AN: Apologies for the long wait but I've been occupied for the past weeks doing what my profession demands. The standard disclaimers as to ownership apply in this chapter as in all the others I've written in this fiction. My goal in writing is to get you the reader to imagine the words coming to life and playing out like a movie in your mind; HD or Blue-ray is totally up to you but it does help if you think of this as a movie rather than a book in many respects. I hope that you enjoy this installment and that you can sit back and imagine the scenes described in front of you.

At daemon, homini quum struit aliquid malum, Pervetit illi primitus mentem suam. (But the devil when he purports any evil against man, first perverts his mind.)- Euripides

::Blink::

The cascading feeling of sand washing away against a receding tide reveals intensely sharp rocks underneath. The pain she feels is excruciating in breadth and scope sweeping the fugue and haze of unconsciousness before it in a slow rolling maelstrom bringing with it the wakening lights of opening eyes.

She feels a wetness too, has this storm brought with it the rain to wash from her a parched sense of malaise?

The thunder of this storm is a mute and hollow sound whispering forth a deep sense of loss and sadness, she thinks this curious for what great and powerful force could find itself capable of such a timid roar as it rains?

She remembers herself as a child looking up at the clouds to find hidden shapes and wonders within their depths from the flighty wisps skimming across an endless pond of blue to the dark inkblots who contain both fire and water within.

These clouds have a shape for all their darkness and forbearance. Not even the darkest tempest strewn night can hide what they contain within from one Temperance Brennan. This shape...

The thunder whispers...

Why do the clouds move and shift? The wonder and astonishment of this phenomena consumes her awe.

::Blink::

Ivory white skin drawn tight over hard features carved with a canal of tears glistening in an illuminating moon. Lips drawn thin in horror whose sole color comes from a thin trickle of rubies from a bent and twisted nose. His throat constricting and spasmodic under the strain of plaintive whispers and roaring sobs.

Through the haze she recognizes him. Temperance Brennan is horrified as the realization strikes her.

"Booth?" a croaking whisper slinking out of a maze of pain and despondency.

"Bones? Oh God Bones." The pain hits her again amongst his babbling; for a man blessed with such charisma and charm she realizes that he can be quite incoherent and rambling when giving an apology.

"Booth... what are you... was that... why are you..." her mind while normally sharp and organized is jumbled up and wrecked. The pain pulses like a heart beat across her head and body.

She the glitter of the glass on the floor, the undercurrent to Booth's fevered breathing burning it's way up her nose.

Suddenly the tense and muscled arms and coarse hands cradling her body feel less like a cradle of comfort and reassurance and more like a rickety bridge desperately trying to hold her up. The glistening copper on Booth's face streaked with tears of guilt and shame tell her things that even he hoped to hide from her. The stench of whiskey mixed with salty tears is a vitriolic tonic spurring her from the troubled embrace of her atoning partner.

"Why?" The short and direct question is all that she needs to ask as she gingerly picks herself up off the cold red bricks; more red now than before she notes which strikes discord in her normally warm feelings towards her partner. That single "Why?" is packed with a confused amalgam of fear, curiosity, anger, betrayal, and animosity. Her heart sings with pain as she watches him physically flinch at her verbal stab.

The curious mussing of his hair and the glazed look shining over the brown pools in his eyes convey more than what his simple words are able to.

"I... I needed to see you... to talk to you." his words, broken and steeped in tears, entice her heart and feelings towards him towards sympathy and a desire to hold him saying everything is alright and brushing away the tears with her gentle hands.

The pain pulses again scattering these desires with the cold hard realization that she and Booth had just attacked each other; drunkenness or sleep induced confusion it matters not they came to blows the fact remains of an ultimate perversion of their deep and intimate partnership. Plus much to her consternation and pride she was the one that ended up down for the count.

"Bones I just wanted to say... there is no excuse I can ever give you but I... after yesterday... I couldn't take it anymore. I just- I can still see, I can still smell them... I didn't think. It was... it was... I never meant to... I just tried to make the dreams go away. Please forgive me I thought that, I tried to call you but... but... I thought you knew that I was here but- I thought." His hands reach for her pleading.

