He had heard of Noble Hiermun’s contract. And he wished to boast of his wisdom in educating me. Again. He still believed I owed him each time I wrote.

On another day I would have made juice, and let him boast, and eaten with him after. But today I was very tired, my eyes stung, and my arms were heavy. I could not give the patience. So I asked him to change the subject.

“What did you say?”

“Could we discuss something else, Father,” I repeated. “I don’t want to talk about this. Noble Hiermun was very gracious. I don’t want to demean his generosity.”

“And how would paying heed to your father ‘demean’ him?” His voice rose at once. My ears began to ring. I had chosen the wrong words. “What disrespect is this? I take time to congratulate my son for his achievement—which he would not have if not for my guidance—and you repay me with insults? Have you no respect for your father?”

I could not think of an answer. My mind clouded as surely as fog poured in my ear. This only made him angrier. “What? Have you no answer? Do you keep something from me, boy? Speak your thoughts!”

I recoiled. He had not called me ‘boy’ in years. Curse my eyes forever, for at that moment they damned us both by flitting to the scrolls and tablets gathered on my writing table.

My father saw. “What’s this?” He reached the table as I stood, and snatched up the Scrolls laid there. ‘Symbols…what is this you write? Where does this come from?”

He glared at me, eyes hard. He pointed one of the Scrolls at me as if to rebuke my life’s career. I opened my hands to placate while I thought with speed.

“It is magic,” I told him. “I received a dream. Lady Ashla said I should write it down to send it away—”

“You practice magic?!” My father’s voice burst at me like cannon. The blood came hot into his face. “So it is true! You have become a sorcerer! My teachings have left you. I must tell my friends of this. They must know not to ask you for writing. You would poison their minds!”

“No, father, wait!” I put out my hands. But he had thrown down the Scroll and raced for the door as though he must guard himself against me. I made a fist as his shadow left. My teeth were locked. He would ruin me now. He would tell all that I was no longer a writer, and make them afraid. Because I was not groveling before him, he would soothe his injured pride by taking away my career.

I grabbed up the Scrolls, my hands white and my chest tight. Red foamed around my sight. One scroll rolled open by my fingers. I put the others down so I could roll it up. I faced the window while doing this. The afternoon sun shone on the paper.

Something moved within it.

I stopped rolling the parchment. Symbols. What I wrote before. Their lines seemed to drift under the sun rays. Like dark branches exposed to wind, they swayed side to side, graceful undulations of ink. I watched in rapture. My anger somehow broken by this dance of signs.

What I did not know then was that my anger was not broken. It had found a way out. While I stared, my mouth betrayed me. From those very symbols, from their mystic sway, came the forgotten speech of their sounds.

I became able to recite the symbols.

And in scorching testament to the naked dangers of such lost knowledge, I did. Scrapings of rock. Predators’ growls. My throat made noise unheard in an age.

=====

The next morning a messenger-boy came to tell me of my father’s death.

I ran with him to my old home, the home of my mother. A neighbor, Good Zechairus the Potter, bent with age, met me at the door. “I have called for the priests,” he said to me, gesturing to soothe. I made past him to get inside.

What I saw, no man should ever see of anyone he loves.

My father lay on his back before the fire-pot. His hands lay beside his head. Each finger bent so cruelly back that bone had broken open the skin. Gouges lined his body, their edges gnawed as though scavengers had their play with him.

But scavengers could not make the deep blood-pooled holes in his stomach. His body was lesser; his killer had feasted on the flesh.

His face held such terror, I could only pray the fright killed him before he was fed upon. Both eyes stuck open, stained red, left for glass facing upward.

It was as though he pushed against a murderous beast atop him.

The priests arrived as I stumbled outside, sick from the sight. They made prayers, and wrapped my father, and took him to the temple. One stopped to look at me while I sat against the wall outside. My thoughts were far louder than Good Zechairus’ comforts.

The priest’s face was as drained as my spirit.

=====

I remember nothing until I returned home that eve and found a woman waiting for me.

I cleaned my father’s home a little. Good Zechairus said I burned some clothing and smashed some tablets, but I know not why. My parents’ home now stood as a cave, empty, meaningless. It had no purpose. To me or to others. I hung a curtain from its door and trudged away. If any tried to speak with me I did not hear or see them.

For I knew this was my doing. The spells I wrote down, for the shaman’s benefit and Ashla’s grandeur, had come into terrible being. They used my voice to speak them. My will to fuel them. Untold ages, and they had once again found a voice. The spells had trapped me.

