In the throes of a seizure, Abe was lost to the waking world, one of furnaces and familial legacies. Though the attack on his physical form was violent and unyielding, his mind was elsewhere and at peace. He slumbered in this pocket space, he drifted into a vast, spectral dreamscape as if in stasis. It had been an age since he had suffered such a fit, in fact his spastic brain knew he had not had been burdened by one since being in Cain’s homestead, but this one seized him violently, wrenching him out of his body and flinging his mind across realms.
He floated, suspended, held only by a delicate thread—a silver tether that wove through the shadows like the gossamer threads of an immense, unseen spider's web. It shimmered in the dim light of this dream-world, a thin line that tied him to his flesh and blood somewhere far, far away. Was this what Amun had felt like on his flight between planes? Did he have the lucidity to control is perception?
He willed flight and settled for a bobbling float of sorts, his consciousness merging with fractured memories and unfamiliar images, a conflation of past experiences and present information that he had consumed from the tome, The Sole Voice Amidst the Discordant Chorus. He was moving through his vast dreamlands, the realms that lay hidden beyond the ordinary, known only to those who dared close their eyes, find the waypoint and slip beyond the veil. Each glide, if one could call it that, took him closer to a towering structure that pierced the clouds, ethereal and luminous, yet forbidding: the Spire of Lacon. The great Spire rose from the earth with an indifferent majesty, its stony walls enshrouded in swirling mist, its surface pitted and scarred with ages of secrets.
In the distance, he glimpsed a faint, pulsating glow—the Cradle. He could feel its influence, even from afar, radiating an ancient energy that made the very air hum with latent power. The Cradle loomed like a forgotten god, basking in a light that was neither day nor night, a timeless beacon that transcended his sense of reality. A bed of prayer and knowledge, a beacon for a dread homecoming.
As he drifted closer Lacon, still so far and so vibrant, his vision shifted. A tremendous vertigo and speeds flung his awareness elsewhere, deeper perhaps? His mind reveled at the acceleration and his slumbering consciousness rebelled (perhaps a self defense).
He rose again with a start, his jaw aching (could he feel?), gazing down upon a shattered fortress—a ruin, bleak and ravaged, an ashen monument to a cataclysmic battle that had reduced its once-imposing walls to rubble. Gothic weaponry, the many scattered trebuchets and ballista, scaly folk who would work such machinations oozing vital liquids from ravaged trunks and carapaces, limbs strewn about, their many eyed faces and maws turned agape in silent screams and terror, what had assailed these monsters? The remnants were everywhere!
He knew, somehow, that this was the final bastion fortification of Ob Nixilus, a duke of Hell and a chief patron of Amun. However, this proud lord was now nothing more than a decapitated head lying amid the wreckage. Circling her trophy like a lioness amidst the remnants of Ob's stronghold, was a figure: Adrestia, lurking like a predatory shadow. She was both beautiful and terrifying, only glimpses of hard outlines would ebb to her surface in Abe’s dream vision: a paldron or vambrace would surface in scrolley gothic script all with set onyx jewels like so many eyes, but she was mostly a blur of oil, some form encompassing her like a encapsulating jellyfish, their many arms flinging entire wall remnants away, clearing the path to her communion with the thing. He could see her eye, the other shaded beneath the cloak, flickering with a baleful light as she surveyed the scene, her feet treading easily now with the cleared path to the remains.
She dare not clutch the vile thing bare handed, her other did the labor on her behalf, holding it aloft and reaching into it. She commanded reanimation and temporary dominion, she needed some information that this lord heals in its cerebrals cell, time was of the essence, there was decay all around and she could sense another’s approach.
Adrestia communed to Ob's severed head, her other’s tendrils slithering into nostril, up the arteries and the still spilled neck, popped the eyes out of the way, enveloped his many horned skull and willed “twist him until he yields my desires”. The gorey talisman, became remarkably animate despite its lifeless orifacaces and wounds, croaked back at her, their conversation a macabre echo in the otherwise silent void. Abe could not hear the words, but he felt them, the weight of their exchange pressing down on his mind, the words threaded with a venomous energy that vibrated his formlessness in an uncomfortable way.
