“The mist lies thick on Hali’s waves

the thirsting shadows reach and crave,

the darkness beckons in

Carcosa.

The moons rise high, the suns sink down

the pale light gleams on Demhe’s crown

the long night comes to

dim Carcosa.

And, behold, black stars arise

unto the axis of the skies

the night has fallen on

strange Carcosa

Hymns the Hyades shall sing

Unto the glory of the king

who eternal reigns in

black Carcosa

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa“

-The King in Yellow” Act 1, Scene 2 by Robert Chambers

*****

All of the knowledge was as superficial now, Amun felt an excited twitch in his periphery foreign as a new piece of music untouched by the senses. His anchoring of senses to the former world vacated, rolled back and reeled, revolted by the various new inputs that were being received. He was on a wave, not a leaf sliding on the tension of a clam stream of familiar energy, no. Weightless he was tossed violently within it, a feathered-rock skipped across an immense expanse of water. All was disturbing and horrible.

He made efforts to command his mind, make sense of puzzle pieces strewn across his touch, feeling their angles and inserts, accommodating his own impatience, trying to breathe, but the gas wasn’t meant for his human consumption.

“Focus!, back to the piece at hand”, his discipline flogged at his slow and groggy mind. He grasped for his tactics and armory, how he had prepared for Asmoedon or an invasion from the Choir’s minions, he had sparred with his companions of old, with gentle Ben and with lords of Hel, this cosmic arena was not to be different…., but deep down he already knew the truth.

Scrambling mentally and likely physically, he felt sweaty, unnerved, the efforts to comprehend and grapple with such indescribable gravities, one that pushed in on him like diving to deep as a boy, racing to the eventual bottom, feeling the silt there, the deep lilly that Vanessa liked so much - the large flat leaves could be dries and rolled so well. This nostalgia was confusing and he lingered in it for too long, hours perhaps? He was startled again and again out of a dream that he didn’t realize he had slid into. Like drinking too much or dozing under a comfortable tree while reading one of his beloved Arcanuum’s whispering tomes, whispering, whispering there secrets.

He was upset, this insight was too much. He sanity bobbled and he had ventured far from safe shores only to have this ocean of waves, of information, of knowledge toss him back as the helpless leaf upon its breakers, to the crags and cliffs of sanity. It all cared nothing for his will or wailing. His wails sounded like chimes, no, was it a bell? A singular vibration that one could focus on while embracing the heat, the sweat and the rooted tea that Vanessa had given him to drink? He would watch her dance and sway, breasts swaying this way and that, her skin singing along with the howling wind outside. No it was him writhing and howling.

He jumped again, seizure like, frenetic and every join and plain in his body jolted agonizingly, bolts from the azure heavens would have been leisurely by comparison. This truth he was beginning to unravel, his mind could not index and sort the bombardment of new information, words that had never been sounded by a graceless mortal tongue, perhaps if it were bifurcated or hexurcated.

He resolved as he pleaded that this was always a possible destination of sorts, an inevitability that senses and instincts had caused male hood to constrict and small hairs to stand on edge. Had he not always wanted to swim out and get lost in it all? Know not a trodden path and have no map or signage to guide, encourage or repose? The growing rogues gallery within his many chambered cellblock mind bellowed ruefully, had he led them to the gallows? He worried that this new parapet, while he scrambled ever upward, was to be his deathbed, unknown and unmarked.

Ammon, if he could be known as he at this point, all was anos and asom, without body and without mind, the lingering memory of what was removed, anchored to formerly only served as a painful memory, one he only wished to be cut free from.

He separated himself.

He was clinging to a memory, a rich a vibrant one, one that he, after a lifetime found some peace in long ago, unburied treasure set into a deep and secret place that time had just begun shoveling loose dirt onto. “Astral Projection?!?”, Ben cursed at him discovering the stolen tome beneath Ammon’s cot one evening. This pleasant revisited memory was of a routine reconnoiter the miesters were tasked with on random evenings, invading the abbey as they saw fit within the Arcanuum.

“You shouldn’t have this one. It is forbidden, you have not risen in the rank, your mind is not calloused enough and you…. know not the folding somatics and verbal incan….” all of this being said as the clumsy miester went to snatch the book away from Ammon. Again and again, Ben’s hand would flail through the rapid illusions, a sort of childlike cookie keep-away game was going on between the two.

