by J K Ishaya
“I could not control myself. With no consideration at all who this individual had been in life, I dove for it. Of course I pulled the heart out first, and when that was gobbled down, I gnawed on the muscle of an arm stump, broke open a bone and licked out the marrow with a tongue that had suddenly grown long and black and able to extract every morsel. Just as I was feeling satiated, my gaze rose, and I saw that there was another alcove adjacent to mine but tucked back a little deeper in the cavern.
"Within its opening stood the figure of a young man who had emerged from that deeper cavity to see what thing raised such grotesque and slurping noises. His tattered clothes had been stripped down to the bare minimum so that I saw much of his body and determined upon first sight, before examining any details, that he was not human. His ivory skin was too uniform, too perfect, even where scarred, and his waist-length hair the color of a wheat field at harvest had an ethereal quality. Tapered ears, slightly pointed on the ends with long lobes, peeked between the golden locks. Large, green eyes—feline with their slit pupils—stared at me, unreadable, but the scowl of his ample mouth expressed obvious disgust. I noted immediately that he resembled Nyarlathotep, but this clearly was not my captor. Our captor. This one was shackled at the wrists and around the neck, fat iron chains reaching back into the alcove out of view where I assumed they were anchored into the rock, so it took no symbols or spells to contain my quiet neighbor.”
Howard turns toward Kvasir, astounded. “You? This was you, wasn’t it? This is how the two of you met?”
“It is,” he replies and adds with a humble tone, “I hadn’t the scars on my face that you see now. I was young by the standards of my own kind, but not young in human terms. I had been imprisoned for weeks by the entity of whom Mr. Corvinus speaks. I had learned by then that we were somewhere in a cavern system within the Alps, nothing less than a lair, and I had no idea if rescue or escape was even possible.”
“So you, too, were now in that Alpine lair, Mr. Corvinus?” Howard asks.
I nod. “At the time, I had no idea how far away from home I had been relocated. And, obviously, I did not know yet all that Mr. Freysson has told you now. This I would learn just a little later, for at that immediate moment he did not exactly trust me after watching me dine on whatever human flesh was handed to me.
“Upon first noticing my prison mate, I recall that I narrowed my gaze, examined him. ‘What are you?’ I asked. My voice was gruff as hell, my vocal cords perhaps still sorting themselves. He did not answer but slipped back out of sight, and I heard a chain rattle. I attempted to reach out and read his mind, but apparently my enclosure stunted my mental abilities as well. Looking around, seeing how the cavern stretched on, weaving deeper with more rows of columns, arches and crevices in the vault above, I shouted out. My voice echoed back, abrasive to my own ears and met with a low chorus of seething and hissing. I focused and saw them up there, the pallid things clinging to the columns. They clicked and skittered up and down or tucked behind a column or into a cavern shelf like giant, milky aphids.
“’You next door!’ I shouted rudely in Dacian, and when I got no response to that, I tried Latin, and then what broken Sarmatian and Greek that I knew, exhausting my fluency in other languages. I was galled, confused, scared, and my immediate defense was to be as obnoxious as possible. ‘I say, you in the hole next to me! What are you?’”
“Ass,” Kvasir mutters at the recollection.
Howard lets out a little sputter. “Excuse me.” He raises a hand to his mouth to conceal it.
“I was not trying to make friends. I was miserably trying to make sense of the world into which I’d been thrust, still waiting to wake up from the nightmare. ‘Tell me something,’ I said with less acid. ‘What. Are. You? I cannot tell you what I am. I do not even know,’ I said this more quietly, losing my wind.
“’An abomination,’ came the answer, spoken in a tired, dull voice, and in Dacian, no less.
I sense Kvasir’s regret at having ever said it. He had his reasons then, but it is a description that I have come to embrace.
