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  “The Southern Trader has gone. He left in the night. He flies south to the land of the great river. Beneath the sandstone gaze of a man-lion, in bright robes, he is worshipped by cults that proclaim him their dark god. He leaves behind his vile curse! Where he walks, madness and destruction follow! Even if every knee bent in honour at the town altar, no respite of the gods would protect us!”

  Interrupting her wild gesticulations, Oonana looked squarely at me. A twisting, terrifying fire danced in her eyes. The crone rushed forward, charging like an enraged beast. She kicked me to the ground and flailed at my chest with clawing hands. Amid shrieks and curses, her fingers tore at my skin. With her savagery, Oonana sent every heron and toad into flight from the scene of chaos.

  Mother and Ishara tried to pull the old woman from me, but with uncanny strength, the hag pushed them into the barley. I grabbed the flint sickle beside me and swung in a powerful arc. The freshly sharpened blade sank deeply into her flank. Stunned by the wound, Oonana staggered away.

  Onlookers had collected, drawn by the sounds of the skirmish. Oonana shoved her way through the crowd, casting aside everyone that offered her a hand. She ran to the river and tumbled down the grassy banks into the rich waters.

  The beast had been lying in wait for this meal. When Oonana fell splashing into the dark water, a great, toothy reptile rose up to claim her. The monster snapped its jaws down upon the doomed old woman and dragged her into the wide depths.

  I rubbed the sickle blade on the soil to remove the blood. Everyone returned to their plots of land. The gods had elected to protect Oonana no longer. Whether by beasts, flood, or famine, those doomed to die would meet their fate. They would be spirited into the Lightless World to drink ash and eat clay.

  “Tigranes, are you sure you are not hurt?”

  “Oonana was feeble, even in her fury. I am fine, Ishara.”

  “Perhaps she had the same evil dreams, as well. Maybe her aged mind could not handle the burden and that is why she broke into this fit.”

  “What evil dreams?”

  “Mother confided in me that she and Father had terrible visions last night. Our uncles, aunts and cousins had them, too. But their impressions were all just vague feelings of misery and unease. They had lingering sensations of doom, accompanied by the music of demons. My evil dreams were far more vivid.”

  “What did you see?”

  When Marduk would pour the disjointed memories of his dreams into my ear, they mostly fell uselessly to the ground. My sister, on the other hand, even if prone to flights of fancy, was a hard worker and a level mind. When Ishara spoke of such slumbering hallucinations, I was more apt to lend credence and listened intently to her story.

  “At first I saw only a wide, black emptiness. I could hear the same music as our family in their nightmares – the cruel beating of drums and the inharmonious wailing of flutes. Lights, like bright torches, flickered in the vastness, yet all remained dark. I had a grim impression, as though I were walking through an endless graveyard. Those multitudes of light hanging in the null vastness were as dead as a field of men slaughtered by heartless raiders.

  “A towering temple suddenly emerged, bubbling up from the viscous plume of the audient void. It was made of massive bricks of dried mud. They were so big that I imagine an entire riverbank of clay and mud would need to be dredged just to mold one brick for this monstrous house of the gods. Tier upon tier was heaped to great heights. Four steep pathways cut with steps led up to the pinnacle at its immeasurable peak. From every doorway issued moans of agony and shrieks of maddened laughter.

  “Then I saw Marduk. He marched down from the pinnacle of the temple in triumph. His face was set in hard, fierce determination. There was a cunning in his eyes and a malice that I have never seen anywhere before. Tigranes, please tell me what Marduk has been doing? You watch over him. Where is he?”

  “I do not know. I do not care to know.”

  That night, my fists clenched in sleepless furor because, anew, my brother’s shapeless words haunted the roof of our house. His distorted speech merely kept me in irate wakefulness, but did not initially wake me. What stirred me from sleep was the heavy, pulsing sound of wind, as though the air were disturbed by the beating of large wings.

  When I climbed to the roof, I brought Father’s obsidian knife with me. I concealed the blade, but would not hesitate in resorting to it if needed. I had already freed the world from one mad mind that day.

