by J K Ishaya
“An ominous energy encapsulated the spread of the ruins, and I dared not wander too far in. My chest began to ache inside for reasons I could not understand. Before me stood a set of cracked and pocked steps that led up to a dais where I knew somehow, just knew, that an elaborate golden throne once stood. Now there were clumps of dirt in the cracks where seeds had taken root, and where a throne had been sat a fragment of a marble arch amid a pile of rubble. Around all of this was a field of masonry chunks that were slowly sinking into the marsh, and upon those pieces more lizards clung with their webbed feet, their skins gleaming with slips of moonlight, and their large, serpentine eyes seemed disturbingly intelligent.
“I sensed Nyarlathotep behind me, but so consumed was I in observing the ruins and the alien emotion they stirred in me, I did not run. I barely even acknowledged him. By now the ache in my chest had spread throughout my body, causing nerves to hum and a wave of blind sadness sought to come over me.
“‘At last, you see it,’ Nyarlathotep said, his tone very satisfied, gloating.
“‘What is this place?’ I whispered weakly.
“‘These are the ruins of Sarnath,’ he said and approached until he was in my periphery, back in the form I knew most: the half-breed body that belonged to someone named Lyrr, and I caught the sick green gleam of the scarab on his forehead in that circlet holding back the palest of hair. ‘You will not remember it easily. At least, not in the manner that you believe memory works.’
“It took me a moment to back track and realize exactly what he had said. It felt like a riddle, and I wanted to solve it, at the same time I felt too overwhelmed. The weight of this place descended upon me. Those walls… I was holding them up. I was part of them. Such was the sensation that I would be absorbed into this bleak, lost landscape with its broken stones and scaly inhabitants.
“’Two hundred years ago, this was a thriving city, a center of trade rich with gold and ivory,’ he said. ‘A thousand years before that, it was built on the destruction of another civilization of peaceful—if inhuman—neighbors who worshiped the god Bokrug.’
“This name, being recently introduced to me, got my attention. ‘The people of Ilarnek worship Bokrug,’ I said.
“‘Yes, because they do not wish to bring down upon themselves the same wrath as the people of Sarnath. You see, Sarnath had blasphemed Bokrug in a most cruel way by unjustly slaughtering his followers across the lake. That was in the city of Ib, peopled with an ugly, amphibious race. They were killed for no other reason than that they were unpleasant to look at by human standards.’
“I nodded vacantly along with this, and then blinked as I began to come around, wondering why he’d told me this so frankly. ‘How did you find me?’
“‘You spoke to your god,’ he chuckled. ‘Thoughts, emotions, prayers, they all come back to me through the Great Ones, and the shantak birds also helped me specifically locate you.’ He turned and gestured back toward the forest, and at a glance I saw that far away in the sky, the two huge bird creatures were circling, vulture like, against the stars and an even more distant trace of pink auroras. For a being like Nyarlathotep, attempting to track the likes of me, they would have been a perfect beacon on the horizon marking that I had entered the forest. His explanation also confirmed that Zalmoxis was his servant, and that added insult to injury, leaving another dead hole in my heart. The deity whom my people had trusted had indeed turned his back.
“‘Once my followers in Ilarnek sent out word that you had been spotted along with Malorix, I dispatched the shantaks to pursue you, then you made it the slightest bit easier. I see, however that he is no longer with you. Pity, I would have liked to see him explain this to you.’ He gestured back toward the ruins. ‘He wouldn’t know where to begin, I’m sure.’
“‘Why is that?’ I looked back at the stone fragments and began to fall into the daze again. The fact that these were no simple ruins. They rippled with the soul of an ancient world, far more ancient than Dacia is now, or Rome, or any civilization that rose and fell within the last two-thousand years.”
“Like Atlantis?” Howard chimes in. “Dare I ask if it really existed?”
“Not that it matters, but yes,” I say. To the new spark of questions igniting behind his eyes, I quickly add, “I know little about it. It was long wasted by my time, while the ruins of Sarnath were young, comparatively speaking, given that Nyarlathotep identified them as two hundred years old, and then he reminded me of the time differences between the earth plane and the Dreamlands.