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Even now, when his life was being threatened somewhere far off, Amun remembered the burn on his arm when Ben desperately dove in exasperation, only wanting to look after his nefarious chap and return the solemn tome, only wanting to do his duty for the Arcanuum, only wanting to serve, but also keep fidelity with the mischievous Ammon, but the fateful lunge went long and through the glamor, the arm wild and not halting before impacting upon the table with considerable impact. When Ben withdrew his faulty limb, sore from the strike, he knocked the large candle astrew, wax singeing Ammon’s neck and own arm, halting momentarily his joyous laughter. On any other occasion, Ben would have been thrilled by the riotous giggles and yaulps of joy coming from Ammon, he only wanted the man’s acceptance and occasional friendship, but when Amun stopped,….grabbing at his neck and then rubbing at his arm, when Ben saw the sigils leap out on the mans head, neck and arms, he saw the Continuum itself curling in those vessels and scawlings, Ben knew he had hurt him and likely angered his stubborn acquaintance. Ben saw the power, reflexively kick and pulse, just there delicately beneath the skin, cleverly hidden.

When Ammon’s eyes met his, not full on of course, when the man’s nostrils flared once, twice and several rapidly, Ben did not scry what was about to happen to him. Ben tensed and closed his eyes as, as

As another peel of guttural glee filled the room! Saved! Ben had barely recovered breath as he was blown past, by the stout, robed figure. He thought to give chase and to have Amun surrender the item, but Ben could not ignore nor could he afford the nerve to confront Amun again that evening. He found that he desperately needed to change his loincloth instead.

Amun released the memory and returned to the trial at hand.

Amun swam deeper into this lucid experience, it was a relief to command a bit of control once again over mental faculties. He remembered jogging down to the shore line and halting just to admire the sudden crunch of stone beneath boot. The waters lapped lazily on the rocky beach, he could smell the evening and it was fresh and untouched. He felt the cool of night, the rich indigo swim high above, he longed to see this from the Arcanuum’s natural amphitheater some day, a ceiling known only to a few that ascended the spire to such a height. To touch, to get closer to commune, to see those all far below in Lacon, to dwell in the astral swim of endless night and astral bodies. Amun gazed up a reveled in it, savoring the moment before the next.

He decided to begin and the craft was called up with the hum of his Thu’um, a guttural and resonant hum. “Rrelligo”, spoken over and over as he saw the night and her majesty, love, devotion and respect to her form, heard the water’s kiss to shore that grounded him in the now, its enormous moment stretching on and on as he relaxed into the word-foci

He continued, “Rrelligo” and felt the word come out of him on unlabored breath, a confident note that any minstel would be proud of, felt it come out of him, the entirety of him, propelled by his belly and all the way down to his feet, pressing through his boots and feeling the uneven stone beneath. He tasted the storm of energies responding to his call, his will. It was an alkali sort of thing that numbed the tip of his tongue first. Once more, “Rrelligo” and he knelt down, cupped the frigid waters, gleaming the reflective tapestry of the nights and the cosmic dance of things above, he admired that his touch was the only thing that had disturbed the surface while performing the perfect ritual. He smashed the water to his face, and as it ran down his neck and chest, he briefly felt it cool smack skin. As the trails of moisture ran down him, his form sank, having gone limp and mostly lifeless.

In a moment, Amun was gone and found that he was floating above the scene and very much out of his mortal vessel. Not needing to breathe, but desperately feeling the excitement of the moment, he didn’t know what to do. He no longer had the needful a voice and knew not how to psychically project a signal of glee, for that was exactly the sensation he wished to express. So he flew up and did a backflip instead, quite involuntarily! That was not all either, no, this voyage had just begun!

He hovered past the shore, gaining speed and confidence in manipulating the new sensation of absolute emptiness and weightlessness he was guided by his intent and the thrill pressing in his mind! He raced invisibly back to the store front on the harbor knocking past a sign, it only swayed but a bit on it’s creaky hook. A man dozed, slumping in his distressed wooden chair on his uneven, sea-facing deck. Amun dared to dart past him as he half-slumbered, thinking that a breeze had suddenly kicked up. He circled-up the street and was disappointed in the lack of bustle out and about on such a well-lit eve. He was full of the night and was disappointed that he couldn’t merrily make more mischief. He circled up and up and to the very top of the conal shaped spire, but he would find that he was not meant on this maiden odyssey to cheat and crest the top.