Before he could draw closer, he felt a tug on his tether. His silver cord shivered, stretched taut as if something in the darkness had seized hold of it. A new presence made itself known—an entity vast and incomprehensible, its outline too chaotic for his mind to process fully. Its form shifted, a swirling mass of darkness that pulsed with a malignant energy, a presence that seemed to devour the very light around it. It clawed at his tether, and Abe felt a jolt of panic. If the tether snapped, he knew he would be cast adrift, his spirit left to wander the void, a meager morsel for whatever nameless horrors prowled the far reaches of the astral plane.
His gaze was wrenched downward, and he saw it—a monstrous visage, the very embodiment of terror and hunger. Though he could not know it, this was the Oduum, their true nature peeking through the cracks of reality. Their faceless, form-shifting mass filled his vision, an undulating nightmare that reached out with countless tendrils, each one a fragment of oblivion, eager to rend him from his tether.
The tendrils caressed the edges of his mind, whispering ancient horrors into his soul. Abe felt his spirit unraveling, each word a razor-edged blade that tore at his very essence. He clung desperately to his tether, his only lifeline against the cosmic void that threatened to engulf him. He could feel the presence pulling, stretching his cord to the breaking point, his soul ready to be cast adrift.
Yet, even as he was being pulled into the maw of oblivion, something within him stirred, a primal instinct, a flicker of defiance against the unyielding dark. He focused on his silver tether, willing it to hold, willing his mind to resist the pull. And, as if in response to his plea, the cord glowed brighter, its light cutting through the shadows, pushing back against the faceless horror that clawed at his spirit.
In a surge of will, Abe pulled himself back, dragging his ethereal form away from the grasping tendrils, wrenching free from the hungry maw of the Oduum. He tumbled backward, the Spire and the Cradle fading into the distance, the ruin of Ob’s fortress slipping from view as he hurtled back along his silver thread, his dreamscape collapsing around him like a tapestry unraveling.
The Oduum materialized in Abe’s vision, a monstrosity unfathomable and immense, an entity that twisted the mind even as it twisted through the astral plane. This was no ordinary cosmic presence—it was a colossus of existential dread, merging elements both natural and impossibly alien, borrowing from nightmares that were born before time itself.
Its vast body resembled the elongated, tapering form of the mythic leviathan, yet this comparison fell woefully short of capturing its true terror. Its skin was a mosaic of deep, obsidian black interspersed with patches of a sickly, phosphorescent glow, each pulsating with the heartbeat of a dead star. But unlike the natural beauty of the shark, the Oduum’s form was broken and unnatural, with irregular protrusions of bone-like ridges jutting from its sides. Its surface was covered in countless bullae, seething and roiling like vast, dark clouds pregnant with storms. Each swelling bubble throbbed with an inner light, as though some unholy birth teetered just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge. The grotesque, bloated orbs popped intermittently, releasing brief glimpses of myriad, chaotic shapes that defied all known geometry before disappearing into the void once more.
Stretching across its vast, twisted form were tendrils akin to root systems, yet they pulsed with veins of dark energy, branching out in an almost fractal pattern, webbed with fibers that twisted into intricate, disturbing patterns. These webs trailed behind it, spanning light years with ease, ensnaring entire astral currents and feeding on the raw, unfiltered energies of creation. Through these strands, Abe could sense the Oduum’s will, an inexorable, consuming hunger, an unyielding pull toward all that was, is, and could ever be.
Its countless eyes, scattered across the immensity of its body, ranged from mere pinpricks to vast orbs the size of planets, each glaring with an unnatural awareness. They bore a darkly iridescent sheen, like the unblinking eyes of a deep-sea predator, yet each seemed to contain the swirling remnants of dying galaxies within. These cosmic orbs blinked and pulsed in irregular rhythms, never fully in sync, as if each eye beheld a separate reality, a fragment of the multiverse, consuming and discarding truths that were both incomprehensible and utterly indifferent to the smallness of mortal lives.