“’Abomination!’ This boomed through the cavern as if outraged, and it was that now familiar voice speaking one language on top of another, clear Dacian over a whispering, guttural hiss. I straightened and looked toward the owner as he approached from one of the connecting chambers. ‘Why no, dear brother, our new guest is no abomination. He is a miracle!’ Nyarlathotep had discarded the cloak he’d been wearing when he trapped me and was clothed in a black leather jerkin the likes of which I’d never seen, sleeveless, with strange leggings and boots of the same foreign fashion that Malorix wore. The sword which had taken my head was sheathed at his side and my eyes automatically tracked it. His fingers tapped absently on the pommel, but by now I saw the greatest of threats in that simple gesture.
“’You are not my brother,’ my neighbor replied from where he was still tucked out of my line of vision.
“’Are you sure?’ I asked, again being as much of a bastard as I could. ‘You look like twins to me. Ah, wait, I see the difference in the eyes.’ Nyarlathotep was not interested in my sarcasm or my prison mate. He came to the edge of my circle and scrutinized me the way he had in the tent, and I braced for something else to happen. What would I lose this time besides my head?
“’A miracle indeed,’ he said more to himself. And then to me, ‘See the potential I spoke of? You are still here, are you not, Zyraxes? Head and body seamed back together as if nothing happened. And that is only the beginning, my friend. Only the beginning.’
“‘A miracle?’ I asked, mistakenly thinking I could steer some kind of discussion with this being, even while his ink-washed eyes unhinged every nerve. ‘Because I survived beheading?’ This asked with an edge of more sarcasm. My hand absently came up to rub at my neck, finding not a trace of a scar.
“’No, because you exist at all.’ He paced leisurely, hands making gestures as if we were old friends. ‘I chose Malorix so carefully. He seemed like the perfect specimen, but when his incubation took so long, I began to doubt. It was years before he emerged from his cocoon, and his transformation was glorious. I thought I would have to find others like him, with the potential, and put them through the same process. I had little idea he could pass on the means on his own, but it seems his blood has become the elixir needed to do this. And now it is possible that so is yours, but not to just anyone, no. There was something that he must have sensed about you. He recognized the potential.’
“This talk of potential again was still a mystery to me, but I hoped to piece the puzzle together later if I simply got enough information out of him. ‘What do you mean incubated?’
“’Like an egg incubating for a chick to break free, or a pupa in its chrysalis emerging as a butterfly. Do you comprehend?’ he was talking down to me now and stopped his pacing to turn those oily eyes on me with a pernicious smile. Behind the patchy gleam of black, his vertical pupils widened hungrily. ‘Only, a chick or a butterfly can be crushed easily. You cannot, and see, look at you. Perfection. So is he who awakened your potential. It was years ago—no, over a century and a half!—when I plucked him from the battlefield in Gaul along with a handful of others for the experiment. Only he survived the metamorphosis. The others sadly....’ He tsked as if it was a matter of little consequence. ‘Most of them went too deranged, had to be discarded. Ah, but they still serve the purpose of study, I suppose.’ He gave another tsk and I might have seen something like an eye roll in those black depths.”
“Experiment?” Howard asks, his brows knitting.
“Yes,” I say. “The term guinea pig did not exist then.”
Kvasir raises a brow to that. He recalls listening in on the discussion as easily as I remember having it.
“It barely fazed me that, with his last comment, he had indicated that some of his other victims were possibly still alive. I asked how long ago this had taken place, and Nyarlathotep remarked with feigned astonishment, ‘Why, since over a hundred and
fifty years. Thousands of years in the Dreamlands.’
“Of course, I had no idea what he meant by the Dreamlands. Not at that time in my life. The rest, however, began to become more evident and had my attention far more. Malorix,” I conclude now to put it in perspective for Howard, “had apparently been creeping around since Julius Caesar. I had been raised to be versed in history given my own people’s dealings with Rome, so I speculated that he could have fought under Vercingetorix in the Gallic wars. Dacians had all heard of this legend, Caesar’s greatest pain in the ass from the West. I think Decebal drew much of his inspiration from the stories of Vercingetorix uniting his people and holding out against Rome even if it had ended in the worst. That made Malorix not an old monster in the scheme of things, but to me a hundred and fifty was old, especially then. As a human I might have managed to live into my sixties as Decebal had, but that was not common, so I was astonished at the claim. Mostly, I put the evidence together that Malorix, those years ago, had escaped from the strange horror of Nyarlathotep but had become a horror himself, but he had saved me, and he might have taught me all of this on his own, and far better than Nyarlathotep did, had I been patient with him. But here I was, in a situation that was beyond my comprehension.
