a revision of "Requiem of the North"

[EG_Administration]

(Note: This story was written for a friend that asked me to describe to him what Alaska was like. I considered this, and posted it to him soon after.)

…for my family.

---
Requiem of the North
By Woodruff Laputka

The following was found on the walls of an underground alcove by the boring through of an ice field in search for crude oil, 400 miles east of Nome, Alaska. Though the language held obvious likeness to that of what is seen on the preserved Sumerian clay tablets in Iraq, the antiquity of the language, nor its near impossibility of transcription, do not account for both the location of the etchings, nor of the age of the of what had covered it, over 60,000 years of formation. Though little of what had not been lost in the explosive boring was decipherable, archeological experts flocked to the site to study the glyphic representations, launching the single largest translations project in archeological history. Taking up over a decade of intense study of both the now oxygen exposed and incredibly decaying etchings and the preserved Sumerian tablets, controversy erupted regarding the vague, and for many, incredulous deciphered representations of what stood on the wall.

At no time did anyone attempt to move the rock face for preservation and lab study, for fear of completely disrupting the pieces structural stability.

This remains to be the single most shocking mystery of the scientific world, and to date, the project of re-translation and comparative study of both Sumerian likeness and photographs of the now decayed has yet to be completed.


(translated fragment)

***


-or it was over by all account. And we went on, the lot and I.

I have been here for sometime, and recall it, terribly. Care not to know not why we were there, for such is frivolous to the account of what would happen.

*

Somewhere along my journey, I certainly had lost my way in the torrential hurricane that swept from out the southern seas and swallowed my team and I whole. I cannot say how long it took us, for with in the body of that most merciless maelstrom be there no time or dimension. Only haze, and fury and the will of high forces disposed of maddeningly, giving a door way to the malice of cruelty of a mindless god; a furious blind beast.

When finally it lifted, we were all displaced from each other, and spent many a days, by sign of the stars, attempting to rejoin in our company. Many of us, those brave souls who started far back, were lost for ever in the wicked storm, and were mourned for their absence; thought dead. And so, with our sleds, and our carrion souls did we move on to vistas of wide, open deserts, beyond the sight and song of the mountains, believably left far behind where we road. In a way, relief took my mind, and I often drifted through out the hours to far off places of splendor. The tower tall terraces of archaic Xanadon, where ever does the motherly sun warm givingly, and the air blows perfumed with fine spices from the gardens below, enchanted with the singing of many riding machines and artisans that laced those streets with a brilliance. The deserts; icy, apathetic and white, gave little else to do stay pressed; inspire our need to move on and not cease. For such is the siren of the great Far North; The unnamable draw, that alien air, which vibrates unheard beneath ice and earth, and through out the blood of beasts and weather, and the victims which they claim for their own. Phantasmal and purely primal, it calls to all that have heard its hum, and if, grant it, they leave and survive the trip back, does it ever stay tinged in their veins to return and to hear its eldritch choir, forgoing the exhaustible certainty of never returning to their homeland, again.

One late evening, after much of the day spent riding did we, indeed, stop for a long needed rest. It was cold, and we were but older men, golden only to memory of those years which bore us from nothing, save depleted youth and old dream. The 4 of us, as was left from our runin with that most accursed of weathering powers, agreed to keep shifts for our watch on the great icy tundra, for in the sleepless night of this most foreign of realms is there known to be present a malice, that which preys on the un-attentive traveler. As such do we give it no name, though know of its presence, somewhere in the tundra's, ever wandering, never sleeping, and always with the terror of a never filling hunger for anything which may come across it as trespassing.


Being the strongest and youngest of we 4 was I elected as the first to the watch, station my self in thick, fur lined over-coating, just a few yards away from the camp sight. In hand did I bear the weapon of our people, carried with us all from way back in the south, holding it firmly in my thick gloved fingers. As gloved as they were, the cold is intense, and gives leave to but nothing in its realm. Description any deeper is obtuse, you must know, and thus excuse my lack of any further statement to matter. Rather, know that in that realm the wind blows seemingly from everywhere, yet makes no ideal sound or thunder, but bellows ominously in silence. And know that that floor of ice and snow does change in rightful shape, and often mounts in sky high hills, or pits of dark-filled abysses with in a single solitary night.