Around its titanic maw, larger than any conceivable horizon, spiraled rows of jagged, crystalline teeth, shimmering like broken glass, each shard capable of shearing through planets and consuming solar systems with an almost casual inevitability. The maw was not a singular feature but an ever-shifting spiral, an ouroboric vortex that seemed to devour itself as it fed, drawing in all matter and energy that dared to drift too close.
Abe sensed something deeper still—an unbearable gravity, not merely of mass but of presence, a force so profound that it seemed to warp the very fabric of the astral plane. Here was an entity that existed beyond any understanding of scale, a devourer of old myths, was both beyond and integral to all existence. And yet, its pull was not just that of destruction, but of a forced unity, as if the Oduum’s insatiable hunger sought to consume and amalgamate all things into its incomprehensible whole, extinguishing individual identities as it fed.
In the periphery of his vision, Abe glimpsed the remnants of worlds, skeletal remains of cosmic debris and dust, caught within the Oduum’s endless spiral and slowly drawn into its consuming maw. He could feel the cold seeping into his soul as he watched the fate of these worlds—a fate that, had his tether been severed, would have awaited him as well.
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It was and it horribly could not be!, a fate beyond mere consumption; it was an absorption, an obliteration that transcended the physical. Abe saw souls—entire civilizations’ worth—stretched across the Oduum’s vastness, each soul’s essence flickering weakly like the fading embers of a long-extinguished fire. They were held in thrall, merged into the unfathomable depths of the Oduum’s consciousness, a tapestry of once-living minds now reduced to strands in an incomprehensible, cosmic web.
This was no simple destruction; it was the subjugation of everything the Oduum touched, a rendering down to base essence. And yet, each fragment of life was made to retain just enough awareness to sense the dissolution of self, an endless torment as identities were stripped bare and woven into the Oduum’s grotesque amalgamation. Abe felt a shiver run through his silver tether, a desperate pulse as if warning him of the fate that awaited should he lose his tenuous grip on his physical form.
And then, like a distant murmur carried on a wind from an alien world, Abe could hear voices—echoes from the trapped souls, fragments of thought, snatches of forgotten prayers. Each whispered lament hinted at the horrors they had endured, horrors Abe’s mind could barely comprehend but which seemed to linger at the edge of his perception, pulling him into their despair.
The Oduum itself seemed unaware of Abe’s presence, but it radiated a malevolent indifference that chilled him to the core. Here was a creature that lay beyond any known moral compass; it was neither malicious nor benevolent but simply vast and insatiable. Its purpose was not to punish or to cleanse but to consume, to weave all of existence into its horrific, singular reality.
In the depths of his soul, Abe understood that this was the true nature of the Oduum. It was entropy personified, the inevitable end of all things dressed in a form that defied logic, a slumbering titan from which even gods fled. And as the strands of his tether stretched thin, he could feel the dark pull of the Oduum, beckoning him to join its endless feast, to lose himself in the vastness of its yawning maw.
He knew he had only moments left. Desperately, he tried to pull back, to flee from the horrifying vista, but the gravitational pull of the Oduum’s gaze clutched at him, an iron grip that seemed to pierce through his very essence. His mind began to fray under the strain, visions of Adrestia and Lacon flickering like dying stars at the edges of his consciousness. He saw Ob’s shattered fortress, the crimson-stained ruins of a fallen Hell, and yet all of it paled in comparison to the incomprehensible entity that now loomed before him.
With the last vestiges of his will, Abe tugged on his silver tether, drawing upon every ounce of strength left within him. And as he did, the Oduum seemed to tilt its countless eyes in his direction, as if noticing him for the first time, unlikely, for the scythe cares not for a flea on a blade of grass. A wave of dread surged through the childe, a final, unbearable realization that even in its slumber, the Oduum was aware and not, and that universal ignorance and truth alone was enough to unravel the minds of lesser beings. We only mean something unto ourselves, but so much chum to bait larger predators.
In that instant, Abe felt himself slipping, the tether stretching too far, impossibly and somehow suffocatingly thin, until a sudden, fierce light enveloped him—a desperate, primal surge to return to his physical form, to escape the annihilating gaze of the Oduum. The creature’s final image burned into his mind, a vast, yawning void, a leviathan consuming the stars themselves. And as he hurtled back through the astral plane, Abe knew that the Oduum would haunt his dreams, forever lurking just beyond the edge of perception, a constant reminder of the dark, devouring reality that lay just beyond the veil of existence.