As they trapped the Dreamed Shaman.

Now I understood his eagerness. It was not peace he sought – but escape. In my helping, I was ensnared.

These thoughts, and the shackling doom inside them, rattled within my head. The only sound I could hear.

Until I arrived home.

The woman wore servant’s dress, with an unpainted face and cascades of black hair. She knelt as I entered, for she had come inside without my permission. “Forgive me, good sir. I came to speak on behalf of Lady Ashla and found your home open.”

My hand bid her rise while my mind stewed of other things. Those hateful spells, murdering my father…!

Ashla’s servant-girl rose. She did not smile or meet my eyes. Seeming to keep distance as well. “She commands me to say she has heard the news of your father. She sensed a great spellworking last night, but couldn’t tell its purpose. She gives her sympathies.”

A pouch rattled in her hand. She placed it at my feet while I stared across the chasm in my skull. “Gold,” she said, “for your loss. Lady Ashla wishes to see you when you are well again. She hopes this tragedy will not cause you to stop what was discussed.”

Since I made no response, she left. As the sun melted away and darkness crept back in, her words sank into my thoughts. And provoked them.

All that mattered to Ashla were the spells. She must know of their potential now. She would want them all the more. Perhaps she would torture me to finish the rest of them. Perhaps she would trick me by offering herself. She would give me whatever I wanted for such power.

Was that all then? Was I Ashla’s plaything, stuck between her ambition, a dead shaman’s plea for release, and a mutilated corpse I somehow engineered? I felt my fists clench. They felt strong. Eager.

Mighty.

This startled me. I pulled them open and looked down. And on one hand, the palm of my left, I found a symbol. Drawn in black, an exact copy of one of the Dreamed Shaman’s spell-symbols.

They failed to protect us. But they may protect you.

This was not the Charm of Stone. How had it come onto my skin? I scratched, but nothing came of. I tried again and again. My fingers scratched so hard blood appeared. Still the symbol displayed its unbroken black lines.

I half-ran to my writing table. I threw the scrolls open at once and searched. There, on the third, lay an empty place.

I gasped.

The spells had begun to enter me!

My breath left in shudders. Was I doomed? Could I escape? Or was this the curse laid upon the shaman, to wait after death until I could pass on this malice?

No.

In his shimmering nether-body, the Dreamed Shaman appeared. His face bore great sadness.

I would have struck him, had his body any weight.

I am sorry. I had hoped we would finish before the spells could affect you. But they were too eager. It has been too long.

“What has happened?” I hissed at his ghost.

The spells are not of this world, but of another. Jurrecz exacts a price from whoever uses his power. It has always been so. The magic must feed in order to grow. I used it to save us. It took my life in return.

The ghostly old man gestured at himself.

It left me in this empty existence. Until I could ensure the magic would have others on which to feed, I would not rest.

“You’ve condemned me old man!” I shouted so hard at him, my throat tried to force him back. “It has taken my father. It has begun taking me! Damn you!” I shook with rage. My hands reached for his spectral face, needing to attack despite it being futile.

No! There is still a way!

The ghost held up both his hands.

The magic has fed. It sent a creature from its world to your father. It has gone back. There is nothing we can do now about it. But if we finish the last Scroll, and then bury them all before it awakens again, you will be safe.

“Are you mad?!” I roared at this bodiless intruder in my life. “You expect me to finish writing now, after those scrolls caused my father’s death?”

The Dreamed Shaman lowered his hands.

I am sorry. It is the only way. Otherwise, it will consume you as it did me.

I sat down hard enough to make the chair move. Long moments passed. Under dim stars I stared at my polluted hand. The ghostly shaman waited beside me, silent.

I thought of burning the scrolls. Or handing them to Lady Ashla and asking her help. Even hurling them into the sea ten days from here.

But in the end, I did what the shaman asked. If only to rid myself of his violating presence, I told myself. If only to be rid of all of this.

In the hour before dawn two days after, in a silent field far from my city, I buried these scrolls deep in a hole. I laid stones upon them to keep them hidden.

And I have left this warning. You who read this, place the Scrolls back in the hole and cover them anew. Tell no one of their existence. These spells must forever starve. They will bring doom upon you, and all of your peoples, if they are allowed to feed again.

–Unan the Writer

If you have read the warning, then the spells must have been unearthed. So, ponder this…where are the Enoth-Ikul Scrolls now?
~Lord Glanbrin

There are indeed too many humans on this world. In the past nature was able to curtail them, through plagues and famines and their own deep-seated desire for violence. Now however such methods do not go far enough. Nature waits for the inevitable collision, certain she will then be avenged. Even as she herself is ravaged, she will cry out in victory.