  Marduk was again staring at that rock, chanting phrases of veiled meaning. He did not hush his voice, or perhaps the night air amplified his words just for my ears. His fevered thoughts were of an even stranger bent tonight. It seemed that Oonana’s wild ramblings, denied entrance into the Lightless World, had been passed along to my brother.

  “The old woman has taken into oblivion the secrets of her lineage. Flowing through her blood was an ancestral memory of the flesh digested in her forebears’ stomachs. Those were not the bones of deer and mammoth left behind in long-forgotten caverns before the Great Thaw. They picked those femurs and fibulae clean of flesh and marrow, but those tiny bones covered in supple flesh, harvested fresh from the young livestock, were the true delight.

  “Now they have all fled to distant Leng. Only that festering old woman remained to pick apart at humanity, although she preferred to feast on their minds and sanity, leaving the meat to rot on the living bones. Nevertheless, the banquet of ghouls shall be rejoined. Already, on a rain-sodden isle of blight far to the north and west, the Great Mother has sounded the call for her children to devour the scratching, squealing bipedal beasts who believe themselves sentient.”

  Marduk had been a revolting vermin in our house since the day Father rescued him from the barren hillside. His vacuous face and abbreviated thoughts nagged me like a swarm of gadflies. He had brought embarrassment to our family and vulgar frustration to my life.

  Never before, though, had I felt him so intrinsically repellent. Deep within his heinous, cryptically shocking words, lurked something alien in his nature that made his very existence abhorrent to my eyes. The godless words that had slithered foully from his lips confirmed that I would be purging twin abominations from the world this day.

  I protected my eyes from even fleeting glances at that shining rock of shifting form and unimaginable mental horror. I lunged at my fiendish brother when he turned his own eyes to meet me. The milky veil was lifted from his eyes and in their depths, I saw forbidden secrets, waiting without patience to emerge. In my haste to extinguish those secrets forever, I tackled Marduk and wrestled him into submission.

  I held his throat against the precipice of the roof, leaving his head suspended above the dusty lane below. Nanna’s light danced on the notched surfaces of the obsidian knife. The glassy, black blade glimmered against Marduk’s neck. His eyes, almost rolling back into his skull, turned up to look at me one final time.

  In that instant, I saw the weakened eyes of my idiot brother, containing his old, harmless, imbecile spirit. Beside his face, having rolled along the roof in the scuffle, lay the menacing, multicoloured shimmer of that horrendously enlightening stone. My sight betrayed me and my eyes became affixed to the leering secrets that danced across its etched surfaces.

  The unbearable truths of Time and Space wriggled their way into my brain to fester like maggots bloating themselves on a ripened corpse. That stone opened doors for me, revealing the expanse of worlds that should not exist. I bore witness to darkened stars that consumed the light of the heavens to feed their captive masters. In caverns vast enough to swallow all the rivers in the land, I observed writhing hordes of contorting bodies clinging to the walls of the Inner Earth. Those beasts waited for the summons into wakefulness that would herald the new age of the hunt. All the while, these tormenting insights were chorused by a cacophony of pipes and drums from the ends of eternity.

  When my fractured mind returned to my family’s roof from those far-flung abysses, I found myself alone in the cold wind. Marduk
and the stone both lay broken on the ground below. Kneeling in stunned shock, I could still feel the sting where my hand had gripped that wicked rock as a weapon against my brother. The insanity of wisdom would not let me spare him.

  Amongst the fragments of bone and stone littering the ground, my uneasy senses beheld movement, but not from my brother. An amorphous creature, resembling the abnormal spawn of a slug and serpent, slid across the dirt towards Marduk’s body. In grotesque shades of black and green, the thing was a faintly luminescent amalgam of bubbles and eyes that stared everywhere, but saw nothing.

  Leaving a viscous trail of slime, and unleashing an odour that wafted up the height of a tall tree to assault my nose, the fluid beast crawled onto Marduk. It flattened itself out and inched towards his face. Morbid curiosity and an undying familial connection compelled me to slide down the exterior ladder to inspect my brother.