Also, know that rarely do the hours of the far, far north match that of any other region on this earth, often times giving to either long spans, months even, of non-submissive daylight-which ever holds in variation of empty, pale blue sky, and deep grey, murky gloom-or the endless chasms of limitless night, ever cascaded by the scowls of storm and the cold of empty spaces. Cured by breath of colder wills, that time will part to clarity, and reveal to any watcher the wide array of endless heavens; the cold, staring stars and the black voids between.

It shocks me to think it as real, not but a nightmare, plaguing in surreal oddity, before forgotten by the waking life.

So was it to the season of change, that time that I set there, guarding camp, watching the sun to the far south west slowly ebb deep downward, casting and array of orange purplesque twilight over every bump, frozen dune and emerged stone. One would think the land ablaze and molten if not for the cold or the bottom of a wide, empty ocean, if not the dryness of the air. Then the sun would drop, down beneath the horizon, to emerge again moments later, like a bobbing ball in deep, thin water, playing up and down as if the earths own pleasurable play thing, before the one a final plunge, then casting all to ominous dark, and brining the freeze of the night to all my thoughts.

I set there alone, my team sleeping soundly, left in quiet contemplation of the lands back home. Attentive as I could be, my hands stayed nimble and ready, regardless of how numb they were beginning to feel. Dozed must I have gone, for it didn’t not catch me at first until I fully wakened, watching as my very body went numb, and my visiob lured in confusion. For in that empty tundra, where never does anything survive it as if the ringing of many small bells, harmonized by larger, reverberated gongs and whistles of winds through out the rocks came to me. Flowing from far, beyond the dark it cooled the air to where my very breath turned solid, and brought a crispness to my skin that burned unlike before, and somehow, though I don't see how, the smell of fresh, restful spices met my nose.

Then, way up in the dark skies above, the array of Almighty heaven could be witnessed! And there! Dancing in the open sky of the northern night spanned a long, wide tale of a whimsically flowing green lamp light. Liquid in its expression, though dancing as a prismatic sheet of ice and fire combined; how it flowed back and forth like shaggy tall tails and summer winded grass groves, and called out to me with scented streams of cold, inviting potencies. And watching it, I realized that the singing bell, that eldritch noise which ever did play to my ear, was not from high but deep below, bubbling from all around me. From even deep with in my body, and the men who slept behind, the song rang out, a single call, to the lights which danced above us all.

*

Staring at the colors which shifted from an originally deep green tint to something of a yellow, then red, yet in such a way that the colors were divided, almost with out notice, by a far dim shine of something undefinable that glowed there. For but a moment would it come, and then vanish, as if an object, like an arm or a sweep of motion, deluting and rippling the dancing that was done, before vanishing and returning off and on. Watching, earning ever more as the song rang sweet from all creation; to that unknown colour that rivaled the stars and crowned the night sky of a merciless world, I was entranced by that thing. Oh, how I loved it and wondered.

Yet, in my watching did I indeed, lose interest in my work, and forgot my sitting in the camp, protecting those who did sleep from harm. Beneath my gaze was the cold, seeping darkness long ebbing, drawing a channel, a way for a broadened path, abiding by the will of something that had witnessed our camp site. And that something chose, deep in that night of wondrous light and prismic dance, to come and feast on us silently, taking unto us unaware, to feed it bottomless hunger. And it did so, its approach most soundless, its image unseen in the darkness, slowly, one by one pulling the sleeping bodies of my comrades out from warm and innocent rests and into the veil of its protective shroud, devouring them hole, unhindered. Lastly was the third pulled out, and shifted over the snow with greatest of terrible patience, but in his dreams must there have been something wrong, for he woke for a moment the terrible reality that assailed him, recognizing his fortune as hopeless and bad and then screamed out my name to come and aid him.

My attention was snapped from the sky, down to see him, helpless and incapably struggling under the weight of the abductors’ grip, crushing him before my eyes, before I could do anything, taking his blood and his breath from his body, and pulling deep away into the shadow. I sprang up, screaming the name of those men, and leapt out towards that place of iced unknowing. Screaming and howling, I lifted my weapon, sweeping the land with great haste, rushing the unseen enemy with abandon and forgoing all caution as I were vengeance.

