?

I had already made my choice.  I would live for my own purpose, but if the powers of the Lord in Ebon would ease my way, I had no more shame with which to deny his grace.

“I do not love you, my Lord,” I said to him.  “But for this moment I will serve you.”

He sat beside me, crossing his legs and poising his upturned hands upon his knees.  “I do love you, Samir,” he said to me in the tongue of the Babylonians.  Again, that curious sorrow in his voice.  I knew he was the Lord of all deception, but too, I believed in him.  His capacity for lies was exceeded only by the sincerity of his pain.  “And that will be enough.  One night, you will understand me and why I am.  Now rest, my child.  Rest.”

He turned, and I did let him kiss me upon my brow.

~

And I turned in my fitful sleep, there alone in my loft in the god-lavished city of Tadmur, where the nightbirds sang in the wind-tossed palms and the moon belongs to no one.  I would never sleep again within that city.

“Adaya,” I whispered to the night.

And to the nothingness.

SCROLL L

For the Love of Adaya

From that moment until the dawn, I did prepare for my passage to Damascus, the city of the jasmine blossom and the idolaters of Jesual, the Christ; Jerusalem, cradle of the triad of faiths besieged; Gaza, the carved-out rind of all the ancient treasures of Canaan; and Alexandria, the gateway to all of Khom, empress of Egypt.

Would the Lord in Ebon guide my way to the Sinai?  Would he strive to guide the way of my life entire?

I did not care.  He knew that I would betray him, and yet he gifted me with shards of all the powers I would need.  For now, our fates were intertwined and when he said that he did love me, I knew this to be true.  In losing Adaya, I had lost my fear of death.  I knew that I would become mighty, and feared, and suffer and know the ends victory.  All caring ceased as I set my feet upon the path of the forsaken, the hopeless and the exalted.

I knew that once Najeed was dead, I would seek out Hetshepsu; and if I did live on, I would journey south up the River Nilus to the shadow throne of Klocha herself.  If Adaya was cursed to wander upon this earth for all eternity, perhaps, I told myself, she would forgive and she would come with me.

It comforts me, even now, to believe that this is true.

Would she forgive me for all that I had done, if love had been the reason for my obsession?  I cannot erase the past, nor the abomination of my sin.  But I can learn, I can show mercy to the worthy, and I can pray that the good and righteous vengeance I shall mete may serve in some measure to balance the scales of my damnation.

Saved or damned, whatever my fate might be, I did not care.  I knew only that my sole hope to be with my Adaya had drifted into the west, into the land of Khom where the Pharaohs lie entombed and forever dreaming.  I would serve Nyarlathotep not to do his will, but to do my own and to destroyed Najeed and the Cult of Cthulhu.  From the Lord in Ebon I would steal the secrets of eternity, and live forever with my Adaya in the Empire of the Blackened Mind.

If she could only live on in dream, so be it.  I would take my true flesh and live in the Lands of Dream as well only to be at her side.  There we would be real and be as one.  If she would be caged in a single world, the Otherness of the Real, I would make that cage a cage of gold.

~

And in that time, that now of Tadmur?  Adaya is dead and wandering.

But what is mere Death before the throne of Love?  In worshipping Nyarlathotep, how can I not come to know the glorious power of passage unto dream; and there, the rising of my love in the Real of Otherness, the sacred miracle of reincarnation?

Should she choose, I will sleep in the Palace of Nothingness and there she will to come me.  My princess, and so my Queen.

I wait for her.  Every night there I dream.

The Song of Tadmur,

Of the Departure

O Adaya,

Forgive.  Endure the silence,

Embrace the hope that I may free you.

Should I triumph,

Your death shall be as nothing.

In Khom and before the gateway

To the Empire of the Blackened Mind,

The deeper netherworld

Where no priest shall ever

Dare deny you passage,

There I will carry you

Across the thresholds of the nether

Into our paradise, where by my hand

Sarnath itself shall be raised once more ...

For thy pleasure, for thy greater glory.

In miracle, I as the master of my will,

May you return to my embrace.

~

Pray, will you come to me,

Live again forever as my bride?

Our joy together shall be immortal.

Hand in hand, dancing, laughing,

Ever-lost in the palace of the songbirds ...

As Amytis in her Hanging Gardens,

As Nebuchadnezzar in his love’s enchantment,

You and I shall walk

The onyx streets, and so reflect in every pool,

And ever live as one.

This I swear to you.