*****
He awoke with a gasp, the physical world flooding back in a rush of sensation, he had returned to his when his where and all felt queer. His body lay still on the floor dead weight and leadened yet found his frail extensions trembling, his breath ragged. Had he bitten his cheek? He felt the ghostly echo of the tether within him, a thread that now felt frayed but still held him to the world of the living, it would be quite cold there for a time. He had seen things that could not be unseen, tasted insights and supposed it was “a felt presences” that would linger in the recesses of his mind, haunting him, even as he returned to the safety of his own skin. Yet he knew, as he lay there, that the void had tasted him, and it would not forget…..perhaps had a hunger now to smell him out.
He attempted to think on how to move a muscle, the blinking made noises in his head and his eye welled with tears…all so hot, his body drenched in sweaty sacred salts, he felt as though he’d taken a lashing, though Father had never the reason to belt him..indeed as if they had been pulled and twisted in every direction at once, the flesh felt overcooked in too much summer sun.
He shuddered to the sight of his uncle Cain beside him, steady and calm. Cain's expression held a well-worn patience, the kind only honed through decades of witnessing the inexplicable. Abe blinked, momentarily disoriented. He was no longer in the basement near the comforting, infernal hum of the furnace but in his uncle’s austere chamber, a room that felt both foreign and familiar, like a relic of another time. A big mug of something delicious and both revolting held under the boy’s nose that screamed in dry respirations, still too rapid. Abe sensing his brethren’s mysterious experimentations, flinched back untrusting.
“Take the broth, Master Abe. You have suffered under this strain for days……” the man’s words faded for Abe noticed his shade behind him, pantomiming his every motion as an obedient shadow should always be. Abe felt he should perhaps trust them both, he had to trust someone, why not them both?
"Uncle," Abe croaked, so dry the shot through his young throat was a pained shot that reinforced that he had arrived at some home safe again from the Leviathan that sought to devour all with indifference. He was youth once again and just needed to be held desperately!, reaching out instinctively, his fingers trembling with an urgency that betrayed him. Cain was relieved to oblige, thinking the childe had been brained by the fit and fever, finding him there cold and spastic for so so too long,…how long feeble man? He had promised his parents (at least the Mother) some semblance of aegis from dangers. The boy was stammering snot and tears into him, “I was... I was there, I saw... I saw everything." The words spilled out, a frenetic tumble that bore the weight of his fevered mind's labyrinthine explorations. "The book, your phantom, the furnace... trials and cycles and echoes, Amun’s endless struggles, Adrestia stalking, immovable and the other unstopping…. through that ruined fortress, and—and the Oduum, returning to claim everything."
The Uncle listened and listened, and held the childe and tried to comfort until he hitched and extinguished…Cain’s face softened with a half-smile as he rested reassuring hands, encapsulating the little’s head of blazing cheeks. Abe felt safe and swathed, reminded at the enormity of the elder, his voice soft, "Easy, lad. There’s no need to rush through it all now, though insight is a merciless in its torrent as any storm” he murmured. “We’re closer kin now than your Pa and I even, he was smart enough to deny me, but knew he had damned you. This is your birthright, after all. You will be alright after a time, son. Breathe and listen, will yee?”
Abe stared at him, struggling to process what he’d just heard. “I thought I had betrayed your trust?! You... you know? You knew this would happen bringing me here? You knew about the book, the stories? About this yellowdecay unraveling it all?" His voice wavered, desperate in the rapture caught between disbelief and a frantic desire to understand to be understood simultaneously. “Please just tell me it is all bad dream brought on by sleepin in the basement….”, he trailed off and counted crow’s feet until his compatriot answered.
Cain breathed and eventually chuckled at his own flush, though there was no humor in it, only the weariness of someone who has survived countless storms asking another love to batten down their own hatches, curse the wind. “Your sight is true, Abe. The Sole Voice Amidst the Discordant Chorus is no ordinary journal, for it is ours to maintain. It consumes its readers, yes, just as surely as you consume it. It's a curse we bear, a family burden. It’s more than ink and paper, Abe—it’s alive, in its own dreadful way, and we keepers, …the wardens from it ever leaving this place, we're simply its instruments and acolytes.”