“I regretted that I had wandered away from Malorix, that my last discussion with him had been argumentative, and I wondered if he would find me again, or if he had given up on me. Did he even know I was captured? New urgency rose in me and I took a step closer to the edge of the circle only to be pushed back, and Nyarlathotep gave me one last snide smile as he moved to the next cell and its occupant. I watched him stare through the opening, and I assume a private exchange was made. Was there?” I look to Kvasir.
“Yes,” he replies, clears his throat. “Yes, there was. I believe it involved a fond fuck yourself from me to him, and then he tormented me with an assault on my mind and memories to keep me exhausted.”
“It was not a good day for either of us,” I say flatly. “I thought Nyarlathotep was finally going to leave, but then he returned to the edge of the circle one more time.
“‘Hmmm, I wonder,’ he said looking me over again. ‘Eyes of steel and sapphire.’ This he said more to himself, but I heard it clearly and cocked my head wondering why he had recalled those words, which had been originally spoken by Decebal. Nyarlathotep had snatched them from my memories of being an infant in the cold, but it was as if something had suddenly occurred to him about that statement.
“Then he reached up and thrust out his hand over the line, fingers spread wide. I cried out as an invisible force lifted and pulled me toward him, dragging the tips of my toes over the rocky floor, and my throat was snared in his hand. With otherworldly strength that far surpassed mine, he pulled me closer and I felt the power of the circle exerted upon me. It vibrated through me and prickled, and the longer I was held there, the more prickles became full shots of pain that felt like my skin was evaporating. He leaned closer, I dare say sniffed me as if that would give him some other clue, and through the haze and pain I saw his face twist from an exotic and humanoid creature into something unfathomable. My vision muddied, but I still saw the eyes become completely black, and down the center of his head a seam formed that gaped wide open into a vertical mouth, rimmed in multiple rows of dagger-like teeth. They gnashed at me and then the maw opened wider, and I would have screamed were he not squeezing my throat. I felt like I was shrinking and falling down inside that mouth, into void, into a soupy chaos where I could not thread together a single thought and my consciousness gradually shattered. The hand around my neck extracted long claws, one of which pierced my skin and cut deep down to the vein. I felt it dig around there, drawing up a well of blood.
“A moment later he dropped me, and I landed on my haunches gasping. The pain stopped immediately, and my head cleared. I brought a hand up to clamp over the side of my neck. My fingers became slippery with the ichor, but I felt the gash close up into smooth, scarless skin. I looked up to see him once more in his less terrifying form. He had his hand up still, and a long line of nearly black blood covered his thumb, running down into his cupped hand. ‘There is more to you, Zyraxes. There is something very familiar indeed. Your blood will tell me.’ He began to turn to go, his attention captured by the ooze pooling in his palm. ‘Your blood will tell me everything.’”
Chapter Thirteen
Howard realizes that he left his notebook in his room and goes to get it, stealing glances at us before he disappears down the little corridor. Between Kvasir and myself there is pure silence in which neither our minds nor our mouths speak. It seems neither of us was quite as prepared for this part of the telling, even though Kvasir has been encouraging me to speak of it for some time. The boy returns and resettles with the book on his knee.
“Go on,” he insists and waves the stubby pencil at me as if it is some magic wand to get me speaking again.
I scratch at my beard and consider the time, now one hour after midnight and there is so much more to come. “Clearly, my perceptions of the world were already flipped upside down from my transformation and grasping the true nature of my captor, but I had little concept how much weirder it was going to get.