~

Whether I be absolved of my transgressions,

Or be judged by the Lord in Ebon,

I will be thy champion.

I will fear no evil.

I go forth.  I wake.  I rise.

~

For that is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons, even Death may die.

~

HERE ENDETH CODEX I, NECRONOMICON.

CODA

By Professor Kelly

So ends the first four years in my interminable labors, in decrypting the John Dee manuscript of the Olaus Necronomicon.  I never believed that I would live to write this Coda to the work; but having done so, and in translating so many of the scrolls, I have found myself too intrigued by the life of Abd Al-Azrad to do anything but continue in my endeavors.

As haunting and disturbing as Codex I has proven itself to be, I find that it still entices me to read it yet again.  Whenever I come at last to the end, Al-Azrad’s famous couplet seems to reveal another secret of its meaning.

Throughout this project, perhaps the most troubling of all the revelations I have made is this one:  despite Al-Azrad’s evils, and all his vile deeds, I feel myself empathizing with him at every turn.

And what did happen, after all?  Lovecraft told us only that Al-Azrad worshipped Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.  How can this be, when Codex I ends with him serving the treacherous Nyarlathotep, and swearing to destroy the Cult of Cthulhu?  Did he find Najeed in Egypt, and slay him there?  Did he earn the favor of Hetshepsu and the sorceress Klocha, and delve his way into the Dreamlands where Adaya could live again?

There is so much to tell, much more remains.

The immensity of the Necronomicon itself is daunting.  This first Codex, some 80,000 words, represents perhaps one tenth of Al Azif in its entirety.  There are thousands more pages to decrypt.  This work manifests all that remains of the first 50 scrolls of the epic work.  I am decoding the scrolls in order, a task of many years.  In measuring the lacunae in John Dee’s ciphered pages, I believe there to be some 500 such scrolls in all.

Codex II, which Dee has entitled VEILS OF NYARLATHOTEP, is now in preparation.  From what I understand, it tells of Al-Azrad’s passage into Egypt; his hunting of Najeed; the secrets of the Deep Ones who lurk below the marshes of Faiyum; the assassin war against the Cult of Cthulhu; the secrets of the Sphinx, the Pyramids, Queen Nitocris and Nephren-Ka; Al-Azrad’s time in Hadoth; Hetshepsu, the Eater of Dust; the betrayal of the Lord in Ebon; and the occult revelations of the greatest sorceress of Al-Azrad’s age, Klocha the Unbeholden.

As I continue the work, I am certain that I will find oblique passages which shall further inform Codex I, THE CTHULHU REVELATIONS; and I still hope that I may find those sections which were torn or sliced out of Dee’s original grimoire.  There are also the lost scrolls which Dee and my ancestor Edward Kelley had never beheld.  Too, there are missing parts of the Greek Nekronomikon which Olaus Wormius never knew.  For these missing fragments, I am ever searching; and everything that I find will be included in Codex I and its future revisions.

I am grateful to you, the reader, for taking this journey with me into darkness.  When Codex II has been decoded and prepared, despite all danger, I will publish it as well.

Cthulhu slumbers, dead and dreaming.  The world must know what is to come.

Until then, may you sleep well, and may all your dreams of Sarnath and R’lyeh belong to you alone.  Farewell.

~

KDK

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Title

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

Dedication

A Reverie

Masks of Madness

Introitus

A Curious Inscription

Gathering the First

Scroll 1

Scroll 2

Scroll 3

Scroll 4

Scroll 5

Scroll 6

Gathering the Second

Scroll 7

Scroll 8

Scroll 9

Scroll 10

Scroll 11

Gathering the Third

Scroll 12

Scroll 13

Scroll 14

Scroll 15

Scroll 16

Gathering the Fourth

Scroll 17

Scroll 18

Scroll 19

Scroll 20

Gathering the Fifth

Scroll 21

Scroll 22

Scroll 23

Scroll 24

Scroll 25

Scroll 26

Gathering the Sixth

Scroll 27

Scroll 28

Scroll 29

Scroll 30

Scroll 31

Scroll 32

Gathering the Seventh

A Note on the Text

Scroll 33

Scroll 34

Scroll 35

Scroll 36

Scroll 37

Scroll 38

Gathering the Eighth

Scroll 39

Scroll 40

Scroll 41

Scroll 42

Scroll 43

Scroll 44

Scroll 45

Scroll 46

Scroll 47

Scroll 48

Gathering the Ninth

Scroll 49

Scroll 50

Coda

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