Corvus Rex

by J K Ishaya

  “Borean Dreamers are unheard of, but pair a human Dreamer with a Borean, and the possibility does arise. Lyrr was a custom bred physical product of both the Dreamlands and Earth, creating a strong anchor between the two realms, his mind and brain matter a perfect lens through which Nyarlathotep could operate more fully. He was also long lived like the rest of my kind. We are virtually immortal though not invulnerable; Nyarlathotep would not have to worry about general human decrepitude so he could focus more on whatever horrid intentions he had in mind for humanity.

  “First Lyrr’s Borean father died; there were suspicions as to how and why, and then the Nyarlathite conspiracy to create a permanent earth vessel became known. Lyrr’s mother was a devious human whore and skilled Dreamer who had seduced his father for her own purposes. How she became so corrupted no one knows, but she had promised him to Nyarlathotep before he was even born. Lyrr and I were both very young when he was snatched away and raised by my clan in secret. He became very much like a real brother to me and my sister, Freytha, and was kept under the additional protection of our queen.” His deep green eyes look sorrowfully at me on that last, and I quickly avert my gaze back to my cup, and suddenly the cream seems sour, the sugar tastes bitter instead of sweet. The cup and saucer lower in my hand to my lap and I soon forget them.

  “But even with our precautions, Nyarlathotep’s agents on earth found us still. It was twenty some years later. At least we had that much time, but what is time to a thing such as Nyarlathotep?” His eyes glaze slightly from what I assume are fonder memories fleeting. “His sect infiltrated the enclave in the night and were caught, but now we knew that the ruse was up. With me assigned as Lyrr's protector, we fled along with my sister, Freytha, and managed to elude them for a while longer, but they still found us, and to my eternal damnation, I failed my brother and my clan.”

  You failed no one, I send to him, while my teeth clench to drive the point home. But one cannot argue with a mind that has come to its own firm conclusions. He ignores my edict with sheer stubbornness.

  “There is a device, a shining red gem of Euclidean geometry, with great power that ties this world to the Dreamlands and Nyarlathotep’s consciousness to any who gaze into it. His followers on earth had acquired it, and, led by Lyrr’s own mother, successfully captured me and Lyrr. They threatened my life so that he would cooperate, and so he took the gem, and he stared deep into it, and I lost my brother, possibly forever.

  “I witnessed the possession, saw the warm light in Lyrr’s eyes be replaced with the cold, black pits behind which Nyarlathotep’s consciousness lurked. Rather than kill me, Nyarlathotep chose to hold me hostage. I was taken to this lair in the Alps that had clearly been created long ago, and there I had been for weeks. I did not know what had been done with the gem, but I carefully shielded my hopes that I might escape and find it, shatter it, do whatever it might take to purge that filth from Lyrr’s body.

  “After my capture, Nyarlathotep would be gone for weeks and then come back, drifting in and out of the prison cavern, mostly ignoring me. His servants brought me water and scant amounts of repellent excuses for food, just enough to keep me alive, which I only ate in hopes of surviving to escape. I do not know why he kept me as a prisoner rather than execute me. His agents had sworn not to hurt me when Lyrr had given himself up, but I did not see why Nyarlathotep himself would honor that. I held on to a little sliver of hope that perhaps Lyrr was inside there somewhere influencing his unwanted guest in some way.

  “When he returned from his most extended outing with this Dacian who was human on the outside but something else beneath, I was most uneasy. I had witnessed the man’s separated head and body be lain down in that circle feet apart from each other. After a time, I detected the most subtle movement, and then a rapid progression. The stubs of severed neck sprouted long black tendrils—which themselves had smaller roots upon roots ramifying—that reached for each other with desperation, crawling over the rocky floor, gleaming wet as they went. They slithered and hissed and upon touching they briefly twined around and then appeared to absorb into each other, merging into one strong root that shortened itself and pulled the parts back together. Once they met, the last edges of skin sealed against each other, leaving no scar at all, and I heard vertebrae crack back together.

