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The following is an excerpt from a tattered journal, bound in rawhide, scrawled in a murky ink on rough, yellowed, hand-made paper:



I once heard it said that hell is found in other people. The happy fool who penned that lie never set foot in these lands.

How many years have vanished since I last heard a single word uttered by another man? The memories of my years cradled in the warm bosom of civilization fade further with each fleeing day. No longer do the faces rising before my inner eye dredge from my depths the barbs of loneliness which long hence settled there. In the moments faltering on the precipice of sleep, once-familiar voices drift to me from decades past, as silt through the night-deep trench. I am a pierced vessel, and as the man I was trickles out, what is this which seeps in to replace him? What abyss waits below to swallow me in my descent?

The tree drops its ripened fruit, the carrion bones slough their husk, and I shed the vestiges given me by the consensus voice of Man. The amalgamated convictions, the habitual shrill worries and cares, the predetermined forms and dances of the collective, all withered and fallen to ash, like the pyre that was meant to be my ferry to oblivion.

Though I have lost even the face of my own mother, still do those last moments remain scorched vividly in my memory. The anxious whispers and shuffling of feet outside my cabin door, the rising smoke and crackling timber in the square beyond, the shredding bite of the window glass into my flesh as I leapt into the night, the clutching ache in my breast and the searing sting of terror in my eyes as I ran my bare feet raw over the forest floor. I still leap awake in the deathly pre-dawn hours, hearing the echoes of their slanders and curses pursuing me down that bramble-strangled deer run. With bitter triumph do I recollect the hoarse laugh that soared from my throat and overtook their screams when they breached my door and found my parting gift.

Thus I fled, stumbling over grasping roots, crawling through voracious swamp muck, clawing through constricting vines, and staggering over freezing mountain passes, until no lights bobbed behind me on the horizon, no trails betrayed my route, no searching hounds bayed in the dark, and no hearth smoke rose for miles in any direction. There, into some dank pit of lichen-caked rock and guano-spattered clay, I fell at last, starved and broken.

The sleep that came was deep and nightmare-harried. Yet how many times did I start awake, every muscle straining, roused by a furtive stirring on the cusp of hearing? In those agonizing moments of breathless anticipation, I learned the true nature of silence.

I felt it first as a gaping void, the phantom pain of an amputee's severed limb. The world around me was suddenly empty without the susurrus of voices and the murmur of other life. At times I wondered if I had lost my hearing entirely.

But then the picture inverted, and the void became substance. True silence is not an absence but an overabundance, akin to the overwhelming radiance which blinds the eyes fixed on the glaring midday sun. Without the mundane distractions which had always deafened me, I began to perceive subtle patterns in the stillness.

In that Stygian grotto, I came to keep the secrets betrayed by the sliding shadow's whisper. I saw the hidden arrays in the blood-sign which ever throbs behind the eyes. In my waking dream, I emerged to move silent and formless through the misty liminal realm, guided by the lights which beckon through the lamentations of the ancient oaks, and therein learned of the dark ascencion of the heretic seers. In the shrieks of the storm winds, my spine reverberated to those voices which drift near on the backs of the Outer currents, those dread voices which relentlessly insinuate, and tempt, and mock, and flay bare the flesh of the truth.

Do not seek the silence, lest you find it refuses to release your listening ear.

In this fugitive hermitage, I trespass upon the domain of the forgotten gods, the hideous names of which crawl forth from the black aeons predating Man's ascent from primal, bestial squalor. I falter to write them here, fearing the act should turn their merciless eyes upon me and condemn me to an unspeakably worse fate. It is to their blasphemous, sepulchral murmuring that the sylvan sea quakes and bows. Their blood-hymns are the final horror-rent shrieks of the hunted. Their temple, the mouldering carcass-pit, the charnel miasma rising as profane incense. Their baleful eyes leer through the blind, white sockets of long-dead stars. And in these befouled lands, their children howl and grovel and writhe in ceaseless hunger, the cast-off fragments of the Creator's nightmare. Some day, not even the Sevenfold Incantation will hold them at bay, and I shall be their greatest feast. But before they claim my flesh, I will steal their secrets and turn the fury of the outer spheres upon their loathsome manifestations. And should I meet one of the architects of my exile, in glorious lex talionis, I will drag them screaming into the truth of this world.

(The following section is illegible, and the rest of the tome is blank.)