  The wound I had dealt him made it impossible, yet my brother was rising to his feet again. He ignored me, at first, and he focused his attention on the rubble of his precious stone. From the remnants, he selected one shard – a stone of many faces and angles that shone with a light other than that of Nanna on high. Marduk tightened his fist around the stone and would not expose it for the duration of this, our last confrontation.

  The blood was still fresh on his brow, but the gash I left on his skull with the ignoble stone had healed with unnatural celerity. His bones, assuredly snapped and smashed in the fall, had all knitted back into cohesion. His eyes were cold and knowing. The madness from the raw magic of the stone was diminished from his aura, but from his bearing, it was clear that a vastly different person was inhabiting Marduk.

  “The Trapezohedron is still imperfect, but there are whole epochs left to correct that.”

  “What are you that has stolen my brother?”

  “Suddenly, you care for the animal you spent a lifetime cursing? He will harass you no more and yet, you are not joyous. The buffoon has served his purpose and his destiny has reached its end. Marduk the ascending god has been born. My eyes see centuries forward and back. I shall grow this stagnant collection of farms into a mighty city and force your race into a civilization. My temple will be built from their mud, wood and bones. From the pinnacle, the prayers of the worthy will reach out into the spheres as a beacon to the Great Old Ones.”

  I searched the ground desperately for Father’s knife. With growing despair, I realized the obsidian tool lay back on the roof. Marduk smiled in defiant victory, sensing my fear.

  “Do not hope to kill me. It cannot be. Your bloodline will not know the glorious burden of my yoke. You will march north and abandon the fertile lands of the flood. In the bitter rock of the highlands, you will lay the foundations of your ill-fated progeny. The weight of ceaseless subjugation will weigh on your people and they will never know triumph in their bitter knowledge.”

  Against the hypnotic might of his command, I could muster no defense. In accordance with his whims, my feet carried me down the lane and out from the town walls. The comforting safety of drudging toil was left behind. In the be-nighted world stretching out in all directions before me, I marched north into the crushing liberty of the unknown.

  For all the disappointing promises that lay sequestered in those distant peaks, the crushing pressure of the secrets relayed to me ensured that the world would never again look as bright. Long after the names of our gods had fallen into the grave of eons, there would forever be a pall cast over the whole of existence. In a doomed universe, where ever-hungry ghouls lurk in the shadows, and blithering idiots are reborn as tyrannical gods, how may hope survive the rise and fall of empires in the sand and stone?

  Andrew Dombalagian lives, writes and dreams in Havertown, Pennsylvania. He works as a writing tutor at his university: Penn State Brandywine. His fiction and poetry have appeared in the collegiate publications, Crimson & Grey and Penn in Hand. “The God Lurking in Stone” is his first professionally published story and he is thankful for the support of his fiancée, Ellen.

  The author speaks: Ancient history has always been a fascination of mine, so I thought it would be fun to surpass the historical and take my story into prehistoric realms. Set in Neolithic Mesopotamia, “The God Lurking in Stone” was born out of a curious idea to explore how Lovecraftian elements, such as Nyarlathotep, may have shaped the gods and mythologies of ancient civilizations. I also wanted to offer a possible origin for the Shining Trapezohedron featured in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”.

  THE SEEDER FROM THE STARS

  Julio Toro San Martin

  Always, the High Priestess communed with her Lady, Inanna.

  We lived in the great temple ziggurat and out of all her servants and retainers, I alone can boast that I was the closest to her in her detached affections. My Mistress was the En-Priestess of the Moon God, Nanna, but his daughter, Inanna, was the deity most dear to her heart.

  I served her in the high place closest to the stars, charting the heavens and their revolutions. I saw from above the great city – clearly, the vast buildings, houses, orchards and agricultural lands. My name is Smenkhkare.

  Always, she’d say strange things to frighten me, and that I didn’t understand. I knew she was possessed of the divine and that I, a mere commoner, could never know of such things. But I was proud to be the friend of such a mighty princess and serve her, body and soul, in the Temple of Ur.

  Because my Mistress was a member of the Royal House of Akkad and En-Priestess of the Moon, her decrees were unquestioned. She handed out many secret prohibitions, such as: never peer behind the curtains of the Holiest Room.