She can see the dark circles under his eyes, a darkness that her breaking his nose couldn't have caused yet. She finally see's just how disheveled he is, normally Booth is meticulous with his care of uniform and equipment; if it's brass it will shine like gold, if it's black it will be polished in such a way to defy any blemish.

The man before her is hunched over clad in black tactical gear patterned with the ground in debris of dirt and mud, a patch just below his left thigh is crumbling onto her floor as fissures are caused by his flexing muscles subtly hidden behind the worn fabric. She can see chips and scratches on the buttons fastening shut his breast pocket betraying flecks of silver and gray underneath the matte black paint. His collar is stained dark with sweat and grime, a slight rash on his neck drives home the point that he hasn't changed out of that uniform for at least a day. His normally steady and reassuring hands are mussed and shaking; dirt underneath chipped fingernails and a string of abrasions across his wrists where gloves chafed. His steady figure is bent like a condemned man asking for mercy shaking with barely concealed anguish.

Azure eyes give more acceptance and encouragement than the most eloquent prose; a confession elicited not with the burning iron of a red-masked brute but with a silent grace of long-forgotten myth. A granite set jaw cannot obscure the hidden wonders shrouded within the twin mirrors which gaze into a warm soul set on forgiveness.

"They told us that there were- were 50 missing children," his pale lips move barely forming the words as they are whispered into the darkness "we heard rumors... there were disturbances in the woods. Far beyond where the towns are or hikers go. Fires. Noises. We got a tip, some crazies were out there doing God knows what to these kids. We went into- Bones it was horrible the night it was... you could feel the- the unnaturalness of the woods. It was as if something was in the air. And then the noise... the tom-tom of the drums... tom-tom... tom-tom... like it was a church bell of some sort. Or a heartbeat of something..." Bones sees something that she thought that Booth's face couldn't express, terror "great... something terrible."

"When we broke through the woods and saw them it was like getting punched in the chest... all of us- just stopped and... we couldn't take our eyes away. It was horrible. The writhing maggot piles that Hodgins has in his lab are more appealing than that was. The bodies just... like a wave of pus seeping from a bloody wound. And the chanting... the chanting it just- it just got into your head and... it- it... oh God Bones... the chanting..."

Booth sobs a drunk's tears now but Brennan can tell that there is something else behind them. Instinctively she kneels down onto the floor and takes a sylvan hand and gently places it on his shoulder. The look in his eyes as he looks up is the twin to one of a drowning sailor who has just been pulled out of a sinking ship onto a rescuing vessel or of a soldier who has been on the losing side of a major engagement with the sound of artillery and the rattle of tank treads still haunting his mind.

"When it was over and we saw the scene up close we saw... we saw a totem with a trench dug around it. There were bones in it... so many bones. They were small bones. I could see the scrapes and marks on them. You'd be proud of me. I could tell that something chewed on the bones and ripped the flesh away. There was blood around the mouths and all over so many of the... the... people," this word he spat out like a curse "and I... I almost lost it right there. And the sculpture and the drums... the drums were terrible. Being made with human skin but the sculpture on top of the totem... I've... I've been having these nightmares of- of what I saw there. When I close my eyes I can see it. Perfectly."

"When I left... I just- broke." At this he sobs and averts his eyes from her and flinches away from her touch. This hurts her more than the knock on the head. "I started drinking. To dull the pain. I tried calling you but... I don't know what happened but I just couldn't bring myself to... I remember walking here to your home. Stumbling through the street holding a bottle like a bum like," his words turn into a deadly whisper "my father."

Brennan can feel the waves of shame and pain dripping off of Booth at this self flagellation; his pain oozes out of him like blood from wounds whose coppery tendrils continue to grow without retreat. She realizes that Booth probably has never felt so low or prostrate before now.

A part of Booth's mind tries to tell his mouth to stop talking but the rest of him demands that he continue this confession even though the pain it causes is unlike what he has ever born before.

"When I got here I just... I don't know what I was doing anymore I just... I just needed to dull the pain and the- to hide the dreams. And then you got here and... I don't know what happened but... suddenly you were on the floor bleeding. Bones- Oh God Bones... I-I, you must hate me now. I'm... just like my father I get drunk and then... then..."

All coherency leaves Booth at this point and he just kneels there before her a broken man.