“‘So it goes,’ he continued, ‘that when the destruction hit, it began with a disturbance at a great feast that the king of Sarnath threw to celebrate a thousand years of prosperity after the slaughter of the people of Ib. He had been warned by his high priests not to do this, but nevertheless, he proceeded to schedule a city-wide festival and a royal banquet to which the members of neighboring kingdoms were invited. These royals or their envoys arrived in finest fashion, in caravans of camels and elephants, bearing gifts, and the city was loud with cheers and drunken revelry leading up to the feast. They ignored the mists that were crawling across the waters of the lake, and on the day of the feast, an uproar occurred. The walls of Sarnath shook, and guests who were not at the feast fled in terror. The king and his court did not escape, and in fact it was suggested that they were transformed into hundreds of water lizards that scampered about on their bellies to flee the crumbling walls. Bokrug’s vengeance was served with a sense of poetry, wouldn’t you say?’
“‘I… suppose,’ I said. I had seen this destruction he spoke of, illustrated on the panels of the repository door in Ilarnek, and I thought of the idol and now understood why those people would want to avoid such a fate by showing greater respect for the lizard god.
“’On Earth,’ he said very pointedly, ‘that was only thirty-eight years ago.’
“A startling surge passed through me, and I whipped around to look at him, frowning when my mind reeled to grasp where he was going with this. ‘Why does that matter?’ I asked weakly.
“‘According to a servant woman in the court, who escaped Sarnath’s fate, her mistress was the king’s daughter, a beautiful maiden with eyes that were like steel and sapphire. She had come to be with child, a secret she kept from her father whom she was afraid of and who was in negotiations to marry her off to one of his allies, a monarch who was much older than her and known for his unkindness as well as the inclination to pick his pustuled face in front of his court.
“’On top of this looming threat, she was a very pensive, troubled girl and given to studying her city’s past, a past which she did not approve of, and the celebration her father was going to hold, glorifying the eradication of an entire race, filled her with intense disgust. The servant woman claimed that Bokrug showed mercy on the girl and allowed her to escape with her child. The night before Sarnath fell, she and her servant crept from the city and made their way south to the coast, and there they parted ways. The girl’s intention was to go across the sea to the isle of Oriab, there to climb the mountain of Ngranek, that place where you saw the face of the Great Ones. It is one of the portals onto the earth plane, you see. She wanted to escape the Dreamlands, and if a mortal can get past the night-gaunts and the sharp edges of obsidian and up to the rim, you will find a portal, that one which opens upon the peak of a mountain in your home country, that mountain that you once held sacred.’
“Numb, I listened to this and murmured, ‘Kogaionon.’ Then I shook off what he was inferring by this supposed evidence. It was nothing but a story, I told myself. How could he know so much?
“‘A pregnant princess would have great difficulty surviving such a journey, she might even, at the end of it, find herself stressed to the point of giving birth unplanned, somewhere in the woods of a foreign world, and in that difficult birth, succumb to death.’
“‘Be quiet,’ I snarled at him. ‘You are fucking with my mind again.’
“‘No!’ he said, his voice tak
ing on a preternatural growl that rose on the night. Suddenly he was close to me, gripping my face and forcing me to stare back. The horizontal pupils in his eyes narrowed to sharp slits while the oily patches danced on the edges of his lids. ‘Remember when I took your blood in the cavern? I used it to read your past. That girl, the last noble of Sarnath… she was your mother. The one with eyes of steel and sapphire.’ He shook me roughly and I reached up to grasp his hands, tried to pull them free, but around him the world began to roil with vague, shadowy shapes, claws reaching out then receding, eyes and tentacles and a thousand mouths of long, needle-like teeth. Then faces, familiar but warped by their movement, coalesced and then collapsed back into the chaotic. A glimpse of Decebal, and then Bielis, and my wife’s face.