He looked back to admire the distance he had trekked telepathically to discover something quite inconvenient: his tether, the bind that anchored him to the material plain was about to be manipulated. The trespasser was enormous, some sort of phantasm that had sensed him from the shoreline. Amun knew of the woe-begotten spirits, the one’s of abandoned lovers that waited for their sailors to safely return to shore, to endure the storms and ravages from sea, the weeping mothers for their sons and daughters, the pregnant wives or lonesome husbands. The sea was prayed to, like the tree, like the wailing wall of the mountains, yes - the sea had gathered all of these tails and emotions and this, this enormous apparition had fed upon them all. Its effect emotionally was instantaneous, made bad feel worse or love making on the shore that much more intense, all the better to distract prey with and feed longer. That is what this gray specter, foaming and writhing liked to do the best: take its time and savor the meal.

It had heavy claws, like some sort of crab and slithered out on angular legs that looked more serpentine in movement than normal mechanical ambulation. It saw the dead looking man, chest all exposed and saw the gleaming tether stretching up and out from the still being. In its primal mind, it did not desire to understand what the structure was, all it knew instinctually was that it was an easy meal.

Amun found that the dreamlike memory had gone askew, that this is not the way it had gone originally. He found that he did not stream back, the string of essence guiding his way. No, something was amiss and Amun found that the summoned psychic Eldritch blasts couldn’t be summoned as they had been, as he KNEW this chapter had actually unfurled in his memory, no the eerie green blasts failed to develop. So Ammon, just hovered there, high above, watching it consume him stupidly.

This was all wrong, this creature was dumb and could have easy ben dissolved back into the water, back to the continuum itself that laced the water. Amun should have seared the foamy backside of the shelled back and cooked the tender force within, he was certain that was how it actually had gone. All reflexively, certainly, Amun knew the creature had started him flat-footed on a night of such splendor, but this new version of a treasured memory was all wrong!

The vice-like claw grasped the rope that could return him to his form, Amun knew it was improbable, that a mistake in the narrative was being made, but in the snap of the tether, the vibration that shook its was back up to him, a loft, whether it was wrong or not, it no longer mattered. He had been severed from his body by the cloudform from the waters and in moments his body would die!

Floated clumsily, legs all wrong above him, the tether recoiling back to him and he becoming tangled in his own disorientation, he tumbled and was afraid,

Confused and tormented by the approach from the creature that would consume his stumbling life force,

Over and over, he had lost his control, perhaps when the form contacted him, he would have a moment to correct himself and put up some sort of fight. When the claw came for him, he was not righted by it. It instead clutched him by what would have been his head and held him there, admiring its trophy meal.

Amun was indeed being held in some….Thing’ cluthches.

He jerked and came too, roused viciously from the memory set wrong and askew, a verdant cosmos of thick, swimming mists all around, acidic smells that burned. Gravity was rendered a pointless artifact in deciding the journey’s inertia, Amun was lost to the will of this crossing. Alas, there was no boatman, no escort, no ally to interpret this plane. It wasn’t meant for the human comprehension but he noted every thought and vision as he was flung somehow that was neither outward nor inward.

What he was met with after some great time of crossing was wet, he did not meet the depths of Hali gently. He clambered in a terrain that was communicated to him as aqueous, yet he scrambled for its surface, movement based on instinct not of comprehension. The sound was nothing but a rushing thing, as if held under a many falls. True sight was useless and he dared not open any other sight, it would leave him so vulnerable. This had to be a truth, he knew he wasn’t flailing unobserved.

The vessel begin to fail but he had readied many remedies to combat such limitations. What was a magi such as he if he went ahead completely unprepared but, lo these depths very few had tread. He felt infantile and fought desperately against a rush fear. This was his companion’s dominion and surely it’s instrument - even if the danger were real, he could choose to control such green-toothed follies. Fear simply doesn’t serve one when gazing into an abyss such as this. Yet here it stood and he had long forgotten his resolve.