The Chronicle of Shadows

[The Imperator of the Night (Hearken to the Attestation of the Sinistrous):] For it is the iniquity of man which compels him to these tenebrous gates, seeking opiate dreams and the alluring embrace of oblivion... Know that I have cavorted beneath the horned moon with repellent fiends, and liberated virgins from the burden of their maidenhood. (Supping deep of that sweet ichor and revelling in the sanguineous megrims my ophidian tongue has wrought.) Tyrannic I am where the Serpent dwells, the lissome embrace of the succubi, Like a wolf in the fold, red of tooth and claw, enthroned beneath black nether-skies. Shadows stalk the viscid gloom, (beware the) blades of the assassins, The call of Ul-Yeh in the air, the crystal skull is shattered, A veil of cloud about the moon, (fevered) dreams of (trenchant) steel and fire, Hearken to the slithering, the envenomed kiss of night. [The Imperator of the Night (Thus Spake the Chronicle of Shadows):] Such adoration bestowed upon me beneath the cryptic moon! Caressed by ululant lotus-stained tongues... (Behold the true purity of that which lurks concealed beneath the mantle of shadow, and let the deluded, debauched sybarites flee in terror from that darkness which they profess to embrace!) Beyond the spheres of light and darkness, beneath distant pallid stars, I bring the iridescent glimmer of forbidden truth, seared in the crucible of blasphemy! For amorphous they come, steeped in the fetor of ten thousand years, Abhorrent colossi spawned from the sinistrous cosmic spheres. And upon their tongues, vile secrets so terrible sweet madness is a redolent balm! [The Imperator of the Night (Revel in the Triumph of the Dark):] I shall glut the maw of that ineffable nameless evil which lurks forever in the soul of man, for so it is written in the Chronicle of Shadows... [29 October, 1893] They came in the night, and butchered five of my party, the terrified survivors fleeing with the first wan light of dawn. The fiends seemed inexplicably to be an extension of the night, as if their misshapen bodies were actually somehow composed of the darkness itself. Even as I gazed directly at them, I found I could not truly focus on their stygian forms... their bodies appearing to shimmer and shift like the ripples of a heat-haze upon an arid plain. My ammunition, discharged in vain, is all but spent... and now, as night unfurls its malign wings once more to enshroud this desolate and forsaken place, I wait alone for the sunrise I fear I shall never see. At dusk I discovered a hidden alcove in the time-raught surface of the great monolith which stands as a mute sentinel before the entrance to the colossal temple; a moss encrusted crevice concealed from the eyes of man for I know not how long. As the darkness massed about me, a strange miasma seemed to grip my mind in tenebrous tendrils, and I beheld that horrifying and immemorial edifice which I now feel certain once cast its diabolical shadow upon the Gate of the Sun. It is all true, everything I feared, everything which I dared imagine only in the blackest embrace of the most narcotic malignity. There are Six Keys To The Onyx Pyramid, which conceal a terrifying truth never intended to be grasped by the woefully fragile mind of Man. I now pray that no unfortunate soul ever again stumbles as close as I to those cryptic axioms which lie ever in wait between the incorporeal veils of light and shadow. I would offer up a prayer to the divinity which once I worshipped, but I know it would echo emptily through the abyssal reaches of the unheeding cosmos. As I scrawl this final entry in my journal, the sun sinks with a chilling finality below this now alien horizon. I know the shadowy figures shall soon return to claim me. I must fortify myself for the onset of the night...