Six Score And Ten Oblations To A Malefic Avatar - Bal-Sagoth

Terrifying axioms, shadow-haunted lexicon

Clandestine cults, ancient spells, cryptic rites, the summoning!

Lore from time immemorial, acolytes, diabolists

Blackened tome of blasphemy, the Chthonic Chronicles!

Lore derived from ancient tongues, Grimm’s Hold Sanitarium

Oblations here, six score and ten, this avatar, malevolent!

Fragmentary entry II:

Caught in the maleficent whorls and verticils of this dark tome…

but what lies at the heart of it?

A vespertine viper’s nest of sublime

wickedness!

What I discovered within this shadow-haunted volume was a

terrifying axiom so inestimably terrible in its magnitude that it would shatter

all man’s carefully orchestrated views of the cosmos and render utterly

redundant previous theories on the origin of humankind.

Lore dating from time

immemorial;

lore surviving in the records of long extinct civilizations,

be it inscribed upon parchment now crumbled to dust, etched into the

sand-whipped, glyph-scored stone of hoary temples, or committed to verbal

traditions long since ingrained into some collective tribal memory.

This is no globally common myth cycle, no collection of universally

allegorical folk tales;

it is all cold, pitiless truth!

And yet, such enlightenment has not been a prize easily won… I have communed

with native shamans, consulted with misanthropic diabloists, I have confronted

the martial agents, acolytes and cultists of clandestine sects who would see

their knowledge safeguarded at all costs.

Hildebrandt and the Quorum have

treacherously attempted to have me commited to the baleful confines of Grimm’s

Hold Sanitarium, yet I have circumvented their insidious plot to put an end to

my vaunted research.

Damn their traitorous eyes!

I must confer with Blackthorne

upon his return from the Peruvian expedition… or mayhap Stone if ever the

poor wretch regains his sanity…

Stygian gramarye, etched with blasphemy

Whorls and verticils, black with baleful spells

Vespertine conjurings, doomsayer’s prophecy

Pellucid lotus-dreams, spawn of the elder fiends

Cryptic halls, squamous mass, malevolent diabolist

Black desire, nighted woe, shunned and forbidden tome

Brooding dark, deepest night, ritual, abhorrent sight

Whispering, malignity, hearken to the summoning!

(This black desire, this nighted woe, this vile shunned and forbidden tome

In the brooding darkness of the night, now witness this abhorrent sight

The whispering, malignity, now hearken to the summoning!)

Fragmentary entry III:

What titanic demi-gods once strode the boiling surface of the young earth,

treading the shattered surface of mighty Pangaea beneath their ersatz feet?

What fearsome entities were already inestimably ancient when mankind himself

was naught but a collection of mindless random atoms, a viscous puddle of gelid

protoplasm teeming with the raw materials of life, transient cells of

primordial slime, all naught but malleable and tractable clay to be worked at

by unimaginable sculptors, immortal star-spanning fiends!

What inhuman eyes

even now watch the inconsequential toilings of man from afar?

The answers to

these questions of denied primacy and direful cosmogony were too repulsively

horrific to contemplate, and yet… I knew the truth!

And more terrifying still… The Z’xulth and their villainous agents of

depravity even now walk among us!

But what price these revelations?

What dire agents of malignity safeguard such

cryptic axioms against the prying intellect of man?

I must confesss,

oftimes in the brooding darkness of the night, I have sensed their malefic

gaze upon me, lurking, inexorably dogging my every step, their existence

perceived only as some unnamable sense of fearful unease, and the occaisional

glimpse of black shimmering against black in the depths of the teeming shadows.

.

I hear them whispering when the mantle of darkness silences the world,

and the sibilant words they utter are not for the minds of men to know.

O' how I wish I had left those vile and fathomless depths of cryptical lore

wholly and mercifully unplumbed!

O', how I long for the assuaging balm of

ignorance to once again soothe my ravaged mind!

But such pleadings are,

of course, ultimately in vain.

I must keep my wits about me.

Even now the

stars align, the celestial spheres moving into the prophesied positions of the

great astral conjunction.

Am I to be ground to dust between the grand gears of

this pitiless cosmic engine of destruction?

The die is cast, the endgame nears

Wait… they come, they come for me!

Is it Hildebrandt, or something far,

far worse which stalks me this night?

The key… I must hide the key!