  “I was disgusted by this, but I also sensed the horror and trepidation in the being who was experiencing this freakish healing. When, not soon after, I saw him feed on human flesh, dead though it was, I was appalled and initially reacted to that. There are things where my kind come from that devour corpses—ghouls and other such creatures—but clearly, he was not anything I had heard of or seen before.

  “When Nyarlathotep spoke of Malorix, that captured my attention. I did not know the man directly, but I knew of him through various channels, and I knew that he was no friend to Nyarlathotep. From the exchange I’d witnessed, the mysterious Malorix obviously had some history with the new prisoner, so I tucked that information away in my mind amid any other evidence I’d gathered. Then I decided to at least communicate on a civilized level and see what else I might discover.”

  “It was as civilized as we could be,” I remark, “given the situation. From where I lay staring at the ceiling and the clusters of those creatures, I said quietly, ‘What are they?’

  “My prison mate answered just as quietly, ‘They are called the sheq n’gai.’ As I mouthed these words under my breath, he added, ’N’gai for short.’

  “If he had that answer, then I figured he could answer my biggest one given that he and our captor clearly had some history as yet unrevealed to me. ‘And what am I? I was a man, but what am I now?’ He asked me what I thought I was. ‘A demon,’ I said, ‘that is all I know. It is all I can be, is it not?’ Given that I was also contained in a mystical circle drawn on the floor without a single shackle, the evidence was pretty strong. That was the only definition my worldview could possibly muster.

  “‘No,’ he told me, though hardly reassuring, ‘there are many other things.’ And how did I become this demon? This unidentified other? he asked. Who was this Malorix to me? Well, I told him the pieces I knew, from the Dacian wars of my generation through Malorix’s appearance and eventually my transformation and the sacrifice of my humanity. My speaking patterns grew clipped and agitated. After he went quiet for a while, I reconsidered my tact. ‘Why did he call you his brother?’ I asked. ‘Are you?’

  “’No,’ he said with a low tightness in his voice.

  “’But there is a resemblance.’ I sat up to look at him. ‘You two are the same race.’ I examined the green eyes that were staring back at me with their own curiosity. ‘The same and… beautiful.’ It slipped from me without a thought. The fair hair, the exquisite, chiseled features, the taper of the ears and the eyes with those slit pupils like a cat’s. I had never seen their like anywhere else.”

  I have, quite intentionally, drawn attention to Kvasir’s features now as they stare back at me before shifting to Howard to give the boy a better look. Said cat eyes, just a trace too large to be human, are almost animalistic and yet too intelligent to be operating on instinct alone.

  “They were the features of mythical creatures,” I continue, “the sylphs and nymphs of our ancient forests, not ordinary men. Only the black amoebas sliding around in Nyarlathotep’s eyes marred such beauty. ‘If I can become this thing,’ I said, ‘then it stands to reason there are other things in the world I have never seen or heard of. You two are among them.’

  “To that he relented somewhat, though his guard remained up. ‘I’m no brother to the thing that dwells within that body, only to the shell that remains.’ At last he gave me Lyrr’s name and told me everything that he has already told you. He explained the possession to me, told me of the red gem and the role it had played. I still had no real concept of the Dreamlands, so this part of the tale was obscure to me.

  “I grasped that the being I knew as Nyarlathotep was not a single evil being, or one who had so
mehow become corrupted, but a host possessed of another consciousness entirely, and that consciousness was not an earthly force at all. And where was the consciousness of the host? I wondered. Was this Lyrr individual trapped inside his own mind? Was he conscious, watching helplessly through the windows of his own eyes as Nyarlathotep steered his body? Now I was yet more terrified of my new world and diverted to a more common question. ‘Do you have a name as well?’

  “He did not answer me immediately, and in the silent lapse, over which I heard more clicking in the deeper cavern, I did not expect to get one. Then he said, ‘Kvasir. My name is Kvasir.’

  Again Howard is thrilled to have an original name. He has only known my companion as Mr. Eric Freysson. I see his lips form the name and then the pencil goes to work on the paper. I hear an excited whisper in his thoughts, Like the Norse god of mead and poetry!