But my fall was suddenly met hastily and halted in abruptness, for in that air was I caught by an unseen thing that set as a wall, broad and sturdy as any mountain, and as wide as the darkened landscape, toned with all the cold of the artic north breathing outward from with in, as if it were the land itself that took me. In short was I paralyzed, incapable of maneuver. I watched as I was lifted up, up into the air by the unseen enemy, my eyes still straining to see its face. Then, I did see its face, or what I could only discern to be some blasphemous abomination of a face, and all my skin went white and my breath released, and I cried from utter horror.

As if in answer of my terror did the ominous bell playing turn quite low, and deep from out the landscape did its volume fade to near nothing. But the lights, those things, still danced out, to and fro, though now steadily more and more attuned along its transitional brightness to that indefinable coloured thing that occupied it.

Until finally did that shagging thing transform entirely in look, and grew very still, hanging high in the sky and speaking to my glare a sense of cold, unyielding malice. The warm and wondrous benevolence that earlier had played through out its dancing was stripped to clod and calice omnipotencey.

Then a striking shriek and thunderous howl came crashing down from all above, as if all the heavens gave out a fearsome shriek horrible contest of what would follow . All the open night world of that alien, ancient land retreated, and left me there, gasping, before the presence of that awesome, looming night fire, growing more and more through out the sky, consuming all sight, engulfing me, afraid and unable to pull away.

With my mind all taken over by what I watched unfold. Oh, by the gods! I still was captive to the beast that took my hope. And in my absent mind did I feel the works from in resounding abominable form pour into me, attacking my senses quietly; whispered in my ears that it was as a servant of the gates to the North. Where the walls, it said, were thin and variant, and held little in the presence of our world. The ones who ever make it this far, and see the brimming of that flimsy fortress are quickly set upon it and its power, brought to the gate itself, and sent through the untold things that lay there, beyond. It gave me images, thousands of images, and voices, and screams, of unexplainable terrors. As if my mind was fed as a great receiver, I could feel the flow of captures influence over come my paralyzed mind. Worlds of fire, spheres of darkness, wars of great millions of tittering creatures, comprised of both shadow and unearthly flesh, that served, as the Terror did, the Great Gateway.

Then the relentless onslaught of imagery ceased, and the voice of my capture fell silent, and the sky above went black, and the world itself was as void. I floated for ever, it seemed, unable to move or try. My senses had all escaped me, and turned me into an observer of nothing. Bodiless being with sight of all sight, and witnessing the void over all.

Then a sudden, faintness of a bellowing wind broke the silence of my catatonic state, and a great, explosive light shot out, embracing me with in, and sending my word of black into that of pure, ominous white. High expanding whirlwinds of a vast and cosmic assembly appeared, shooting up and outward, breathing and congealing in formations to great to be known, everywhere, collapsing and displacing atop one another, and wholly distorting, mutating into new and incredible masses of endless, rivaling stellar composition.

It was here, at the dancing end and explosive beginning of marvelous heavens that the final and most terrible horror appeared, and the loss of my self, my life and my being entirely came entirely with stern incontestability, for what faded in and weaving between the vast nebulas cosmos in overlapping aethers was the appearance of Titanic presences dancing and dancing like the flowing of smoke and water, endorsing the chaos with motion. More of the came. More of them! Waltzing between the bodies of celestial confusion, dominating the void and with motion displaying as influence on the universe, allowed by darkness to unseen, managing about in ritualesque conformity.

To describe them would be futile, as they look like nothing known to man. They stretch beyond reason of size and scale, and seem unaffected by the explosive potential of the worlds that seem beneath their mighty influence, moving in sway from where they venture. Deep with in my observing, emotionless eye, I could feel a sudden strain of personal despair. A sense of humanity in the willingness to go and flee from some sensed, inevitable danger, from where to go and hide in ignorance through out the universe that belonged most obviously to them.

Turning about as a spindling wheel, a greater form then appeared, and my observational eye grew more and more akin to the fear that bubbled with in itself. It turned ever close to where I watched, again and again in the turning, like some sort of cyclone, yet neither with top or bottom, like the rest, scaling for ever from either direction. The sound of clashing crescendo resounded so loudly that nothing could rightly be heard. But the a familiar voice, after that eternity of watching, crept into my mind once again.

And the Terror spoke to me, and I felt as a man again, before a fierce pull shot me out from that one spot, and tore me down towards the cyclone.


It is-

(fragment ends)

[Hodgson]

Downloaded; reading. . . .