With my next post I will begin a new story. You place much truth in written recordings. It happens that I possess one of the very few written records of Xhol magic. Perhaps its telling will convince you.

The second year of His Rule. The year is known as 689 in the heathen calendar. It is the thirteenth month and the second week.

Today my liege was visited by a traveler. A man of white skin and red cloak, who claimed lordship over small lands in the northwest. He gave to my liege a beautiful ring with a green stone, which he called a “stone of Nat-ruul.”

My liege did not share the full discussion he had with this man. They spoke of some topic in quiet words for many moments in private. Then the traveler gestured in such a way toward the throne, and my liege leaped up as though struck. He ordered the traveler to leave in a booming voice. And to never again enter our lands under pain of lifelong imprisonment.

The traveler laughed rudely in response. He is a fool to displease my liege. Men have died for such actions before my eyes. Yet this traveler was not approached by the royal guards. He departed untouched, allowed to leave his insult in the royal presence. I have never seen this occur.

He called himself a lord, and yet spat in the face of grand Kutran? Either my liege was in generous spirits this day, or there is another reason why he chose not to respond to mockery. Perhaps he is of great influence elsewhere, or he has an army.

This concludes my recording of the day’s events.

==============

Yatoslan, Scribe of the Court for the Grand Kutran, Ruler of Volga Bulgaria

The seventh year of His Rule. The year is known as 694 in the heathen calendar. It is the first month and the first week.

He returned! The red-cloaked traveler, the foreign lord! I remember him well. His sneer insulted our grand ruler; he lived only by the generosity of my liege.

I must write this down quickly. My liege did not give me leave to do so. They have gone into the royal chambers. I can hear my liege shouting something at him. The guards are coming up the hallway. Wait, I can hear. This ‘lord’ is cal

Here the transcript ends. The remainder was burned away in some distant night.

He stood in the mangled remains of the head doctor’s office, leafing through a jumbled collection of files he’d pulled from the wreckage and dumped on the desk. ‘Jumbled’ was a kind phrasing though. Dr. Merriweather had been running a terrible shop out here if the records were any indication.

Missing treatment records. Mean-spirited documents about patients AND staff. The only part that seemed consistent were the admittance records.

Nurse Sandoval stood across from him. Hands clasped in front of her, anxiety and eagerness mingled on her dust-streaked face. Rezavich tried not to pay her too much attention. If he did, she’d ask that they make another search of the building and grounds. Another fruitless and very dangerous search, since the forest was not tended. And if it held a slew of crazies, well…

“Lot of Irish patients in here,” he murmured, mostly to himself. Papers flapped past one another as he turned admittance records over. “I’m not seeing a why though. Miss? You know why?”

He looked up. Sandoval was already shaking her head. “No sir. Most of our latest patients did arrive in one group, and they were Irish. But I don’t know anything else. Can’t we–”

Sergeant Rezavich returned his attention downwards. He shuffled his crisp leather notepad out from under the latest stack. It was a new device to him, this portable note-taking tool and its pencil. Still, it had been valuable thus far. He wrote down a note about this group of Irish crazies.

Then he wrote down his theory about where the patients had gone.

“Now then.” The hefty sergeant stood, collecting a pile of records under one arm and his notepad into his trench coat pocket. “Miss Sandoval, if you’ll join me, I’d like to search the surrounding forest treeline.”

“The forest?” Nurse Sandoval unclasped her hands. “But why? They vanished like ghosts, I know it…” Her eyes trailed up and around.

Sergeant Rezavich put up a hand. “They had to get out somewhere. I think they headed to the forest for cover. That means they’re going in the wrong direction for town, so there’s no immediate danger to people. If I find where they went in, I’ll know where to send my men. Come on.”

He turned about and walked through the gaping crack in the wall behind him. Nurse Sandoval followed him dumbly. Outside, Rezavich hissed at the cold while his eyes scanned a clump of evergreens north of the building.

They must be crazy to escape in this weather, he thought. But with the treatment they apparently had at the Razor – and those were just the documented accounts – he couldn’t blame them for trying.

He thought there was movement past the treeline to the north. His eyes narrowed, trying to pierce Night’s veil.

Then a tremendous visage appeared in the night over them. Larger than the Razor itself and filled with atrocities upon sanity, it sneered down as a god to displeasing followers.