“‘You remember far more than you know, Zyr,’ he hissed close to my cheek. ‘Reach deep within, and you will find that this is your heritage, this ruin. This is your true ancestral home.’
“’No…’ I tried to resist him, but my mind was reaching back in time, again, just as when he had first ripped into it and delved back as far as my birth. Only now I was diving deeper, floating, hearing voices and screams and fitful visions phased in and out behind my eyes which burned in their sockets. I saw human figures warp and twist and hunch over, their screams becoming garbled, as they watched their own skin tighten into gleaming scales. I saw grand marble columns and buttresses collapse and crush bodies below. I saw a murky tidal wave of gargantuan height rolling over me from the lake, and I heard myself suppressing a harsh keening noise that wanted to rise into a scream.
“‘You are the only rightful heir to Sarnath, if there were a Sarnath,’ his voice continued taunting me. ‘You would be the only rightful heir to Dacia as well. If there were still a Dacia at all.’
“The emotion of it all, the sensation of plunging back and forth in time, the visions. I cannot put into words what it was truly like, only that it was swallowing me. My only retreat was to pull deep within myself and slam shut a mental door which I held tightly in place as I sank… and sank…
“And the last thing I heard him say was, ‘That makes you the king of ruins, Zyraxes.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
A small parlor clock on the mantel seems to tick louder along with the pencil nub that scuffs rapidly over paper as if both must compensate for the silence that falls. Howard has been taking notes more diligently, writing down the story of Sarnath in his personal codes and symbols.
“Did you discover any truth to Nyarlathotep’s claim?” he finally asks. “Or was he fu-fu-ffff… Was he only playing with your mind after all? Getting you to fold?”
Kvasir and I exchange a glance, and then I look at that little clock: 3:30 a.m.
“Truth… lies… either can still fuck with your mind, Howard,” I finally say. “Truth is far more disorientating, when you’ve already accepted the life you were born into, but to discover another one that you might have been a part of? Truth can be very disruptive indeed.”
“Did you find out more about Sarnath?”
I steeple my fingers, stare deep into a reflection of myself in the glaze of the teapot. “The ruins are no longer there,” I say, “only the lonely marsh. It has been ten-thousand years now in Dreamland time since that catastrophe. There is nothing left. The last arches and columns collapsed long ago, and the water swept over them. Reeds grew out of their silted crevices. There are still the scads of water lizards that undulate through the water and dine on small fish and insects. You might hear frogs bleating, or the trill of a dragonfly, but any last signs of Sarnath… nothing. The repository in Ilarnek has scrolls bearing the same story Nyarlathotep told me, but they leave out any rumors of an escaped, pregnant princess.”
“Then how did Nyarlathotep know about her?”
“Oh, the widespread gossip about her did exist. The scholars in the repository felt that it was only hearsay, so they did not record it, and I failed to track down the servant woman. With time the gossip faded. You will not hear of said princess anywhere else.” I sit forward and look at him intensely to make clear my next statement. “I would also appreciate it if you would not mention her in any writing of your own. You may scrawl down the story of Sarnath, but do not mention her.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t you like to honor her in some way?” His argument is in no way aggressive, but even Kvasir is a little annoyed.
“There is more to it than that, Howard,” my companion says firmly. “Do not do it.”
Howard clamps his mouth shut and finally nods.
“Swear it.”
“Yes… yes, of course… I swear.” He gives me a gesture. “Please, Mr. Corvinus, continue.”
“I do not know how long I was unconscious. Long enough for my body to be conveyed back to the Phantasm, which was out to sea already when I finally crept from the safe haven I had established in my mind. I rose from the cocoon of my personal darkness into bodily sensation, including a throbbing headache. My eyes were crusted shut, but when I pried them open, it was to the soft phosphorescent glow of symbols beneath and around me. The circle was painted on the main deck of the Phantasm, and I was lying directly in the middle, trapped in yet another prison without walls. It was somewhat humiliating to have been captured again, especially this way. I cursed quietly at the situation, and then gradually began to recall how I had gotten here again. The trap had been far different this time, in some ways a trap of my own making with my own memory used against me, and yet, as I came around, I doubted all of it. How does a person completely raised in one culture accept that his origins are in another that was smote by an angry god of lizards? Again… absurd… yet here I was, still in the Dreamlands and still going nowhere. At least, not anywhere away from Nyarlathotep.
