Last Emissary: Sraosha (IV)

 

Day 4

‘Tis the dawn of the fourth day. I am Sraosha צ, last of the envoys of the Great One sent to this Earth. Diary mine –

          A night of sleep, but sleep peppered with dreams. I dreamt in the eyes of a thief, first, one of the clay people that inhabited this Earth in the Last Days; I dreamt as he broke into the houses of the opulent and stole their food, and ran away desperately from their private armies. I dreamt as every heist became less successful; I dreamt as every time the thief became more mangled. In the end, he was nothing more than a collection of holes and seeping wounds; and the food was left to rot upon those streets. 

          I descended once again into the storage-room in search of Words in its library. In candlelight, I pored through the ancient texts – one, two whole, with nothing found; and then a third. An ancient composition in a half-forgotten language of the Bet Chavvah – and there amidst the words of the priests of a long-dead religion was that terrible word, that awful sequence מילה, a command forgotten perhaps for good reason. Remember, remember, that wrathful day; the day when the Lion-Star Ialdabaoth cast his evil gaze upon the clay men of those cities Sdhôm and ‘Amôrâh, and bearing the last of the true Light grafted upon his awful spirit he transfigured them and the wife of Lôt’ into pillars of salt and mountains of dust. This is the Word – the Word that erased every failed world before this one, the fundament of the Abyss; the Word that, spoken by a soul divine, will consume everything in salt – everything. At last, one Word was learnt; but what awful fate it is for this to be the one that begins this reborn Testament.

          I tell you, Diary Mine, that the sounds I’d heard on the day prior had only intensified, crawling and scratching and biting and growling through tunnels beneath the temple, caverns perhaps, or trenches dug up by the Enemy known as Terror. And when I learned the Word which killed those towns of men, a section of the floor collapsed, revealing that tunnel underneath. Four creatures of Terror, abominations, amalgams of flesh and hatred and loose tendons, patches of the skins of soldier-men and their armor, arms and hooves and mouths all over, hungry and dark and desperate to feed. I ran – so fast, so desperate, for the ground floor; then threw myself, skin and bone and wounds, down the aisle, toward that third pew to the right. Beneath, the weapon I’d discovered – beneath, the implement of death, of killing. This shall be the first terrible sacrament of this new era. Four creatures of Terror from the underground, melded into a single chimeric form as bones realign and muscle re-entangles, four into one, a creature of Legion; and in such quick succession through the weapon’s pump action, four slugs loosed like thunderbolts in myth, one after another as the putrid blackened blood of Terror flushed from the abscess being and painted the temple’s interior with an eviler shade of color. Opaque, Lightless; and far from the last.

          Silence, complete and utter. A review of my possessions – the girl’s room untouched; the study untouched. Three shells left in the gun; one loaded, two in the tube. Much food, many books; the storage-room remains mostly intact. The patch that collapsed is substantial, but remains quiet – perhaps too much so. I tried my best to enclose it, to create a blockage by moving shelves above and around the hole – but who is to know if such a tactic will suffice? Who is to know if my improvised barricade can at all stand in the way of Terror? Maybe not. Maybe – maybe not. I hear a storm, thunder rumbling outside – it is time to pray a bit. To stop and rethink what to do. Yes. Perhaps in the girl’s room instead of the temple proper. I am not keen on the sight of their blood.

Night, Fourth Day

I have made a breakthrough. The southern room in the underground, near that of the girl. This place; a library. A true library, thousands of books, many of them holy tomes. Many of them, therefore, relevant to my quest. We are closer, so much closer – closer to finding what we have come here for. One book bears that word זכר, the Word that the Ancient One used to graft remembrance of eternity upon the soul of the Eternal Adam; a Word that might bring me visions of that previous life I have forgotten should I speak it. What mystery – and what relief. A gentler Word to complement the Testament.

          Another book – well. Another book revealed something I would rather not have seen at all. I pulled on it and was surprised with the sounds of turning gears and rusted cogs, as the shelf it lay on spun and revealed a hidden room. Diary Mine – few words exist that could describe my terror. Cold, cold, a gigantic refrigerator powered by an unseen source of electricity, something long-lived and oh-too-cruel. Then, the smell, pungent, astringent, an assault on the senses. Then, worst of all, the vision, Diary Mine. Bodies, a mountain of them, preserved by cold and formaldehyde, bled dry and pallid, slashed each by the throat, all nude and bearing bruises on their knees. A solemn plaque read “We are the Children of Tomorrow. We have ended our suffering early, as per the teachings of the Great Prophet Khonsu N.R. We leave the Last Family behind to guard our vessels for the Reawakening.” Clearly, the Last Family did not survive this ordeal. What horror, Diary Mine – this was one of the Bet Chavvah’s death cults, the groups which bore their power over their believers to guide them into mass suicide. Dear Almighty, what Hell you have thrown me into!

          Diary Mine, I have spent so many hours lost in thought with this ardent thought of mine. Perhaps the mission is not worthwhile at all. What worth is there in faith from beings like these? I have thought of it, of disassembling the remaining shells in that shotgun and lighting the whole temple ablaze, of kneeling before the Two Horsemen that keep watch over me beyond these walls so that I may be beheaded and everything can end. I have considered it, but I keep my faith – I keep it, regardless of how unlikely it is to concretize. Faith that the next generation, born on the aftermath of this resurrected Testament, will be better than the last.