The face was gnarled and chitinous. Four terrible mandibles sprouted from it at top and bottom, grinding like they crushed the very space between them. Hundreds upon hundreds of voices burst from the visage, whispers and wrenching cries and things only heard when angry insects mass.

Sergeant Rezavich seized his head. His screams could not drown out the sounds drilling into his mind. In seconds he collapsed to the ground unmoving. Dead from fright. He would never find the truth.

Nurse Sandoval, shrieking as though the devil himself was behind her, fled down the road.

NOW
Walker was the first to claw his way out of the dreamscape.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. His eyes at first showed shiny yellow gym floor. Then dimness, polish fading at the edges. Then a gritty texture, and finally the shrouded glistening of moonlit concrete.

He lay facedown in the Razor’s main hall. Dust caked his cheeks. He forced himself to hands and knees, coughing.

Walker shook like a dog, sloughing off rocks and gray. It felt like the floor, the very building trying to suck him in. He got to his feet, casting about. Danielle lay on her side facing him, eyes unblinking. Dust had collected so thickly on her hair & clothes that she appeared petrified.

Angela crawled up the hallway on his right. Jaw locked, eyes fierce. One hand reached ahead and pulled her forward. Then the other.

“Angela,” Walker said. Voice coming out gritty. “Where you headed?”

“Garrett…find…” she hissed.

“Oh god,” Walker responded. Garrett. Where was he? Walker lurched forward. His legs stumbled him up into a loping run. He ran past Angela, reaching the end of the main hall in seconds. To the right was a short hallway with a collapsed roof. To the left was a badly-damaged room, gaping holes in both walls facing him.

Inside it lay Garrett. He was slumped forward on his belly, bent almost straight up with his hips still on the floor. His face cruelly pressed into a shadowy wall, arms dangling limp at his sides.

Beside him lay a brittle human skeleton. Bones brown with age.
In exactly the same position.

Walker picked his way over rubble to get through one hole. “Garrett! Hey Garrett, you okay?”

Garrett made a muffled unintelligible sound.

Did he fall? Hit his head? Walker braced himself with one hand above Garrett’s head on the strange-painted wall. Then grabbed his shoulder. Garrett didn’t move.

“Garrett? Hey man, if you can hear me, I’m gonna pick you up. Say something if it hurts.”

No response came. Walker hunched down and worked his hands under Garrett’s shoulders. He moved his feet for good positioning.

Someone screamed.

Walker started so suddenly he yanked up on Garrett. The boy made no sound. Even when his lip scraped up the wall, leaving blood in a diagonal line.

Another scream echoed out. Walker jerked his head up and around. Different voice. Where? Who? Walker breathed harder.

Screams. Female, far away. No. Getting closer. More frequent now.

A woman crying. One called his name. The girls. “Garrett, man, get up.” Walker’s voice sounded hollow to his own ears. The screams washed over it, still more. Where were they coming from?

Then Walker knew. He saw one of the warped symbols beside Garrett’s lolled head. It glistened a sickly red as though inscribed with fresh paint.
Or fresh blood.

They came from the walls. From INSIDE the walls!

All at once he heard Angela yell out, voice shot through with terror.

“What are you?!”

Walker heaved, managing Garrett up alongside him. They had to get out right now. He would carry Garrett out through the nearest damaged wall, then do the same for the girls.

When he got out of the formerly walled-up room, there was an old woman in a ratty smock with wild hair and hawk’s eyes standing in the hallway.

Old Mrs. Taylor rubbed her wrinkled hands together. “One voice,” she whispered. “Free to one voice.”

Walker stared, dumbfounded. “Where’d you come from?” he asked. Then he realized he’d shouted it. His lips were trembling.

“The wall,” said Angela, kneeling in the hall past old Mrs. Taylor. Fear tightening her voice, she pointed a shaking hand at the crumbled concrete.

“From the wall.”

“One voice! We saw beyond!”

Old Mrs. Taylor raised up her hands like a preacher stirring their flock.

Or a witch summoning some demon.

Down the main hallway, past them all, something began to emerge from another wall. Concrete pushed outward, flexing like gray rubber. Handprints – two, then four. The shapes of bodies grew forth, defiant of all reason. Splendid madness showing in lively shapes out of unliving surface.

More people began to step free of the walls. Stone spilled like slime around them, pouring as liquid around their wizened legs, castoffs of a torn chrysalis.

