Ghostsign and Nanrin did not move, the water lapping at their hips. Every pathway angled further down, the water growing deeper against the tunnel walls. Elspeth wanted to call out for her sister — even as she knew there was no such person — and a bellow from within the prison’s bowels forestalled her. Every wall quaked with the roar, fissures marking the stone as though the ancient assembly would at last give way. The gate trembled as if with laughter.
“Did you dream this place?” Ghostsign whispered to Elspeth.
When had she not? She eased her grip on Feymal to unroll the scroll. Its aged face now showed the prison, a path mapped in gleaming gold. It snaked to the left, curving downward and around, leading them through the loops and whorls of star-stone that confined the great beast.
Say his name, the dark man rasped in Elspeth’s ear.
“He needs no courting,” Elspeth murmured, wading through the water and into the mouth of the first corridor, Feymal still sheathed. The dark man did not leave her side, as loyal as a hound as the trio moved ever downward. Since time immemorial, he whispered; now is my time, no messenger, me.
The gate also followed them, sending ripples of light down the corridor as the women advanced. They said nothing, Nanrin’s hands curled into tense fists, Ghostsign already having drawn her sword. Elspeth held only the map as they went down and down, feeling the weight of that ancient and amber eye upon her. He watched in his underwater prison, not asleep nor quite awake, and it was no surprise to her when, from beneath the prison walls and into the corridor burst great lengths of tentacles and suckered limbs. Not even this place could entirely restrict him, even in his dreaming.
The water bubbled and burst, fiercely green limbs striking the women to their knees. As neatly as the Great Old One took them down, he did nothing to maim them. Still Elspeth did not draw Feymal, but dived into the blackened waters, swimming through drowned corridors until she came to the massive chamber fashioned to hold this creature of the stars.
He was awful and beautiful all in the same instant, extraordinary and enraged, chained within a submerged star-stone cell. Eternities of thrashing monster had worn the outer stone walls thin, but still had not broken them. He strained at the chains holding him and loosed a fresh bellow at the sight of Elspeth pushing herself to her feet in the chest-deep waters of the entrance. She drew Feymal, and the massive god flinched. Feymal glowed with the light of the stars, inundating the chamber with a staggering brightness it had not known for eons.
Within this clear, clean light, Elspeth watched planets move through the walls, planets the god-beast might have once taken in hand and traveled to…
The idea of anything beyond this room was absurd, the prison the whole of the world, and Elspeth turned, seeking the dark man who had brought them here. What game did he play with these worlds, taunting the shackled god with worlds that did not exist. The prison was the whole of the world, the whole of the univ —
Say his name, the dark man hissed.
Elspeth said nothing; it was the imprisoned horror who shrieked a name within its dreaming, a name that clawed its fiery path into Elspeth’s heart: Nyarlathotep. Elspeth felt the power of that name.
“Nyarlathotep.”
She spoke the name three times, and as before, the name engulfed and pervaded Feymal. As though the sword had been given new purpose, it lunged and took Elspeth with it. But not toward the chained behemoth — it was Nyarlathotep that Feymal sought. Within her hands, Feymal was the living, vengeant stars, the thing the imprisoned god knew best, having been confined within the same star-stone for so very long.
Crafty as he was, Nyarlathotep could not outdance Feymal. There was no place to hide within the chamber, so brightly did the room glow with the light of every star that had ever been. And when, in the end, Feymal pierced Nyarlathotep’s battered form, it was a new sun’s heat and flying sand that coalesced around him; it was the sudden and swift prison of a far-distant pyramid — standing as proof that other places existed, that the prison was not the whole of the world.
“Not the whole of the world,” Elspeth said, as she sagged to her knees.
This fact remembered, it pervaded every bit of the chamber and the two figures it still held; the walls screamed with planets, comets, the naked universe spread before them for the taking. At the sight, the Great Old One rammed himself into the side of his cage and at last spilled free through cracked star-stone. He stretched in his freedom, and punched countless tentacles into countless planets.
And the gate — the knowing gate — spilled itself over him, through him, to carry him into the stars and away. Elspeth stared at the churning waters, the false memory of a sister creeping back into her thoughts. Later, when she had found a fire and a loaf of bread, she might allow herself to long for it — but not now, not as she searched every waterlogged chamber of the prison. Not as she found every room and corridor empty of even Ghostsign and Nanrin.
Had they existed at all? An unfamiliar ache engulfed Elspeth’s heart as though they had, but she could not say. Standing within the ancient chamber of star-stone, Elspeth recalled Basher spreading her wings across the sky, and so spread her own arms, reaching for the planets within the walls. Nine glowing orbs slid into her hand, as heavy and sure as Feymal in the other, and then —
how they loved to journey — this alone was truth
— they were gone, and the certain darkness claimed Lowenhold’s empty walls once more.
The Argonaut
Carlos Orsi
How I became a stowaway in the cargo hold of Beldur Reis’ corsair ship, sleeping on the old, rotting shelves once used to transport slaves, eating rats raw, and drinking rainwater that passed through cracks in the deck above, has no bearing on what follows. Suffice it to say that I was there when they attacked a Maltese vessel, which needs must remain nameless. The battle occurred at night, in the rain, by the blaze of torches and flashes of lightning. I don’t know why cunning old Captain Beldur decided to engage under such conditions. Perhaps he was compelled by what I found later.
The blasts, the clangs, the screams — all that I heard, as expected. I smelled smoke and gunpowder, scorched flesh and fresh blood, all the scents of battle any man with naval experience might anticipate. What I had not expected was what came after the fighting died down — silence. Deep, disturbing human silence. I could hear the rain pelting the deck. I even imagined I could listen to the spilt blood running, slowly mixing with raindrops in rivulets. I heard some small fires crackling.
But there were no voices. No cries or shouts or cheers, no songs, no roars. Not even footsteps. I waited, keeping myself awake all through the night. First, the rain stopped, and the thunder. Then the thin moonbeams that filtered through knotholes in the planks above started to fade, replaced by caustic, razor-sharp slivers of sunlight. It was time for breakfast, the first rat of the day, but I didn’t know what to do. There was no perceptible sign of human life on the deck over my head.
The ship started to heel. Ever so gently at first.