  “’Zyraxes,’ I identified myself, ‘but you already knew that.’

  “After a long, awkward pause during which I pondered what he had told me, I asked, ‘So tell me more about this red gem.’ I was genuinely curious, wondering how staring into a rock could allow for such a possession.

  “‘It is a strangely angled crystal, about this big, with dark, smoke-like striations near its surface,’ my prison mate said and held his hands together, thumbs and index fingers pressed together, giving me the impression it was a somewhat oblong gem and could fit into a man’s palm. ‘I saw it clearly enough,’ he said with a shiver, ‘when my brother was taken.’ He paced a little then, finding the means to summarize what else he knew of it. ‘It gives the viewer the means to see across space and time, but in opening up the mind in such capacity, it also links to Nyarlathotep’s consciousness and allows him to traverse realms by communicating with or possessing the individual. His followers gaze into it to acquire his knowledge, but in my brother’s case, it opened a portal into his mind and allowed the possession.’ He went quiet then and I did not push for more. After a long moment, however, he had moved past the bitter reflection and said, ‘All I know is that it must be stored in complete and utter darkness for him to maintain a firm hold, and so it must be within these caverns somewhere. I am certain he and his sect brought it with them when we came here. He surely would not risk storing it somewhere else too far away from his presence even under guard.’

  “We did not get much further, for soon Nyarlathotep returned. I scrambled to my feet and felt the red return to my eyes as I prepared to at least verbally spar with my captor, and then I saw that he had a young woman with him. The distraction was instant. I was beyond enchanted at the sight of her.”

  “Lyrr’s mother, the witch Amarisa,” Kvasir explains. “She was at least in her forties but still appeared to be in her late teens. Nyarlathotep had taught her similar enchantments to those which he used to maintain his previous vessels. I admit she was a ravishing work of art in the external sense, but her heart and mind were despicable. After all, she’d given her own son to this thing.”

  “She was not at all like Bendis,” I add, “whose beauty was very natural and part of a tiny but strong frame. Amarisa was tall, willowy, and exotic with her slanted and black-lined eyes that were a pale blue glistening with chips of light, not unlike opals. Her red hair was woven into hundreds of tiny braids. Some were bound upon her head and affixed with golden combs and jewels while a few loose strands spilled around her shoulders or down her back. I gawked like an idiot.”

  “Pardon me but you were an idiot,” Kvasir interjects pointedly, meaning no disrespect. “You were so young to our world and didn’t know who was who or what was what. I faulted you much in the beginning when I didn’t know you, but you learned quickly.”

  “Appreciated,” I reply dryly, but his comment is true, and Howard grows a little more at ease again witnessing our bickering like a couple of old men which, and not figuratively speaking, we are. “At first, I had no idea she was the same woman from my prison mate’s story and thus the mother to this thing—or at least its body.

  “They arrived with their hands linked like a pair of pretty lovers. And then Nyarlathotep popped the proverbial cork on the situation. ‘Look at him, Mother. Isn’t he remarkable?’ he said, gesturing at me as if I were some specimen in a zoo. His overlapping, human voice continued to speak Dacian, so I assume he wanted me to know what they were discussing. Well, I was taken aback by him calling her ‘Mother,’ and then my prison mate’s story caught up with me. The shock still remained, though, as her opal eyes roamed over me. I stood transfixed and watched her voluptuous lips curl back into a wickedly pleased smile. She looked too young to be anyone’s mother, so I suppose they enjoyed making a game of using this address with each other in front of the likes of me, and especially him.” I give a nod to Kvasir, who shrugs. “They were taunting him, I’m sure.”

  “And more,” he adds. “Before your arrival, they even fucked in front of me for laughs.”

  I wince.

  Howard gasps. “He f-f-fu… Nyarlathotep copulated with the same woman who was his host’s mother?” He looks like he could be sick.

  “It is no surprise,” Kvasir says. “Both were despicable beyond measure. Incest, at least in this ironic fashion, was not out of the question, especially if it would torment me that much more.”

