9 Tales Told in the Dark 14 by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

Author:9 Tales Told in the Dark [Dark, 9 Tales Told in the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bride of Chaos
Published: 2016-06-21T22:00:00+00:00

IV.

That night Clarence, as he chose to call himself, dreamed again. This time he soared like an eagle, unfettered by physical constraint, across a universe of blinding stars and galaxies to one world, which he beheld for a fleeting instant from a great remove, before finding himself skimming across its surface. Mountains and fields and towns flashed by, to be replaced by a less comprehensible region of formless green light, a seething mass of painfully flickering glare. The green region in turn faded, giving over to a dark, sere scape of soul-strangling gloom. Within that darkness rose a blacker pillar of darkness, a black not the typical absence of color, but a vivid hue unto itself, an oppressive, greedy, acquisitive blackness that consumed the view rather than blocking it. It was a tower, a black tower the thick shaft of which rose featureless and unbroken to a bulbous cap, and from that vast ovoid spire gleamed a single tiny window emitting thin sparkling rays more akin to odd cosmic forces than sane light. As Clarence stared into that window from what he hoped was a safe distance (for he felt it death or worse to approach) another image overlaid itself upon the scene. He saw vaguely a great greenish eye, an enormous orb beholding him as he sought to behold, its vision comprehending him and all things with clearly perceived and limitless wisdom, knowledge, and power. The monstrous eye glared, and it became many eyes, then an infinity of boundless perception. Clarence swam in a sea of eyes that pressed upon him without mercy, probing, knowing, hunting.

The last episode awakened him, leaving him wondering whether the dream was meant to be revelatory, or whether it derived from his start on the reading of the Bleek manuscript that evening. In the dead of night he continued his perusal. Though he read from a typed copy, there were elements of the style and grammar that indicated literary antiquity, also unfortunate turns of phrase suggesting a clumsy translation. Who Jacob Bleek was, when he wrote, and in what language he composed could not be fathomed by any explicit references in the document. The first page bore a chapter heading, “XXIII: The Plan of the Ages,” which made plain that Clarence possessed only a fragment of a much longer work, as Emilion LaRou had told. The text clearly exposed the writer as a man of great acumen and scholar of strange lore, a man who had plumbed dark gulfs best avoided by the decent and the sane.

He wrote at the beginning, in the form of a hymn, “All praise to Xenophor, our true Master, Architect of victory and disaster, the coldly majestic Lord of All Things, whose pleasure joys and horrors monstrous brings.” The document provided no complete analysis of the nature of this Xenophor—there were asides referring to data outlined in previous chapters—but it contained hints enough incorporated therein to make plain that Xenophor should be regarded in terms of deity, that He

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