The room seemed to tilt, as though the admission was a heavy betrayal from a soulmate, as if the sheer weight of Cain’s words had thrown the universe askew - likely had to his younge jelly. Abe felt as though he was falling into dream again, not ready for a return voyage, no. The bed and pillow spiraled back toward the horrors momentarily and he had only just escaped the circling drain. He tried to speak, but his voice failed him, all still so hoarse and dry as pack stone again.
Cain seeing his young twin emote wordlessly continued, speaking as much to himself as to Abe. This was mantra and manna to soothe him also after all.
"It’s a strange comfort, that furnace downstairs," Cain mused, almost wistfully. "But it’s more than just an old stove. It’s the heart of our keep, the nexus of strong olde lines and forces older than this world. Our ashes—” Cain's gaze turned distant, eyes fixed on something unseen. “They’re ancestral remains you were meant to commune with. Your forebears of this legacy, my boy. It binds us to this place, as surely as that book binds us to the knowledge that has driven us so, so mad. How else to see though?”
Abe shuddered. "You mean... it’s a destiny? Something like the Grecian tragedy of Oedipus and the Fates? I’m meant to be haunted, to be taken over by this... this thing?”
The quiet shade nodded and acknowledged before the mortal flesh this time, somber it went to hide the elder Cain’s face a hint of shadowing to his face, trying to hold him. "We’re the gatekeepers. We’re born into it, and if we survive, we live to continue its twisted cycle, adding our pages to the story. The bastard Hastur himself—is like the rot that seeps into every corner of existence. The story unravels, but someone must hold the threads, if only to weave them back in a semblance of order."
The thought that the very fabric of reality, the sacred lineage of their family, and the book itself were all under attack by the entropic will of Hastur brought a chill to Abe's core. Acceptance that things eventually fall apart like the Mona Lisa smile fades, and that all their efforts might ultimately be futile, hung heavy in the air. Yet, Abe felt compelled to push forward, to understand. "But Uncle, why? Why would we keep fighting, knowing it’s all just falling apart?"
Cain leaned back, exhaling a long breath. " So that some may live and love. So that joy lives today out playing in the rain, writing a new song and getting their pink hands sappy climbing new trees. Hope. Because, lad, someone has to. Every piece of knowledge, every story told, is another bit of resistance against the pull of entropy. If we were to leave the book unfinished, if we were to close it and walk away, then everything it contains—every secret, every truth, every lie—would fade. And that is exactly what Hastur wants. Willfullness against helplessness. We choose Hope.”
“You see my shade, yes? The robed monster splices me as well. I some times catch the spry dark dancing jigs as I did in hall of old, yes. Constant companion that runs off leash when I don’t calibrate my mix well.”
As if to soothe the growing storm in Abe’s mind, Cain reached for a weathered page on the nightstand. "Here, let me read something to you. Something I’ve been working on." His voice took on a hypnotic cadence as he began to recite the passage, his words weaving a strange, melancholic comfort over Abe.
"In the twilight of the mind, when all light begins to fail, we remember those who held the torch before us. They walked into the darkness, into the unknown, with no promise of return. And as we read their words, we walk alongside them, a silent legion against the encroaching night. This is our charge, our duty, and our curse. So wake sweetling dreamer, and know that even in slumber, you guard the walls of the waking world."
Abe listened, letting the words wrap around him like a dense hide against the cutting cold of disbelief, soothing the raw edges of his mind. He closed his eyes, sinking back into the pillows as his uncle’s voice echoed in his ears, grounding him, even as he felt the pull of the furnace below, calling him back to the darkness that both terrified and comforted him.
In the quiet there was only the creak of old binding on the book in Cain’s emense lap, Abe drifted under its spell, caught between the clutches of sleep and the relentless pull of the Sole Voice. He understood now, in a way he hadn’t before, hard admitting that he knew he would continue no matter the end.