“When I sat up, rubbing my eyes and finding the crust looked like bits of charcoal, I located him standing out toward the stern of the ship, looking upon the horizon of stars. He stood still as stone but for the wind through his hair, and he radiated an aura of absolute fury. The turbaned crew moved about performing their usual duties, but they avoided him, skirted around my area completely, and kept their eyes averted and there were no gruff sneers or chuckles at my expense. Like children avoiding the attention of an angry adult.
“Beyond his rigid figure, the sky looked more expansive than ever with the sea below. There were no silhouettes of islands anywhere near us, and the moon was on the far horizon in our wake. Against its light, I saw the shantaks soaring high, twin sentries commanded to tag along and keep an eye out for more night-gaunts that might attempt to snatch me away. I faced forward again and wondered where we were going now.
“To prove that he had a tether to my thoughts, Nyarlathotep sent a response that boomed inside my head, close to painful with its force, the voice harsh and completely inhuman.
“You will see. It is time for you to understand your purpose, Zyraxes.
“It was no longer the affectionate Zyr that my men had called me. Now it was a formal show that he was putting me at a distance and in my place. He turned away from his watch and approached the edge of my circle, tilting his head with the strange grace of an observing animal, eyes narrowed at me. An awareness stole into my mind that I had seen one of his greater forms in the immense, unnamable shadow that had rolled through the forest after me, reaching with tendrils and claws and engulfing everything in its path. It had been no hallucination, but a very real manifestation, and it was now neatly folded and compressed back into this single host body, but it might readily emerge again, and there were thousands more shapes that he might take now that he was wary of me and to see any of them might be more maddening than I could bear.
“‘The lost son of Sarnath awakes. It almost makes sense now, does it not? It is remarkable that you are of the Dreamlands yet also a Dreamer, and that may well play a role in how you could be so predisposed to the substance and how Malorix awakened the spark. Most humans tend to be one or the other depending on their realm of origin, but that makes you very much like t
his very vessel that I wear.’ He did not lend me that annoying smirk as usual even though I cringed. But he was finished with playing and I realized that he truly believed what he had told me on that lake shore amid those ruins, that I was this lost scion of a long-drowned city. ‘Malorix spoke to you of a great many things, I am sure,’ he said. ‘Did he tell you at all of your purpose?’
“By this point, I was past caring very much what happened to me next as long as it ended this whole ordeal. ‘Why? Did you want to be the one to tell me first?’ I asked.
“‘What did he say?’ he replied without rising to my bait. ‘He does know, after all. It is the same destiny as his, the one which he has evaded for too long, but he cannot run from his calling forever.’
“Malorix had mentioned something about the need of our bodies as vessels, but for something else other than Nyarlathotep, and that was all I knew, but I was not about to humor my captor willingly. Before I could say something snide again, that gripping force seized me, digging into my mind, it was more of a torture technique this time, as opposed to pulling the information directly out of my memories. He wanted, I realized, for me to volunteer the information this time. He wanted to break me. It was one thing to dupe me into listening to him, to following him down the steps and voyaging through the Dreamlands when I was ignorant but now he wanted me to submit in a far different way, to surrender what was left of my dignity and crush me.
“I gritted my teeth and when my claws extracted, I sunk them into the planks below me, rooting down as pain ramified from the base of my skull and down into my spine where I swore the vertebrae were undulating, contorting back into the original curvature that had tormented me for most of my human life. This was worse, twisting back and forth within me in such an unnatural movement that I swore my ribs were tilting so steeply as to grind against each other. But painful though it was, I refused to scream. I dug in harder, and the glowing symbols directly under my hands began to burn my palms.