"Can you tell from the look in her eyes?
We're going nowhere.
We live our life like we're ready to die.
We're going nowhere.
You can run but you'll never escape
Over and over again.
Will we ever see the end?
We're going nowhere."
-"Shadow Moses", by Bring Me the Horizon
Knee deep in the ancient grass, she walked aside the glistening River Skai towards the forest with her cat trotting at her heels. She could see the dark green band of trees far ahead, stretching infinitely to the East and the West (Where the sun was beginning to vanish over the horizon, turning blood red as it did so). This marked the border of the mysterious and forbidden Enchanted Wood where deadly and evil things lurked. Aside from the distant forest and the river where luminescent fish swam and giant insects hovered, there was nothing else to be seen but the endless expanses of grass. Just a day ago, Clair could see the distant lights and chimney smoke of Ulthar, the town she left behind. She had a family there: old Stoua the local carpenter, her father, and Dalia, her mother. There was also Picyna, the local drunk, Atal the priest and his student Kayan and not to mention the immense population of cats of which Ulthar was known for.
All of that was behind her now, Clair's family and the peaceful little town in which she was born and raised. All she had now was her longtime friend and pet, Willow, and the vivid visions of Azathoth and his demonic offspring, Nyarlathotep, beckoning her ever forward towards Kadath.
Her journey began some time ago (she had lost count of the days as they passed) with a dream. Like any other night, the young, dark haired girl went to bed and slept, expecting the usual sweet dreams her mother wished to her every night and expecting to forget them the next morning. Instead, she had slept herself into a cold and infinite void darker than any moonless night she had ever seen. Her own form was gone. She was reduced to a disembodied consciousness stranded in the endless space.
Then Clair saw a light. It was a long, curved band of light that resembled the crescent moon she saw every month or so. The familiarity was good. In this vast and terrifying darkness, it was not only good to see a light but to see a light that she saw twice a month on restless nights. She tried drifting closer to the light, hoping it could lead her home (She even preferred to encounter the savage moon beast that inhabited it than spend another second in the void), but found she could not move. Her bodiless essence remained fixed in that one spot in infinity. But that mattered little when saw that the light ahead was not the moon but a planet.
She stared in awe as the crescent of light grew to its full shape and slowly gained color as it did. There were hues of sandy brown and dark green occasionally blocked from view by scratches of white. The land was as green as grass and trees of Ulthar and the clouds as equally pure. The most stunning thing about this planet, though, was the vast ocean, seeming to cover over half of immense sight. The blue waters sparkled like jewels beneath the warming sun that gave life to this world. However, the beauty quickly ended when the warming light of the sun turned blood red, washing over the glittering planet with a shade of the most ghastly crimson. The green land burned. The seas burned away and became blacked clouds that blanketed the grey surface. The millions of fragile creatures that called that planet their home were vaporized, leaving only their shell-like cities and monuments to mark their place in infinite history. Their dying screams, multiplied a million-fold, echoed through Clair's mind like a hideous bell. She tried to cover her ears but remembered she had no ears, let alone any hands with which to cover them.
Clair waited. The screams continued. "Stop!" she tried to yell, but her voice was silenced by the vacuum.
