Father, you must forgive me.

I went into your study without your permission. Mother always warned me about my curiosity, how it would get me into trouble one day: she has a habit of being right. I stole away into my quarters, hoping for some sort of answer for my ever-growing list of questions. I know, you always scolded me for asking too many: “Ca, sometimes not even us adults have the answers to the questions of the world. From the finest wizard to the oldest wood elf, no matter how great their wisdom, none will have all of the answers.” I suppose children never learn.

The great volumes were burdensome, it took all of what little strength I had to even open them. Dust lifted into the air as the volume opened, sending me into fits of coughing and wheezing. The pages were yellowed with age, and were of a brittle constitution. I had to handle them with the utmost delicacy, lest they are torn by even the slightest pull to one side. I brushed the dust away to reveal oddities that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. There were various symbols haphazardly strewn about the pages, none of them taking any hold in my memory. There were what I can only attempt to describe as the scribblings of a madman: unknown characters and shapes that bore no resemblance to any language of the Earth. I looked towards other volumes for some sort of translation, and found none. I searched on, that dreaded curiosity pushing me deeper and deeper into the contents of the tome. I kept turning, the candlelight providing decent illumination for the task at hand.

The contents grew even more bizarre. I came upon illustrations of some sort of being, none that I had ever even seen. The creatures splayed before me on these pages were not of the ogre or vampire ilk: I had heard stories of these beasts before, and they did not frighten me as the abominations that lay in front of me. A ghastly pile of black ooze and running slime with an obscene number of eyes stared back at me through the pages. The eyes seemed to shift and disappear with each shift of my pupils, the bastardized irises of this beast seemed to FOLLOW me as I looked at the tome! My mind raced, I knew I shouldn’t go on, but my soul’s thirst for morbid knowledge outweighed my better judgment. The page turned, and I felt a part of my mind begin to snap.

There were only more unknown characters on this page, but this time they began to move and bounce across the page, a forbidden choreography that went beyond the limits of my comprehension. Then suddenly, a word I could understand formed in the muck of confusion and fear: “Old." The words spun in a sickly spiral on the page, eventually beginning to take form in...is that... yes! In English! The words began to stack neatly in sentences, and I read, my eyes squinting in the waning light from my fledgling candle. The text said:

“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substances walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. They know the gate. He is the gate. He is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in him. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. He is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”

I slammed the tome shut and backed away from it as the flame of my candle was snuffed out. I threw the book into a nearby cook fire and watched it burn. The ancient pages took to flame and were reduced to a pile of ash. I scattered them outside and waited for sleep to come. The inky black embrace of semi-consciousness took me, and I fell into a restless slumber. I fear what the details of this letter will do to you father: my own experience of this dream brought me to the brink of madness. I think you are owed an explanation, so I will try my best. May god have mercy on us all.

I dreamt I was cast off the side of a galleon during a mighty tempest, the black frothing water pulling me underneath the waves. All of it felt real: the sensation of tides tossing me to and fro in the waves, the passing graze of a creature swimming for shelter, and the emptiness below. Then something grappled me, what it was I knew not, but its immense strength yanked me deeper below the water’s surface, and I lost sight of the ship. It pulled me further and further, the depths growing darker and the panic began to set in. Then the creature stopped pulling me: I floated aimlessly in the void of the deep ocean, the bottomless deep stretched below, and the infinitesimal expanse of the ocean spread all around me.

Then I looked down.

Gods, why did I look down.

Spread beneath me was a monstrosity of vapidity and unutterable horror. Its head was a puffy, tentacled thing with bastard wings where ears should be. The head was mounted on an assemblage of appendages and limbs that seemed to belong to mortal beings of this plane: its gargantuan body was of a rubbery persuasion, with scales and strange feeler-like appendages that dangled off the beast. Its mouth, a beak of gigantic size that seemed to belong to a bird of this world and it stood on scaly legs of supreme length and power. What I can only call the beast’s midsection was splotched and stained with amorphous growths and spores: they heaved back and forth, spewing out some obscene gray fluid that I could not begin to recognize. If the abomination noticed me, it took no notice, only keeping to its rest. I began to scream. My loudest efforts produced a muffled yelp, and I knew no one could hear me on the ocean’s floor. Then the beast’s eyes flicked open.

They opened towards me, both were black: blacker than even the darkest oil or coal I have ever experienced. As it reached an ancient, gargantuan hand towards me, I awoke in a fit of frenzied screams. I screamed for you, for God, for anyone who could get the nightmarish images out of my mind.