Walker and Angela watched the spectacle, mute, gaping. All the people emerging were aged, unkempt, and wearing ragged medical smocks. Some looked about eagerly. Others wailed in wild despair on their knees. Their voices clashed, words piled over each other, one person finishing another’s sentence.

“We didn’t ” “Reach him! Weren’t many ” “Enough! But was the space-creature” “No! Jurrecz’s punishment! We have to app ” “-pease instead! Different, one voice many ” “Thoughts now!” “When? Is it too late?”

Walker’s feet finally obeyed his panicking senses. He leaped for a doorway on his left into one of the former cells, behind the old woman with raised arms. Kicking aside remnants of old furniture, he raced up to the gaping hole in the cell’s far wall. Outside stood a calm forest, a hushed night-breeze, and the old roadway. Way home. Safe.

Garrett sagged against him, feet dragging. His legs bashed against the ruined bed. Walker didn’t slow. He couldn’t now.

He dumped Garrett on the grass outside the Razor Asylum. Jumping back up, he spun about, intending to go back for the girls.

He couldn’t move again.

His legs locked on him. They refused to approach. Walker stretched his arms out, hoping they could somehow reach the girls from there. Shouts and cackles wafted out at him. Mocking his immobility. Celebrating the two remaining people left inside.

People began to come out through the holes in the walls. Walker froze completely. Their eyes were clouded. Their hands grasped at vapor out in front of them.

Stuttered laughter flowed from the stream of people. It reached Walker before they themselves did. His breath came hot as it dawned on him. These were the patients from many years ago.

The patients who disappeared.

They had come back.

Every patient muttered as they trudged past Walker and Garrett. Like a statue in a park at night, he bore unwilling witness to their mad ramblings.

They spoke of creatures in great damned hordes. Of living swamps and apathetic beast-gods. Of inevitable forces in space and Earth. And of their failed “attempt to join.”

Through the walls.

He and Garrett were witness to secrets undreamt by mankind since well before history was recorded. The weavings between place and its opposite dribbled out of thoughtless words. They were forced to hear of the El’Shem’Kri Tower and the closeness of Lu’kk-Enoth’s bubbling flourishes where Chaos runs wild.

They never again knew sanity as whole people. Ever again.

TOMORROW
Ever since then, a lingering fester has dwelt around the town of Crenim. Visitors tell of a frightful clicking or grinding that emanates from the surrounding woods when the night is grim. Its meeting-places forbid any mention of the crumbled dwelling once called the Razor. Even children dare not venture there now.

Friends discovered the four at the ruins of the Hessh Asylum the next day. Garrett was committed, and caught several times emerging from his catatonia to scrawl grotesque symbols with unknown meanings on his cell walls. Using his own torn fingers.

Walker bought a pistol four days later and put it in his mouth.

Danielle moved to California and became involved with a sociopathic woman there. They found her beaten and stabbed in a cliffside crevasse two months later.

Angela roams North America in pursuit of the Razor’s patients. They didn’t believe her when she told them. They even tried to commit her alongside Garrett. But she escaped and ran. She had to find them. They were missing the walls society pushed upon her. The unity they shared, she felt, it was all one. She had to seek it out again.

They would give it back to her.
They would take down the missing walls again.

For those patients who once dwelled within the Razor are still free. Where did they go? Could they seek what they found in another place upon Earth’s crust? Why, when people hear the many croakings, were they always seen on ocean shores?

And out a thousand leagues from Saturn, advancing with the certainty of venom, the star-insectoid Enah-k’k continues to drag itself across the black ocean of space.

–THE END–
–…for now–

“A ship carrying a group of Irish immigrants passed by the submerged Atlantic isle of Nat-ruul in 1847. Consider that magnetism may not always involve metal.”
–Lord Glanbrin

Here now is the last piece of the Riddle of Meln’k, the Spider Prophetess who scaled the walls of El’Shem’Kri. Who will die in the Insect War to build the dead insect god Knk’k-lusz.

The truths she presents are mysteries of time. Contained within the riddle are four secrets. Solve it and gain fore-knowledge.

Here are the previous verses:
Verse 1 of 4
Verse 2 of 4
Verse 3 of 4

Solve it if you can. I await your guesses.

The third verse of four. Meln’k has not yet described what she found inside the peak chamber of El’Shem’Kri…that will come with the final verse.

Who is the ’she’? I confess I never pried this answer from Meln’k herself. I suspect it a reference to The Woman Enwebbed, but cannot be certain until the Woman awakens.

Which she will not do until Meln’k dies.

Did I give too much away there? Perhaps.

