Oderath Oderath Whereupon I stepped into the great basalt tomb, the floor beneath me began to open, sending mammoth shudders up through the posts and lintels that had borne this structure some thousands of years. I ducked low in natural fear that these that were shaken would bear no more and give way, bringing the tomb down on top of me. I was saved by the stout architecture of these ancient peoples and stood up fully once more, raising the light I'd brought high above me. The flickering flame of the torch danced out into the atmosphere and lit upon the walls, roof, and floor. It revealed there most horrible, ancient scripts of men mad with some wicked passion or treacherous instinct. These things they said I did not understand, but stood still, gawking in disgust at the sheer blasphemy they emitted into the fetid air. I should interlude here, for I think that I have heretofore failed to fully explain these wretched glyphs. They were utterly alien symbols for which I have no name or description. Their shape was not so obscene as the feeling that welled within my soul upon sighting these wicked things. I felt as though my soul had then, upon sighting these most wicked--wicked insofar as I cannot begin to say!--symbols, been horribly blackened and scarred, seared by blasphemy on the most basic of all levels. As I looked from character to character along the many thousands of lines that ran the length and breadth of the wall, the ceiling, and the now pierced floor--pierced where there had been no writing before--I began to notice that there was no pattern, no regularities, and no order within their scripting. This is to say each character was entirely unique. What was before me was no alphabet, nor pictographic language, and carried no meaning but the evil that had been deposited within my heart. These things affected the mind and soul in ways that I hope never again to experience, and never to ever understand. These things that I had lit upon, that I had grimaced at, and that had filled me with an inhuman feeling, a feeling that was the sum of all malicious, malignant, and maldictated things shared among the deepest, darkest demons, they gave me insight into the true nature of evil, and so desperate, my mind pulled upon my memory until my senses were overridden with accumulated knowlege, dislodging my spirits from the slump of the trench-insurmountable that had been dug by those glyphs upon the wall. My memory, in an act of heroism, gave name to this unspeakable evil, or at least the perpetrator thereof: Oderath. I shuddered to utter this name, but utter I did, and the ground shifted again, blackness, like smoke and like snakes, began to seep from the cracks in the floor; most notably from the tremendous piercing in that surface's center--pierced where no vile marks had been before. It cloaked the whole of the room, shrouding the walls and ceiling first, hiding from me most of that name, Oderath, but as it approached the direct radius of my torch it stopped. Here there was a pitched battle, the light holding back the charges of tangible, fluid darkness. Despair instinctively crept up my spine and took hold of my cerebrum, causing me to writhe while standing. I fear I lost control of vital, gentlemanly functions. Motor control eluded me, and I fumbled the torch, drooling still from that misbegotten seizure, I snatched the torch up frightfully from the ground, the darkness having seeped like bile further into the radius. These tentacular tendrils of black whipped about spasmodically, trying to gain purchase, but found none while I still held the torch. I trembled. Fearing to turn and see what I felt build up behind me (for where my eyes could not validate the light, there was essentially none), I quaked. Somewhere deep within me, as though the back of my mind were speaking--no, false--the bottom of my soul were speaking, a voice with all the texture of a maggot pit burning on its own putrid juices spoke up the roaring, burning, violent sound of "Oderath." It was angry, and senselessly commanding, yet I was unable to resist the unintelligible command. I threw the torch out behind me, and the darkness closed in around me. It was solid. This was unlike the oblivion of darkness found on a moonless, desert night when the utter black of space seems to surround the body and squeeze it out of breath and rational thought: This I could actually feel. I felt the snaky tendrils of blackness run like miniscule rivers over my body. It had no mind for the clothes I wore, which seemed to erode before the nasty dark, eroding without noise of tearing or burning, simply ceasing to be. Even when I was entirely engulfed, I felt the tiny tendrils moving, and knew then that the darkness was not seamless, but composed of tiny lines that writhed. So unchanging, so uncharacteristic, so sleek, so keen, and so formless was the design that when I had trapped it in the light, it seemed to me to be two dimensional and fluid. Now I felt the animal, the unearthly beast within their movements, and knew that I was in the merciless clutches of Oderath. Here again against my better judgement and rational wishes, I uttered that odious word, that despised name: Oderath. The darkness shuddered. I trembled. I saw it move, though there was no light to see by. I saw it as a small insomniac child sees the shadows writhe with greasy life, animated by the mind. This was other-sight, sight not of the eye. This was the sight crudely given unto misanthropic things that should not be. I saw the Oderath move within the darkness; it's form impossibly vast such that the structure must surely have been annihilated to accommodate it--yet, somehow, I knew the tomb to be intact, posts and lintels and all. It moved, but I could not gauge direction or speed. It moved, and that move was infinite; it broke my mind with that movement, and we screamed together, Oderath and I; we screamed the Oderath's name, we screamed its title. We screamed its gender, its shape, its purpose, its all and every. We screamed, "Oderath." October 2000 |