We reached an ancient underwater palace, surely older than our species and perhaps older than many others far from our appearance. Thin, luminous plants emerging from the floor gave me clues about the appearance of that place, but the darkness prevented me from appreciating many details, and only with touch could I visualize the strange shapes on walls and floors. Syphil invoked a more powerful glow in those plants, whispering her command in a strange language, until my eyes could see the details of the place to some extent. It resembled an ancient place of worship, but what my eyes saw was beyond human comprehension. The architecture with which that place was built was very different from any known to man. Its three-dimensional, strange, and seemingly random shapes seemed to correspond to a small portion of something much larger, as if that temple had been built to be appreciated not only from the inside or the outside but also from angles and dimensions that no human would be able to visualize.
The darkness at the bottom intensified at the same time that a very primitive instinct warned me about something merging with the darkness of the abyss, an overwhelming presence not only because of its colossal size but also because of the overwhelming power that a sixth sense allowed me to perceive.
My ears began to buzz, as if Syphil's magic had ceased to be enough to protect my body from the devastating effects of pressure. All my senses blurred, regressing to the archaic level of a normal human being, starting with vision, which began to replace light with darkness, and then hearing, which began to pick up an incessant roar coming from the bowels of the earth, as if I could perceive, through the water, the tectonic plates of the planet sliding millimeter by millimeter. The Syphil I knew vanished into shadows, giving way to a face and figure shrouded in darkness and oblivious to the beauty with which I had known her. It was at that moment that she uttered the cursed sounds that still haunt me to this day.
The horrifying impression of what I experienced afterward completely shattered the spell that protected me from the depths. I felt the black waters of the abyss struggling to invade my lungs, and the monstrous pressure of the water felt like hundreds of arms compressing every inch of my body until it reduced to a fraction of its original size.
The next memory I can rescue from my recollections is the intense surf on my body and several people dragging me in desperation, amid diffuse screams and faces of anguish. I didn't want to make any statements about it, so I can only rely on the details offered by a local newspaper about what happened to me. Bystanders claimed to have come across me on the edge of the breakwaters near noon. A street vendor claimed to have seen me swimming out to sea until I disappeared into the waves around one in the afternoon. Then, I appeared floating far at sea, five hours later, with an intense fever whose delirium had me murmuring nonsensical words, according to the fishermen who found me. Given the verifiable facts and my subsequent nervous state, people concluded that I had acted in the midst of a psychotic state induced by drugs; my tremors and nervous tics were a consequence of some withdrawal syndrome, and the way I avoided questions about it only confirmed the shame I felt for my addictions. People believed this version of events because my few friends were not close enough to me to defend my reputation, and I had no desire to contradict them. I wish to believe that it is the truth and that my experience corresponds to the delusions of a disturbed mind, but my only addiction was books, and the closest I came to alcohol was tasting the mole poblano during the local Independence Day celebrations.
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The subsequent investigation I conducted has given a new dimension of horror to my experience in that abyssal hell. There is little in human mythology that referred to the king of the seas as I saw him, but the Mortiscriptorium, written by the Greek prophet Zephyr Nyxios, offered the explanation I was looking for. The Roman Emperor Theonysius I banned that book at some point in the year 390 AD, giving it its abhorrent name to keep people away from its pages while his subjects took care of erasing it from the face of the earth. I was able to find fragments of that cursed book on the internet, although none had been translated into Spanish. In them, I found mentions of The Eight, the deities that man has worshiped throughout history. The eighth corresponded to Jah, later known as Yahweh, now Jehovah, the Christian God whose cult is the newest in human history, as well as others whose existence few humans become aware of. That's where I found the information I was looking for about what dwells beneath the waters.
Just before the climax of my horrifying experience, in that forgotten temple of God, Syphil revealed the name of her father, uttering very strange sounds whose writing in the Mortiscriptorium was composed of a combination of characters that was still difficult to pronounce despite being a translation into Latin.
Sliding down the back wall to the floor in front of us, a long shadow snaked until it confronted me with its abominable appearance. Its monstrous head resembled that of a cobra, but the grotesque scales that adorned it suggested that its origin was older than that of all known creatures. Its eyes sparkled with the sulfurous light of the abyss, windows to forbidden dimensions from which seeped a bit of ancient and evil times in which it had been engendered. Its serpentine body undulated like a nightmare made flesh, and its skin, a cloak of lurking shadows, shone in a pale and diaphanous tone that seemed to voraciously absorb the light but that, as it approached, allowed me to see the horrible details of its face, culminating my most lucid memory of that moment with a row of teeth that had not been conceived to satisfy the need for food but seemed to exist solely to terrify those who looked at them.
Nhagazharakatl, Dagon, that abominable entity whose presence heralds the end of times in Christian mythology, the Leviathan of the apocalypse, father of the mermaids, king of the depths, the fifth of the eight who have ruled over mortals, appeared before me in the form of a horrifying sea serpent of colossal dimensions. A gurgling whisper emanated from its jaws as we locked eyes, pronouncing its speech in an unknown language that resonated in my mind like the echo of ancestral condemnations. The presence of the Leviathan, as close as the shadow of perdition, challenged not only tangible reality but also the very integrity of my soul.
I'm not sure what happened after I fainted in horror, nor do I want to imagine how the existence of what dwells in the abyss defies current human knowledge. I just can't help but think about Syphil's true intentions when she approached me at first. I also don't understand what she said about the true human power or why she needed my permission to step on the surface. Having died in that underwater tomb of ancient times would have been a more merciful fate than the one I face today, as being saved drives me crazy at the thought that my existence is still useful to the horrible entities from the depths and that from here until death they won't stop pursuing me until they complete their plans. Worst of all, even with everything I've experienced, I can't stop thinking about Syphil, as her beautiful image haunts me every night, and her sweet voice begs me with screams to return to the sea. The terror of what I experienced that day has been enough to prevent me from being dragged back to the addictive elixir of her lips, but the attraction I feel for her is so strong that I don't know how long I can remain sane before throwing myself into the sea to look for her and betray humanity to serve new and hideous causes.