  The years rolled unnoticed in the Temple of Nanna, in the now-far city of Ur, and great were those early times. Great was the drink of youth we enjoyed. Great, especially, were the hymns of my Mistress, Enheduanna. If I praise her too much, it’s because I can do no else and if I speak of myself but little, it’s because I am not important.

  Ishme arrived from the ruined city-state of Kazalla, from west of the Euphrates River, in the seventh year of my Mistress’ En-Ship. Without father or mother and orphaned to the world. He’d been found amid toppled blocks of burnt mud, clothed in filthy rags, and eating dirt and crawling bugs. I was assigned to tutor him in the duties of the temple, but early on, he showed promise of greater things. Secret rumours spread that one day, Ishme would outgrow the temple and leave to be a great administrator. Because I was the boy’s principal teacher, he was moved to call me ‘Father’. I was pleased with this.

  My Mistress took an early interest in the boy, also. She taught him much of her secret wisdom, but of the hidden thing of darkness that was whispered to live behind the curtains in the Room of Nanna, she remained quiet.

  When sometimes, because of the rashness of his youth, he’d say something untoward towards the noblewoman, I’d scold him severely. “Do you think of him as our son, perhaps, Smenkhkare?” she’d insinuate and laugh.

  Oh, never let it be imputed to me that I, Smenkhkare, ever harboured any sacrilegious thought towards the Holy One of Nanna!

  One day, as the three of us walked the lonely corridors of the dark temple together, a crazed man approached and attacked my Mistress with a sword. Ishme jumped in front of her. Quickly, the rest of the temple household, having heard our commotion, arrived and subdued the man.

  All night, my Mistress knelt by the bedside of Ishme, praying her beautiful poems under the stars. Her poems had power to soothe the Gods, had power to change their wills, or could summon screeching Ereshkigal from the nether hells. But this day, the High Gods remained silent.

  I knelt beside her. I looked at her eyes and saw, for the first time – the second would be many years later – that they were watery. I reached out and touched her shoulder, covered by her woolen robe. I touched her just this once and she didn’t stop me.

  “Why did the boy do such a thing? I could have protected myself,” I heard her say. We both wept together.

  Then she arose and left the
room.

  Hours later, after the temple physicians told me the boy’s health was worsening, I went to look for my Mistress and found her behind the curtains. Strange now were her songs, strange yet beautiful, sung in a language I didn’t understand and that disturbed me deeply. I let her finish.

  When she emerged, I looked at one of her hands and saw she carried something. I could not make it out.

  Entering the boy’s room, she ordered everyone out, except for myself. Then she placed the thing in Ishme’s wound.

  I heard the boy cough.

  I looked and saw the boy’s wound was healed. The child looked at us, perplexed. Then he turned to Enheduanna, opened his arms, and hugged her tightly.

  Shortly after my Mistress’ assassination attempt, great anticipation engulfed the temple. Sargon, her father, was coming to Ur. From atop the stony girths of the temple, Ishme and I watched, engrossed, as the Great King with his hundreds of military men, carrying weapons of flaring bronze and sturdy bows, marched in ordered phalanx into the celebratory city. Later in the day, a small band of mercenary men arrived and encamped on the outskirts of Ur. We knew they were hostile towards my Mistress and her father.

  He conferred with his daughter and counselors in the temple, instead of in the customary palace of the ancient kings of Ur.

  “The whole of the city-states of Sumer,” I recall the Great King saying, “are not pleased being ruled by just one city. They want their autonomy back. It isn’t safe here, anymore.”

  “I have sung to the Gods,” my Mistress said, while braiding a lock of hair dispassionately, “and will sing again. They are always pleased with my offerings.”

  “It isn’t only the Gods that keep you safe, daughter, but also the sharp edge of my battle-axe. When I go to the distant north, what great army will stop the rest of the Sumerians, as now Uruk and Lagash do, from rising against you? Your death and dethronement from the High Place of Nanna would be a great blow to my ambitions. Come with me and be safe.”