The Door to Lost Pages

The Door to Lost Pages - By Claude Lalumiere

Prologue

Fuel for the Dark Dreams of Yamesh-Lot


It is said, in one version of the tale, that in those days humanity had taken to burying its dead in the ground. No longer did the people surrender the corpses of their loved ones to the Green Blue and Brown God’s acolytes, who would then offer the bodies to their God.

And so did Yamesh-Lot begin harvesting the dead.

From deep in the pit at the heart of the world, Yamesh-Lot’s tendrils burrowed into the earth—far beneath the Godmoat that shielded the world from his darkness—and then back up again, near the surface, careful to avoid the Godpools and the network of underground rivers that connected them. He sought out corpses, found them, wrapped his tendrils around them, and pulled them to him.

Yamesh-Lot poured a portion of his dark essence into each. The corpses grew new eyes: ebony orbs that marked the lifeless, reanimated husks as his.

The enslaved corpses marched toward the subterranean Moon, which rested on its earthen cupule, shielded in the depths of the dark abyss from the ravages of sunlight. They climbed onto the Moon, and there they laboured for their master. Their fragile bodies could not withstand for very long the grind inflicted upon them. Fresh workers were constantly needed.

The workers extracted from the Moon’s bowels an ore that Yamesh-Lot forged into weapons: ebony swords that cut through any light and withstood contact with the Green Blue and Brown God’s holy waters. He had long envied the swords with which the Shifpan-Shap—those warriors of the Green Blue and Brown God—attacked his nightmare hordes; the dark god’s soldiers were too insubstantial to carry such heavy instruments and were thus unable to fight back effectively.

Once the Moon had been stripped bare, Yamesh-Lot raised an undead army that, moonswords in hand, rampaged through the mortal lands of the Green Blue and Brown God while, in the sky, the Shifpan-Shap were occupied by their nightly struggle against the dark god’s legions of nightmares. There was a scourge upon the lands as people were set upon by the corpses of their former neighbours, families, and lovers. The world was blanketed by human screams; but even that could not stir the Green Blue and Brown God to intervene directly.

When the moonswords pierced skin and touched human blood, Yamesh-Lot’s nightmares finally found a path to the world of dreams. Thus did Yamesh-Lot’s tendrils of fear and dread slither into the minds of humanity; finally, the dark god fed on the sweet essence of living mortals; it was a delicacy whose smell had long teased him with its succulent aroma.

But there are other versions, other stories, other outcomes, other delusions, other myths. . . .