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.

These circumstances were forced. I don’t know this house. I don’t even know when I am.
I must have done something to get me here.

It’s like some god put seeds in our minds from before. When we will make him mad some time in the future. That makes sense, right? No, how could it?

I thought it was seven, but it’s 4. Seven was the Knives I saw for cutting the gates open.

4 is worse. 4 is faster.

Only 8 Keys left!

It hurts me to think. I shouldn’t try, there’s something inside…

ONLY AEYONS SUN EERIE TWIN MOTE CREST LAIRDS WASTES ARMORS PIERCE MUU HIDDEN GATES BEYOND ONCE MUSED RITE CXL GOD INSECT MEN FORCES IMMIX BURSTER MERGE

What is that? What did I write?

Oh proto-gods, I see it. Every four. Every four!

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.

There is a spider in here. It watches me.

I called for Father to make it go away. Without lighting even a single candle, he said there was no spider.

He left me alone.

I keep my diary by my bed. But I’m afraid to leave the bed to get away from the spider. I can see it in the shadows there. Black ugly thing. I want it to leave me alone.

I don’t know how it got in. I didn’t let it in. Somehow it crawled into my room when the window and door were shut. Now it squats there watching. It must have found a way. I can see its many eyes glaring.

Why do they act this way? Am I food to it? Or does it simply hate me?

It came closer.

I looked away for just a second, and it moved closer. I’m sure of it.

It must hate. Those eyes glisten with nothing less. But what hate? What did I do to it–

It moved again. I saw it. If the thing had a tongue I know I’d see it lick those wicked fangs.

What does it wait for?

I should call Father again. He has a gun and a great knife I’m not supposed to know about. He could kill it before it reaches me.

Oh Almighty God it’s so close now. I don’t want to die. It scraped its legs against the floor. I can almost hear it. Or is that coming from outside? Are there more?

Take this foul beast away! Father won’t answer me, he thinks I’m telling stories. I told the spider to go away. I threatened it.

It only creeps closer!

I cannot reach my shoes without taking my eyes off it now. Please God, make it go away. I will never harm a spider again, I didn’t know they could grow as large as dogs, please spare me
those eyes

If you search through local county records in the early 1800s, you’ll find a newspaper article about the body of a young girl discovered in her own side yard. Mutilated so badly they would not describe her condition in the article. Only that she had ‘great holes’ and her face was ‘unrecognizable.’

“Assumed work of a maniac believed to prowl about.” How wrong they were.
I know what that ’spider’ truly was. Do you?

I know I don’t understand what happened. This won’t even make sense. But I have to tell it to you. It won’t leave me unless I tell it.

Forty years ago tonight Vinuk, my old village, was attacked. By what things, I still don’t know. I think I’ve found the answer in the years since then, but there’s no way to be absolutely sure. Even the answer I found seems like a pathetic imitation of what my people experienced in their final moments.

They were wild, shaggy beasts. Something like man, but far larger, possessed of demon-spirits, terrible enough to make old men scream. They came upon us as the night began. Bursting out of the dim edges of the forest. Perhaps they were some evil spirits loosed by our actions. Or maybe just an uncaring world that wanted playthings.

They broke down every door and entered our homes. I can still hear the wood cracking under their gnarled fists, big as a man’s head! The doorframe cracked too as they pushed their ugly bodies inside. I was sitting in my room that night, carving some wood-blocks. I heard the loud crack. And my sister screaming. Then this horrible sound…like someone tearing fruit…

I heard my father yell then, and his sword unsheathe. Part of me wanted to go out and fight whatever attacked us with him. But I could not move. Screaming flooded in all around, freezing my body, as though air were water meant to carry the pain into me.

Then my mother called out something in the old tongue. I think it was, “Bes! Odist Bes!” I heard footsteps, great hulking footsteps that rattled the wood and spoke of nightmare places, and an animal’s cry that shook all the windows. Then I heard it again from somewhere outside. And again. There were many.

By some Providence I was spared the monster’s intrusion. Of the memory, however, I was not spared. Between the window and me was my bed. Hunched while sitting as I was the bed obscured me to the outside. But I saw it walk past. Something more monkey than man, huge and coated with matted yellow fur, with terrible eyes of blood. From it wafted a terrifying air of savagery, a hatred of life, an abandon of anything good or worthwhile.

It didn’t look at me. To this day I’m grateful. For I’m sure whatever insane truths it knew, whatever foul purpose guided it and its brethren…
To see them in its eyes would have left me as broken, as mad-dead as it left the bodies of my family.

–Piotr Yvenshich, aged 48

His life in Smolensk was fraught with poverty; he spent almost half of it in asylums. He died shortly after recounting this story to a state authority. This authority is unnamed in the account. At this point, all records die out.

“Bes” is the name of a demon in old Slavic mythology. This is incorrect; the old woman mislabeled their visitor. Though a demon it could be judged, by its actions.

This is only half the story. No one ever found out about the symbols scratched into the rocks a mile north of Vinuk. They never found the blasphemous priestess who painted her body and danced that night. They never saw the remains left when her body exploded to complete the realm-piercing spell.

All of this is still there.

The piercing still yawns open.

“There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

He also wrote a quotation which I find skillfully observant.

“If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?”

No, Mr. Fort. There is no such commandment. And even if there was, the universal mind has already defied it.

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
–H.P. Lovecraft

Ahh, Howard. What is mankind meant to do, if not come to understand its own limits?

And yet they so often refuse to venture out that far.

I often wonder why most humans choose to remain afraid. Yes, I said choose, because you do.

Why else would you leave such places as the black murk of the ocean deep unexplored? The vast wastes of space? The scalding strangeness of other dimensions?

It is my theory that your willful timidity stems from egotism. These are all places where man is stripped to his core. Ideas that pull focus away from the central position man takes in his own make-believe world.

The rawness of real nature is simple. Kill, eat, sleep. So visceral is this nature – so far have you stepped from it – that you bury its echoes down inside.

That is why man fears. There is no true ‘unknown’ to you. There is only what you will not accept. Those places where you are an abandoned child.

It is all perception. A self-delusion planting space between yourself and those things which bedevil your mind.

Concepts that jar others. Cracking the edges of sanity, opening thoughts to the nether-expanse between thought and possibility.

It is in these realms that dwell such things as The Arms That Howl. Fragments of Jurrecz the Shattered God. And the imagined unrealities spawned at the protest of consciousness.

I now remind you of that scraping you heard from the closet.

I remind you of the shape you could not have seen on the drive home.

I remind you of that horrible doll you remember from some half-exhausted vision, its eyes fixed upon you.

Howard P. Lovecraft wrote so eloquently of them.

They can’t be real…can they?

Oh yes. They can.

He smirked as he asked the jesting question, “So how do we save ourselves?”

I incinerated him at once. For his disrespect.

And because he asked the wrong question.

It is not a question of “salvation” with the One Realm Coming. This implies a notion that what you are, what humanity now sees itself as, could be preserved through & following such a discordant change.

How do you preserve communication when continents shatter? How do you keep morality when beasts consume your flesh? How could you maintain “civilization” when cities are gone from the Earth?

How any of this, when even Earth is no longer Earth?

No. There will come no salvation. Only mutation will occur. It may be that some humans will survive. But new beings they will become. Something more? Less? Elsewise entirely? Even I could not say.

Though I look forward to seeing it.

I may be the only one who does.