She says nothing for nothing needs to be said. The silken gleam of ivory glistens with cut diamonds in the watery moonlight changed only with the subtle manipulations of tense muscles. Chiseled granite cast in a steel mold is illuminated only by the shadows as guilt consumes and constricts the tragic hero.

Sometimes a simple touch is all that is needed.

But sometimes...

simplicity is the most complicated thing in the world.


"Nor is it to be thought that Man is either the oldest or last of the Masters of Earth nor that the greater part of Allah's creation is cast alone in life and substance. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall ever be. They dwell not in realms traveled or even imagined by Man but in the spaces in between with the calm and patience of primal predators. Their Words have been spoken and their Rites howled in accord with astral Seasons beyond the ken of mortal Man. They shall come again to claim their old patrimony from mortal usurpers. They whisper from beyond the void ever preparing for the time that they can return."

The burning haze of electric lights filtered through patterned plastic casts a comforting glow on these harsh inscriptions of an obviously, to Zack, lunatic mind. Zack knows that the ideas and claims put forth by Alhazred are ludicrous and fantastic and are obviously works of fiction.

Correction.

The old Zack knew that these claims are impossible and crazy. The new Zack, the one that was reading them now...

After what he has experienced in his dreams and visions and... and... the scars on his neck. Empirical evidence. He cannot ignore that. Instead he drinks down the vile liquid of a forbidden goblet of knowledge like it was sweet ambrosia.

For knowledge holds answers. Answers as to what has happened to him. Answers to what is happening to him.

He keeps reading on with tired eyes feverishly combing the parchment for clues and revelations but the writing of Alhazred are a maze of mysteries and hidden truths with implied meanings forgotten after aeons of history and strange rhyming couplets rife with double and triple meanings inter-spacing whole treatises of a vile and esoteric history.

"That which is not dead but can eternal lie,

and in strange eons even death may die."

Whispered messages and meanings unfathomable swirl about in the maelstrom of Zach's psyche. He can sense that his steady Titanic mind is bereft by any multitude of icebergs whose presence channels him further along casting him adrift in a sea of madness. He can smell the cyclopean cataclysm awaiting him along this path but he is consigned into casting himself into a watery grave of hidden truths and insanity unimagined because buried within the madness is...

He pauses.

"What is awaiting me along this path?" he muses out loud.

The lights flicker and a guttural sigh rattles through the still air of his sterile room. A rank miasma of decay wafts through his nose and a scalding fury of immolating metal gently caresses his cheek like a mother does to a son.

And he knows what he'll find.

Purpose.

He can feel how he's been cast adrift ever since he was ignominiously drawn into a world of perfectly flawed logic and then cast as the prodigal leper; welcomed with happiness back to a pantheon that is no longer, can no longer be, his. Even his blood kin can no longer embrace him with that forgotten warmth. Letters are few and far between and the words scribbled down on paper... they simply do not compare to... to this. This tome of paradigms and secrets unknown.

His eyes rove about until they are drawn to a passage of such unknown significance that he can not help but be entranced by its mystery. And by it's possible meanings.

"The Elder Things sowed their seed in the shadows of foreboding Kadath in the Cold Waste from which they spread across the primaeval Earth. An empire built on semi-sentient herds of Soggoths whose servitude built great aquatic cities and mountain holds alike. Followers of Ancient and Terrible Gods united under a star of six points whose thirsts and desires are beyond knowing. The decadence of the latter generations of Elder Things after aeons of rule coupled with twin titanic struggles against Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go left them prostrate in the face of the cosmic changes in the Earth's climate. The creeping ice devoured them and has blessedly hidden their terrible aretefacts from Man's eyes. Many things are buried in the shadows of Kadath."

Kadath.

This word holds Zack's attention in a strange bondage and his mind whirls at the possibilities. Where is this Kadath? Who were these Elder Things? What is hidden in the ice?

As he ponders these questions and continues to pour over the text looking for ephemeral clues to this mysterious riddle his notice drifts away from his surroundings or else he would notice that the rust on a harmonica seems to spread and the burnished hue of a trophy dims. These anchors are consumed destined to fade away in a gaping maw of a new unknown.

AN: Reviews are nice and they help me write faster.