  Howard nods with the utmost disturbance in his eyes then looks at me and indicates that he is ready to move as far from this subject as possible.

  “I did not know to what degree they had been playing with their other captive,” I remind him. "I continued to stare at her like a moth to a flame, the brightest, most radiant flame in this dark hole of a place. She was Circe to my Odysseus for a fleeting moment.

  "’Remarkable indeed,’ she said, and her voice was as dulcet as a dove’s, her Dacian perfect to the point of being almost preternatural. Her fingers untwined from his and she came closer. ‘Zyraxes, is it?’ she addressed me directly. ‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Zyraxes. I am Amarisa.’ Her gossamer dress, slit up one side, parted and I glimpsed a slender leg and a perfectly groomed foot sandaled in a drape of golden chains as it stepped close to the edge of the circle. Parts of me stirred to arousal at the vision of her creamy flesh in the phosphorescent glow of my prison. Ashamed that I should feel this so soon after losing the wife, whom I had loved more than the world, and especially over a woman who was clearly complicit in my confinement, I tore my gaze away.”

  My talk of sexual attraction kindles new discomfort in Howard. I sense his nerves stirring, see a flush come to his face again. He has little interest in the opposite sex, only in his intellectual pursuits. “You’ve never been in lust, have you Howard? Let alone in love?” I make it a question only to cover up that I already know the answer. “So in love that your gut swam, and you couldn’t keep a straight thought? That your legs and your credentials quivered incessantly?”

  “Well, um.” He thinks on it for a moment and reasons it out most ridiculously. “Yes.” But there is no image of a girl in his mind who caused his adolescent cock to rise, no sweetheart from his school days. He was juggled in and out of school too much to have that experience at any length. “It was my grandfather’s library, my haven,” he says, and I catch a vision of shelves upon shelves of beautiful old books. “There was another Gustav Doré-illustrated book that I loved: Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the size of an atlas, with the most illustrious Gothic engravings. It haunted me, almost as much as the night-gaunts.”

  “He’s not talking about a book, Howard,” Kvasir says gently.

  “Oh, well, um.”

  “Someday, Howard,” I say, “you may understand what I mean.” I chuckle, more sardonically than intended, as I add, “But you will be pleased to know that Coleridge was a Dreamer, too.”

  This does not put him at any ease at all. His discomfort rises further, and he steers the discussion back. “So this witch? What did she do?”

  “’So, Malorix created this one?’ Amarisa asked in mock disbelief. ‘How?’”
r />   “’He kindled a spark in the blood with his own. Who would have thought it possible?’ Nyarlathotep grinned gleefully over this and came forward to snake his hand around her hip from behind, a show of possession which she was completely keen to. ‘And look how the fire has grown. If that is all it takes along with finding the right specimens to ignite the spark, then the transmutation may be easier than expected.’

  “’You mean how he changed me?’ I asked, stepping closer, just shy of my prison’s edge where the field was strongest and most pain-inducing.

  “Nyarlathotep grew serious, his focus clearly like that which I would now acquaint with a scientist. ’I have various hypotheses. He spoke of an awakening, did he not?’ I nodded dumbly to this and he continued. ‘You see, Malorix recognized it in you, though I do not know by what sense. Perhaps you can recognize it in others, then. But first, we have another matter to attend to which will hopefully shed some light on the situation.' He said light as if it were a filthy word. ‘Mother, would you please?’

  “Amarisa smiled and turned away to saunter back toward the entrance to the cavern. She raised her hand and snapped her fingers in the air and instantly an entire entourage scurried from the stony corridor. These were human and clad in ragged black cloaks, though I could see glimpses of grayish skin and long, bony fingers with unclipped and dirty nails. They kept their heads down as they carried in a large chair on their shoulders, a sort of throne that sat on runners. Upon the witch’s command, they set it down before my circle and then quickly tucked themselves against the cavern walls where the shadows made them less obvious.

  “’You wish to know more,’ Nyarlathotep said to me, ‘and you shall, Zyraxes. See, it is exceptional that Malorix was able to awaken your spark and transform you, but just as exceptional is where you come from.’