Local Boys Discover Walled-Up Room at ‘Razor’ Asylum

April 13, 1952

NEWARK, N.J. – A trio of teenage boys made a gruesome discovery at the site of the former “Razor” asylum last night.

The three boys, after vandalizing one of the long-abandoned Hessh Asylum’s inner walls in what they termed ‘just a bit of fun,’ discovered a sealed-off room in the process.

“We just wanted to see in the Razor,” said Sherman Multin, one of the three teen boys. “We found a couple walls that weren’t torn up like the others. John brought a sledgehammer, so he knocked a hole out of one. That’s when we saw it.”

“It” was the full skeleton of a human male, imprisoned in a windowless room built at some point during the asylum’s operating years. It was slumped against one pitted cement wall, facefirst. On the walls surrounding the skeleton, the no-doubt former patient had painted a large number of weird symbols.

“Frankly, I don’t know what they mean,” said Patrick Wildfire, psychologist and nephew of Dr. Anna Wildfire, responsible for the construction and naming of the Hessh Asylum in 1804. “I never even knew about a room like this. All the symbols look like gobbledygook. Some poor soul’s ravings, I’d call it. That’s all.”

Nicknamed “The Razor” due to its high number of lobotomy patients, the Hessh Asylum operated from 1804 to 1849. It closed in the summer of 1849 due to a sudden, violent collapse of the main building and an alarming number of patients gone missing. Even today, over thirty patients remain unaccounted for.

Its last administrator, Dr. Henry Merriweather, made several bizarre claims about his patients’ behavior before the collapse. As Dr. Merriweather was committed shortly after the Razor’s roof caved in, these claims are likely baseless.

The three boys were released to their parents after they flagged down a police officer and drove with him back to the police station. None of the parents decided to comment for this story.

The symbols found on the room’s walls have been copied and sent to Dr. Stephen Crestfall, a linguistics expert at Stanford University in California, for study. Perhaps they had some meaning to the unnamed patient. Other efforts to determine the patient’s identity have turned up nothing.

In a bizarre final note, police found one word that was written in English on the walls. However the word – “Jurrecz” – has no known meaning.

The mammalian brain changes its thoughts, and reality grates upon that new perception. Clashing truth to belief. Sometimes reality gives way. Or perception adjusts. Only will may decide this, at any given moment.

The question of the parallel then arises. Which is order, and which is chaos?

Most fools would presume that human perception is fundamentally chaotic. Unable to focus, difficult to process. Reality however does not change from blink to blink. This must be true; it always has been. Yes?

Heh.

What if I told you that Order was perception, and reality was Chaos? What would you think if perception was what pulled you back from absolute electrifying madness?

It is true. The universes are insane.

As bracing as such a concept may be, consider its further implications. If perception paints an order upon it in which the human mind may function…what happens when you change your perception?

Can you change the color of songs, of thoughts, of color itself? Yes. There is a power in this. Build what you wish to see. Take turpentine to physics or nature.

But a price must also be paid. And when it is…there will come a moment when perception goes awry. As it finally, inevitably does.

There are incidents where perception shattered in the wake of chaos. A few of these incidents you have recorded in history; I will reveal them at a later date. What is important to learn from them is a truth abominable to human understanding.

Chaos is not bound by time.

Things done now (not perceived) may affect the past. They bend themselves into existence by brittling Time’s arrow.

And the future is influenced by the present. Both can be equally warped, but in different directions. It has happened because it will happen. Reality obeys Chaos, and Chaos does not coincide with the notion of before-now-after.

When the warping of today collides with the implacable whorls of tomorrow…what happens then?

The universal walls of Order – of Perception – begin to fray.

And in between those frays lurk the Arms That Howl.

Does she live? Sleep?
Is her spirit chained?
The skin a garment
What moves between shown in their weaves

When Meln’k is gone
Realms fold
The Woman Enwebbed
Lifts her head at last

Too deep in truth
Realms will cull
You may not like what you find
You may not like what you awaken.

The sights from El’Shem’Kri Spire haunted Meln’k. Even a spider can have nightmares.

Meln’k went to the Inevitable Call for peace. For a chance to rid herself of the truth, escaping into the bliss that is blackness between existences.

Unfortunately for her, her tale is not yet over. That day is for me to decide.

Thus far you have seen half of her great riddle. I decreed that when it was solved, she would have her escape. But none have solved it yet…for its solution is not merely one phrase or idea. Four secrets are tangled within its quatrains. Only when all four are unraveled shall the Spider Prophetess know peace.