From the journal of Professor Caleb Blackthorne III, continued...
12 October: 1893
I must commit this to the pages of my journal, while it is still vivid in my recollection... not that such a macabre vision could possibly soon be blissfully forgotten. Just before dawn, I awoke from a fantastic and somewhat horrifying dream in which I traversed a great black cyclopean cityscape, its towering stygian walls inscribed with some form of outlandish glyphs which seemed to writhe squamously and alter their shape even as I gazed at them. A sibilant whispering which seemed at once familiar and yet intrusively alien compelled me to walk to the edge of a particularly sinister looking edifice and peer out over its precipitous perimeter. When I did so, I beheld this world of ours, recognizing vaguely the apparent shapes of the five continents, yet the entire vista seemed so distant that the whole appeared in its entirety no larger than a sphere which I could fit snugly into the palm of my hand. When I turned again to behold the looming obelisks, I found I could then easily read the previously untranslatable ciphers in the black stone. They were the words of a great thaumaturgist who had seemingly discovered a repository of aeons-old lore detailing the sidereal web of the cosmos, with arcane diagrams pinpointing certain astral portals and places of empyreal potency, a sort of pangalactic ley-line chart, if you will. Indeed, these Star-Maps Of The Ancient Cosmographersseemed to take a not insignificant toll on the author's sanity, as evidenced by the tone of his inscriptions, which seem to suggest that in discovering this Pandora's Box of dark elucidation, his fate was to be inexorably dogged by some nameless and implacable gloom;
The Thaumaturgist:
The Great Eye of the Universe opens! Through this astral art the secrets of the cosmos are mine to know... for the stars are my dominion!
The Last Cosmographer:
Vector-alpha, heed this warning... Lexicon, the threshold calls...
Vortex open, in Omega... Sentinels!
The Thaumaturgist:
Empowered at the periphery, ascending to the Id's eyrie,
The cosmos feathers her nest with fire.
Ephemeral, the nexus calls, besieging cyclopean walls,
Branded deviant and pariah.
The Last Cosmographer:
Everything you have been taught about the nature of creation is a lie. This is a voyage in search of the truth. It will not be a pleasant journey.
The Thaumaturgist:
I have discovered a terrifying universal axiom which cannot be denied.
Betwixt the hammer and the anvil are forged the stars...
On the wings of the ersatz ones... through the fathomless abyss...
The Thaumaturgist's Epiphany:
Like a blackened and baleful sun shall I gaze down from beyond the cumuli and the firmament upon you. I alone must bear the burden of this fiend-wrested lore.
New stars without number burn in the heavens, but the shadow of oblivion falls ever closer.
Lucidity through thaumaturgy, enlightened thus. Seeking solace, this opalescence, to span the stars... Zircon into pentlandite, the shifting sky. Open, the Eye is open!
And let mankind gaze at the shifting sky and know enlightenment, for the stars are my dominion!
Shortly thereafter, the dreamscape began to fade, and reality beckoned my consciousness away from the incredible vista. In truth, I was indeed glad to awaken...
