Friday, October 10, 2014

Gather Round, Children

Gather Round, Children
by
Bobby Derie

...and listen well to the scripture, for it has been written for you and for many, to be kept and told and read unto others, so that all may know the one truth. Within the secret history espoused and hinted at by those who think they see the shape of history, there are two narratives. The first is that of the inhuman, alien life and intelligences - the things that came down from the stars, or crawled up from earthheart, or were always and became incarnate for a time and will be again, or those who came forth from the times beyond our knowing...and as strange and powerful as they may be to us, in this place, in our time, when our seven billion strong infection spreads over the earth these past ten thousand years, we have raised our heads and seen the shape of their passing and knew we were not alone. That they who had come before or would come or who had been and will be again had also been to this place, this insignificant rock in the teeming cosmos, and raised up their cities and their monuments, had their kingdoms and their nations, to rule over new continents and young lands, to shape and populate and guide the world and its thing - how they had their day, before humanity, and how some of them still dwell in darkness and hidden places, and will rise again after the brief interval of man.

So it is written, and so it is said.

Humanity is the second narrative - the hidden reign of human civilization, in some form or fashion, going back far beyond the dim recesses of memory, almost all traces of them obliterated by time. Before Egypt and Sumer and Çatalhöyük were ages of man fallen into obscure and occult legend: Mnar and Doomed Sarnath, Hyperborea and Mu and Muria, the Worms of the Earth and the shadowy kingdoms of Atlantis and Valusia - and others, so many others, fallen and forgotten, their knowledge and histories lost to all save the Great Race, and in the dreams of those sleeping giants they worshipped and glorified. Many people there were, lost tribes who perished upon the earth to disease or disaster or lessons yet unlearned, and nothing remains of their people, nor of their simple wisdom, for words cannot echo forever unless carved in stone or in living hearts and voices. So too there were our cousins, those near-human peoples whom we once warred and married and competed against, and some small part of their blood we carry with us, but when the last Neanderthal and the last Devonian died, I think someone sat at their side and was troubled by the vast emptiness left in their wake, for we of our species knew we were alone. Yet even if their legacies are mainly gone, in the strange dusty corners of the planet there are still...relics. Artifacts of ancient humanity, or proto-humanity, which may remind us of how close at hand our mysteries are, how little we who would plunder the lore of Cthulhu and Tsathoggua can recall of our own dark sciences...and what we may yet regain.

So it is written, and so it is said.

Now we live in wait of the third narrative, the blank sheet we must write for ourselves. For whatever is written of us is known only to the Great Race, and mayhap in strange aeons there are barriers even to their own knowledge, and limitations to their strange survivals. For while we know that ours is to be an ending, we do not yet know the nature of that end, or to what purpose we can turn it. It is to us, my children, to decide what we shall become - shall we render ourselves unbodied as the Great Race, and while away the centuries as slow time travelers, minds eternal searching the universe? Or shall we arrest the great foe, and conquer the limitations of our forms, to become ageless within ourselves, fully encapsulated in the flesh and free from concerns of years and disease, so that we gradually strip ourselves of all the dross and taboos of our cultures? Perhaps we shall remain more as we are, but the definition of ourselves will change; with struggle and determination we may find new modes of existence that would be alien to those who had known us before, colony organisms, line marriages, rough beasts that suckle and hunt again, castratos that hasten the end of ourselves and our madness. We may reach out to the stars, and the depths of the ocean. Our seed may build mountains, and the mountains may breed cities, and the cities may choke the oceans with their filth and blacken the skies; we may run wild through the new forests that grow on the forgotten cities again, and our far children so strange that we are as forgotten as the folk that came before. All this we know, and it is our duty now to write...

For so it is to be written, and so it is to be said.

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