“I wandered the edges of my prison for a while, testing the barrier and finding no weakness, and when I gave up, I laid down flat on my back and stared at the ceiling. I listened to the pallid things above click, scritch and scratch as they scurried up and down the columns, and one occasionally came within my line of sight as if to check on me, but none broke the circle. I still had the remains of my last meal nearby, but I did not touch it again. The hunger was replaced by every uncertainty I never thought I would have. As a human, I knew what I was, and I had a very defined place in the tapestry of life. I knew someday I would die, and that was simple enough. Now, I had no idea who or what I was anymore, the only certainty being that I could not die, and thus I faced the greatest unknown of all. I didn’t think about possibilities and what I could do with this eternal existence, not trapped as I was. I could not even conceive of escape. Were it a normal prison of chains and iron bars like that cage in the Roman camp, I might have imagined finding a way to pick a lock, or dislocate my thumbs to get out of shackles, but for this prison I had no concept of how to escape.”
“And I began to wonder what Nyarlathotep wanted with him,” Kvasir adds, coming back into the conversation with a little more avidity. “The Boreans had known that Nyarlathotep had experimented with transforming human victims for some reason. Everything he did had some motive if not merely demented entertainment.
“Borean?” Howard asks. “This is what you call yourselves?”
“Yes. After our founder, Boreas.”
Howard pauses to add that in his notes but remains somewhat on track. “And why was Nyarlathotep calling you his brother?” There is an understandable shiver in the boy’s voice.
I merely sip my tea in relative peace and and sit back to let Kvasir take a turn.
“It was not complicated,” he explains. “He was Nyarlathotep, yes, but the body which he inhabited was that of my fostered brother, Lyrr, who was half Borean, half human.
“But allow me to elaborate a little more before I further explain that.
“Boreans are the remnants of a race that parted ways with its architects eons ago, Howard. We came to this world from the Dreamlands to set down roots and have been here since before man forged the first sword. Nyarlathotep was the reason we parted ways with our forebears. They are the Great Ones whom you might think of as the old gods of earth, those who carved out the mythologies you will find in your Bulfinch. Nyarlathotep, you see, does not need to subsist on the beliefs of man to continue existing, but they do. He convinced them of their vulnerability, and an agreement was struck. They served him in exchange for his protection and his assurance that somewhere within the Earthly realm, they would always have believers to support them but, over time, his demands became more corrupt and they his pawns. The story goes that a young god na
med Boreas grew dissatisfied and resented that his kind should turn to such primordial filth as Nyarlathotep. He led a rebellion, and while a handful of the Great Ones joined him, it was mostly the few generations of their half-breed children who followed him through one of the hazardous portals from the Dreamlands into the earth plane. My clan was a product of that immigration, what we call the Great Crossing.”
“Do you not become homesick?” Howard asks.
“I was born here on Earth long after, so I have never known the Dreamlands as my actual home. I have gone there through other such portals as we have discussed, but that is the length of my journeys. So, no, I do not feel homesick. My home is here, though I do sometimes feel a strange sort of nostalgic tug to see the land of my origins more long term. It is not impossible. I think I see glimpses of it, occasionally, in my sleep, even once encountering those damnable steps that you two speak of.” He gestures laxly from me to Howard. A new glaze forms briefly over his eyes and a small smile quivers at the corner of his mouth. “Who knows? Perhaps I am a bit of a Dreamer yet, hm?”
“You mean you’re not?”
“My people originated in the Dreamlands, Howard. They are not Dreamers themselves.” He smirks at the boy’s astounded look.
“Anyway, within the Dreamlands, Nyarlathotep has many forms and is at his greatest power, but to walk on earth with some permanence, he needs a vessel. In the past, he has had several in this world, all of them human Dreamers with minds able to cross the threshold between worlds, but one thing he could not do was shift into any of the multiple forms he is capable of in the Dreamlands, plus he had to expend some energy preserving those vessels and keeping them from deteriorating. He also detests the sunlight here, and full exposure could drive him completely out of this realm were he to face it unshielded. The earth plane has, at least, more limitations than the Dreamlands, so as I said, to operate in greater capacity, Nyarlathotep sought to create the perfect vessel.
