Free THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations by Kent David Kelly Page B

the beloved and the lost.
    We dreamed as one,
    Echoing thrum of jackal heart.
    In life, she was the only.
    In death, she is everything.
     

 
     
    SCROLL XV
    The Watcher at the Oasis
     
    Having sung my heart to the body of my beloved, and having slept, I woke with the next sunset to the flurry of wings.  An oasis is not only a sanctuary crafted of sweet waters and cool breezes; it is a place of the birds of passage.  These ever-beautiful creations fill the palms before they endure the fire of the day, coveting the moisture and the shade.  At sunset, they soar across the desert in its chill, lofting on the thermal winds seeking their next horizon.
    Yet in waking me that twilight, the cacophony of the birds was not only one of wings, but of cries of alarm.
    I drew my jambiya and looked all about, fearing bandits or badawi grave robbers.  Perhaps, I feared, even the foul Najeed had followed me to render himself as my assassin.  But no.
    There was a silhouette of black against the blood-red of the setting sun, its heels set to its haunches, and as it crouched it sniffed the scent of me from the air.  Its snout was of the wulfen , a predatory face of canine cast.  It lifted its too-long fingers to the breezes.  The thing was so gaunt, its waist was pinched as narrow as that of a wasp, and then I knew:
    My mother, the Shepherdess, had in all her whispers—the desert elegies sung for me as her child—spoken true.  The myths of the Ghuls, the deathless and corpse-eating prowlers of the desert, were no myths at all.
    The Watcher at the Oasis, this thing, was a Ghul.  Once more, it scented the moistened air.
    The thing did sense me as I lowered my blade in comprehension.  Seeing this, it did not flee, it did not approach.  I believed that it would kill me, and despite my blade I bore no illusions that I could survive such a confrontation.  For this was a Deathless One.  The thing had mastered the desert and hunger and had snapped the chains of death itself.  How could I, not even yet a man, hope to vanquish it?
    And so I bowed my head over the grave, and whispered a prayer to be with my Adaya.  It was a blessing, it seemed, to die where her body had been buried by my own hand.
    But when I dared to raise my head again, not even the echoes of birdsong were to be heard.  Only the wind.  The Watcher had left me to my love.  The Ghul had gone.
     

 
     
    SCROLL XVI
    The Temptation of Aharon
     
    After the fulcrum moment of the Watcher at the Oasis, I was reborn.  Not only was I alive, but for the first I had a glimpse of understanding into the truer nature of the worlds.  What some called superstitions:  the Ghuls, who stride the waste and lord over themselves undying?  To my mind, these were proven to be real.
    It was not so difficult for me to believe in them.  The Empire of the Blackened Mind, the Otherness, the nightmare of Cthulhu, these were to me facades which despite their own realities had never touched my life of the waking world.  But all of them were real, were they not?  All of them had been experienced not only by myself, but by Akram and Adaya as well.
    The Ghul at the oasis had certainly been real and of this earth, and I had beheld its silhouette before the setting of the sun.
    I was yet enthralled by the ways of youth, the ways of simplicity.  I had seen, and so what I had seen was true.
    ~
    Of course, the world of grief and exile held its own complexities.
    I had sworn that I would never return to Sana’a, the death-place of Adaya and so by my heart accursed.  Yet still I needed food and water to survive.  My shame, in deciding to live on, was to leave Adaya’s grave.  But as I recalled her farewell words to me, in her death and in my dreaming, I found that it was not love alone which dwelled inside me and gave me the breath of life.  Greater than this, there was a curious mask upon the face of Hope.
    This mask, I learned, was Hatred.
    I desired nothing more than for Adaya’s