The screaming ended. Clair couldn't hold back her relief despite the tragedy she just witnessed. As her disembodied consciousness pulsed with an ironic laughter, a new sound broke the void. It was a complex jumble of words, incantations, and a myriad of unearthly noises that threated to tear Clair's mind apart. Beneath the orchestra of clicks, warbles, moans, buzzes, roars, growls, drones, and other unexplainable sounds she heard the faint trace of human speech. At first, they were impossible to understand, but as Clair focused on the human voices, the other ungodly noises drifted away leaving the choir of human beings to their chanting. Nothing the voices said made any sense to Clair, but every indistinguishable letter and syllable stuck to Clair's mind and arranged itself into sentence she would forever remember: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Near the end of the hellish choir, the voices droned in unison "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
Dead silence again. Clair drifted in the void, paralyzed with fear and shock. As the former planet burned before her, Clair struggled to understand what just happened. Eons seemed to pass before the universe began to stir again, prompting Clair out of her state of utter fear. The vast, black canvas of void around her seemed to bend. The stars slowly began to drift from their former places. As she watched the universe warp and disfigure, she felt the presence of other planets that circled around the life-giving star. She sensed a boiling rock-world, enveloped in its own fumes and gases that was the home of many stone-skinned scorpion beast and giant crawling disk. She sensed a world that hugged its parent star and housed a tiny kingdom of hive crawlers; she sensed a red world of octopi that skulked beneath the sands; a world surrounded by vibrant, rainbow rings that were the gods of primitive cat-like creatures; a titan world of mindless balloon-hunters, a blue world of hellish winds that played with the marching trees that lived there; and a world that spun on another axis. She felt this mass spectrum of worlds and creatures dance around her, tranquil and in bliss, until they too suffered the same, bloody fate as the glittering planet. More screaming and more suffering surrounded her. She soon sensed the presence of a final planet: a small, dark, and lonely world that drifted on very edge of the solar system. Its surface was nearly starved of the light and warmth that the other worlds were privileged with. It watched as the whole spectrum of worlds crumbled under the malevolent hands of the unseen entity.
The stars began moving more violently and started swirling around a central point in the void, creating a vortex that engulfed the worlds and their parent star. Out of this pit of destruction and mayhem came a million lights and colors. The screaming ceased, slowly drowned out by the sound of other worldly music. Clair turned to face the chaotic display of lights as they grew and continued to consume the space around her. The music became louder and louder as a new presence began to approach. It was everywhere, a thing so vast that the known universe barely contained it. Within the streams of light and color, Clair began seeing claws and teeth that raved and mauled around her. Her sight involuntarily fell on the chaotic apex as it began to split like a giant pair of eyelids. She saw the colors and forms of the universe circle within the iris of a giant eye as it gazed downward at her. Unimaginable fear struck her as she understood the presence around her.
"Azathoth…" she whispered.
"CLE'R!" Azathoth growled, as if in response.
Clair trembled. The universe had plunged within the mad abyss that was Azathoth and there was no escape.
The eye closed again, only to open once more as a mouth filled with a trillion spear-like teeth. The mouth swallowed everything, including Clair, and she was in total darkness again.
"Clair…" She heard a distant whisper.
Clair, now on the brink of madness, searched around desperately for the source of the new voice. Despite the terrifying predicament, the voice was calm and soothing, yet carried a malevolent air. She saw a distant figure, draped in prismatic robes and crowed with a pharaohs pshent.
"come" Nyarlathotep beckoned.
Clair did as she was commanded, but before she reached the specter she awoke in her normal bed in her normal home in normal Ulthar. For a time, she thought the visions were just a dream until they began following her in her waking hours. For sanity's sake, she consulted Atal and he told her the dreams were messages from the gods, telling Clair that they demand her presence. What they could have wanted with a common Ultharian neither of them knew, but Clair knew it would be foolish to deny the gods. Atal gave her a map, pointing to the direction of Kadath, the dark city of the gods, and, after a long and sad farewell to her family, she was off with only her cat to keep her company.
Days later, she found herself sitting upon a rock on the bank of Skai, seeing those nightmarish visions again. She stood against Azathoth and Nyarlathotep again, this time silently waiting for them to vanish so she could move on. Her hand fell on Willow's fur. The soft silky texture reminded her she was still in the material world and still alive. The nightmare ended, leaving Clair disturbed and tired. She glanced at Willow, who stared back and purred.
"We'll be alright. We'll fight through this to the end so I can go home and rest easy as I have before. We will survive." Clair told herself. Her head tilted back. Her eyes sparkled with the billions of strange stars that decorated the dark sky. The moon stood out alongside the ringed worlds of the outer reaches. Her eyes drooped and fluttered. She desperately didn't want to sleep, knowing what awaits her. "I'll survive." She whispered. She fell asleep next to the River Skai as the fireflies glided and illuminated the form of the resting adventurer and her friend.
By the next evening, she reached the edge of the Enchanted Wood. She couldn't see past but a few feet into the tree's as they gave way to the dark, but she was not afraid. "We'll survive." She told herself as well willow. Together, they entered the forest.
