PART ONE: A VOID

There is a void, a certain missing breath. That twisting and turning articulation of the human tongue now made strange and queer, to hold such syllables inside a man's mouth. It is an utterance, ecstatic, absent from that collective consciousness of human civilization, yet it survives even now.

It is a key, sought after by mad men, by occultists, mystics and academics. And it rests solely in my hands.

Me.

I am the one who discovered it.

Not them.

Me.

The key, it comes to rest in in my palms on a tiny scrap of tapestry, it is a void, and that is to say, it is a single, unknown. A word never seen before in the English language:

"R'leya"

And what beautiful and tragic, guttural sounds it makes! It is a word so ancient that it is in effect, unpronounceable to modern day scholars such as you, dear reader, and me.

It was this single, strange word, writ on the scraps of a dying old English tapestry, which prompted me as a young man to devote my life in finding answers to the questions that such a peculiar discovery presents.

Where did it come from?

What does it mean?

I abandoned myself to my research, leaving behind all promises of friends, of a wife – a family. Those things could wait, I had told myself. R'leya could not. I was finishing up my post-graduate in English Literature at an esteemed University, when I first encountered the word. My professor at the time, brought in the tapestry it was scrawled on one afternoon to share with me once his lecture was finished.

The tapestry was unlike anything either of us had ever seen. It seemed to emit a strange aura which drove us to bouts of confusion and that which could only be described as a hinted delirium.

It displayed what appeared to be some of the oldest English text known to man, predating even what had been discovered of the epic of Beowulf. It spoke of patterns in the stars, of peculiar wisdoms carried to clansmen by druids from the Far East; in particular it mentioned great focus on something called R'leya.

We could not understand the word presented before us, or its mystical philosophies, my professor passed it off as mistranslation.

I wrote my dissertation on R'leya. I tracked it down. Studying its origin by following the only clues I had available to me - the druids who had carried it over from the Far East. Using the names of the other translatable descriptions of the wisdoms these druids brought, I managed to track them and isolate the myth to the ancient land of Mesopotamia. And it was there, that I made a startling discovery.

The word.

R'leya.

It made an appearance in nearly every ancient language within and surrounding this region. Like an itching at the edge of my brain, I began to feel a peculiar and terrifying knowing, a vague awareness of a strange and literary cosmic terror, which sat just beside, and out of sight of my cognitive faculties.

I started to harbor a peculiar theory, a theory that would be considered blasphemous among the academic community, but try as I might, I could not shake it from my mind. What if; I had somehow stumbled upon an origin dialect? The language, from which all languages derived?

My mind began to travel violently, bordering the walls and bridges of the insane as I considered the repercussions of such a fact. If that were true, then language (being arguably the most important aspect of forming a civilization), was potentially invented by and passed on by a previously unknown culture or people in the early years of ancient Mesopotamia.

Memories of strange and peculiar theories, frighteningly haunting, started to take ground in my brain. Images of ancient Sumerian glyphs supposedly telling the stories of the Anunnaki – the ancient astronauts that had visited the earth eons prior, were dancing in demoniac visions behind my eyes at night.

The years began to pass, flying by like hideous black wings, and I found myself increasingly drawn into strange ideas and conspiracy theories, those which seemed to connect up with a single word which no one knew.

"R'leya…"