Bring to us, Oh buried one, the great fires of Hell and the star. Swiftly grant us absolution, for we dilute your world’s beauty, we corrupt the home of the true people! We have adulterated your precious soil, exploited your generous gifts, and now we beseech annihilation! Quake the Heavens, usher in the new dawn, let us be reborn in thy image, our shining Spouse of the Sun!
The peaks are older than old. Before the dinosaurs, before giants, before the trees around us, they have sat there - watching, waiting. They lie still today as they always have.
Egregious mounds that they are, rising out from the Earth like ancient tumours. Detestable cliff faces and horrid valleys, the mountains that should not be.
Something stirs now from those monstrous hills. A great blaze lain dormant for aeons, brought about by some unimaginable cataclysm. It flickers in the sky, a dying light; it infests the air and burns the hair in your nose; a harbinger of what is to come.
Those blasted zealots, heretics to all that is good and proper. They wish to rend us from steel, from our civilisations and return us to the dirt. They will not rest until all our great works are undone and we are crawling in the mud.
They wish to rouse what fiendish fire lives within those mountains! To call down the end of all things!
Lend an ear and obey completely: regard the Lunedas only with dread, and unwavering terror. To do otherwise is lunacy.
The great inferno rages on, unquenchable. It consumes all in its path, a maw of death that hungers for the living. The trees are its teeth, the earth is its gullet. All manner of creature are caught in its blaze, flailing wildly as they are drawn inexorably towards damnation. It is here.
Silence sits thick and strong like a layer of cement. It’s a palpable, physical weight; all encompassing and inescapable. The ears groan and complain, they find sounds where there are none – they whine and ring endlessly. Blood pumps through miles of twisting blue and red tubes, rushing to the surface of the body, over and over in a steady, rhythmic fashion – it is the loudest noise in the world.
It is an infinite void full of so many things. The endless cycle of days turns into a marathon of loneliness. It is a singular experience, unbroken even by sleep. Moss and grime are poor companions and the vacant towers can only be scaled once or twice until it becomes a bore and not worth the effort. There is a night, and a day, where the sun shines mockingly and the moon plunges everything into darkness. The cold is the worst part. It sinks into the bones and makes them ache, numbs the skin and steals the warmth from the blood. There is no one to share a fire with.
The name is forgotten, but it doesn’t matter. There’s naught a reason to remember, there is no person left. Everything that made it human is somewhere else, hidden away, vanished forever, or maybe just hiding. The cracked, empty pavements don’t care what it is called, the vacant windows don’t want to know it’s favourite colour and the trees would rather keep growing. The last one, wandering in its death knell doesn’t faze them.
A storm gathers several kilometres away. It can sense it in the way the air hangs, still and expectant. It can be seen in the way the clouds have begun to roil and boil, black and purple. It remembers storms. Used to love them, the way they came on suddenly and swept everything up in their ferocity. The way thunder would boom, shake them to their core, and the way lightning would flash and light up a whole field. It used to love the rain, when it washed everything clean and made the world smell fresh. It waits for the storm. It could strip the flesh from the bone and leave naught but a ruined mess, and nothing would be missed.
Wind arrives first, a low howl that picks up speed quickly. Debris fly, small at first then larger. It can hear the crunch and snap of branches, the tinkle of glass. The rain comes next and its like needles, tiny little needles that pierce the skin and make it bleed.
The mind wanders, as it often does, to the sound of footsteps. A dozen pairs of feet, hundreds even, walking the streets. Hurried feet, full of movement and attached to people. The sound of life.
We have dug too deep. To try and uncover that which remained hidden, that which is cloaked by the natural order of things, that which was, are, and shall always be, is a madness inhibited only by humanity, swimming in our great pool of ignorance of which we can never hope to comprehend.
Where the skin of the Earth ought to have remained untouched, great holes are secretly dug. An expedition into the unknown launched by the minds of irrational men. Beyond the turbid universe of which we foolishly think possible to understand lay horrors far more chaotic, and at last our heinous meddling has called them into view.
It is against our very nature to accept our limitations, and accept that which is not ours to uncover. It is this nature that kills us, that brought delphic forces to our plane. It is here, in the north, on the magnetic centre of the planet where our evil prying has converged to a singular pursuit. Where the cold is ceaseless and unyielding, where the comforts of humanity do not reach, and where the holes are dug. Deep, malevolent pits that they are, which hold an evil unique in its indifference; a primal terror that is beyond life’s edge. It exists, has existed, and will always exist; the uncaring, callous things that are now within reach. It is here, in these depths, that the madness of man has reached its peak.
The cold is merciless, and the metal corridors that make up this labyrinthine garrison of villainy are eternally empty. I remain, with naught to do but to ruminate and go slowly mad. Some of the others I saw their deaths first hand, some as a result of fighting but most met their end by their own hands. Each day brings me closer to my own inevitable conclusion, and each night I am haunted by the thoughts of what lies below, what I know exists and has always been; unaccountable beings that stay undimensioned to us, the existence of which is a white hot blade to the psyche. In perpetuum I mull over myself, muttering and biting, roaming the dead halls. God pity the man who remains sane.
Our ignorance and vile curiosity has done away with our most merciful tendency. The inability of the human mind to comprehend the entirety of the Universe, which has created ourselves a gracious bubble of blindness. The bubble that we have viciously and purposefully ravaged open, revealing to us terrifying vistas of the true reality, of our true position in the domain of existence. Our clouded reality was a blessing, and we have torn it asunder.
back