Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (16 page)

reat Cthulhu is ever a warrior god, and of all the Old Ones he is the most terrible, for it is his delight to slay and lay waste to everything that lies beneath his feet, and the very lust to conquer what was once free drives him onward across the heavens and through the spheres; it was he together with his star spawn that defeated the Elder Things, who had long possessed the sovereignty of this world before he descended on his gray and leathern wings through the upper gate opened by Yog-Sothoth. As hungry wolves on an unguarded flock they fell and crushed the great stones of the barrier walls of the elder cities into sand. Even the shoggoths were driven as chaff in the wind before their fury; who can measure the strength of a shoggoth, yet it is whispered by ancient things that dwell in the depths that its strength was without avail against the might of this god. Into the sea the Elder Ones fled, little dreaming that through the changes of fortune and the passage of ages they would once again walk the frozen stones of their greatest city far to the south, and Cthulhu would lie trapped beneath the waves in the sea.

Long aeons the Old Ones reigned in our world after the vanquishing of the Elder Race, their palaces and cities secure under the protection of Cthulhu and his armies. No foe could defeat him, save only time itself, for the heavens revolve unceasing in their courses and care nothing for the will of men or gods. The stars became poisonous to the Old Ones in our world, and so they withdrew in bitter rage to bide their purpose until the sky was once more wholesome; yet Cthulhu would not depart from the lands he had conquered. He devised a work of potent magic that would keep him safe within the house he had made for himself on the mountain that overshadowed his island city of R’lyeh. Within a tomb protected by great seals he lay as in death, yet he dreamed and in his dreams continued to rule the world, for his thoughts mastered the wills of all lesser creatures.

How could he have foreseen the cataclysm of the lower earth that drew R’lyeh beneath the waves? The waters of the deeps were the one barrier his great mind could not pierce, and it was for this reason that the Elder Ones had sought refuge beneath the waves so many ages before, to escape from his tyranny. The barrier that protected the Elder Ones while Cthulhu raged above has guarded humanity from his fury throughout the history of our race, for he has never ceased to hurl his commands forth from his mighty mind all the span of his durance beneath the surface.

The stars do not always remain poisonous, but for brief periods in their endless turnings they assume the angles of the same rays they shed down in the primordial dawn of the world. Then does R’lyeh rise upward so that the house of Cthulhu emerges into the air. The mind of the god waxes strong, and he uses its power to send forth to men who are susceptible to his influence the command that they release the seals that bind his tomb, for it is his single weakness that he cannot release himself from sleep but must rely upon hands of flesh to shatter the seals. As though in bitter jest, the stars never remain right for more than a handful of days, and always in the past, before the men enslaved by the god can reach distant R’lyeh, their fatal conflux of lights permits R’lyeh to sink once more, severing the bond between the will of Cthulhu and the flesh of those he has enthralled, leaving them to wail in confusion and despair upon the bosom of the vacant sea.

On the walls of lost cities and in the carvings of madmen who have glimpsed him in their dreams is the form of the god delineated. His height is as great as a mountain and he walks on taloned feet that resemble those of a hawk, so that the very stones of the earth are shattered by each step; yet from his back extend vast wings that have no feathers but are made of skin as are the wings of a bat, and with his wings he flies between the stars. His body has the shape of a man in that he has two arms and two legs, but his head cannot be described without horror, for it is akin to the formless mass of a deep dweller, having many ropes or soft branches that hang and writhe in place of a face, and his crown throbs and moves with watery softness for he has no skull. His eyes are small, and three in number on each side of his head. The color of his skin is green mingled with gray on his limbs and trunk, but paler gray on his wings, and these he is accustomed to keep folded so that they hang down to the ground behind his heels and tower above his pulsating crown.

Such is the unnatural body of this god, which has no kinship with the dust of our world; indeed, it is not flesh as we know flesh, but as crystal or glass, and soft so that during his dreaming death it often breaks apart, but when it breaks it at once reforms itself, held in its pattern by the will of the great one. This truth the Elder Race, who are indeed of solid albeit strange flesh, learned to their dismay, as their murals in the City of Heights on their own world attest, for no sooner did they shatter the body of Cthulhu with their arts of war then it reconstituted itself and in moments was whole. He is as their own shoggoths, about which men whisper but which no man has seen, able to take the shape of his desire and to hold it.

His spawn are like himself, but smaller in their dimensions; what they lack of their master in size, they compensate with their numbers, for they fly into battle as the locust swarm descends upon the ripening field of grain, so thick that they obscure the sun with their wings. At times past the
meegoh
have followed his commands and battled in his wars, for they dread the influence of Cthulhu upon the whim of their god of passage, Yog-Sothoth, and risk any danger rather than court his displeasure. All this was in the ancient times, and in the age of man Cthulhu lies dreaming in R’lyeh, his spawn has vanished, and the
meegoh
are returned to Yuggoth, all but a few that watch and wait.

The tale is whispered that at some future time the stars will move in their courses and align as they have in the past, but at last their pattern will endure and the world will become wholesome for the Old Ones. Cthulhu will rise and conquer, as is his right, for what force of gods or men can stand against his fury? Until that day, may it

soon be witnessed, those wise in necromancy who adore him wear the seal of the god burned upon their skin and chant a litany in his remembrance in the tongue of the Old Ones, that dreaming Cthulhu teaches his prophets in their sleep:

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä!

The prayer has this meaning in our tongue:
At his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming; it is
so! In the far places of the world, from the plateau of Leng to the western isle of Albion to the banks of the Nile and the frozen wastes of Hyperboria, his chosen chant these words, and they are the sign by which they know each other, and the bond that unites them even when they are of different races. The poet may sing a different song, for they chant what has been and what remains, but the poet intimates in verse what shall come to pass:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons death may die.

Of all the lords of the Old Ones, Cthulhu stands alone and apart, for his is not of the same blood with the others, though his blood mingles with theirs. They use him as a sword and think to distance themselves from his presence when the battle has been won, but he keeps his own counsel well guarded, and none can say what he intends for his kin. When all had fled the poison from the stars, he remained in his house at R’lyeh and dreamed his deep purposes in solitude. The ocean alone contains him, for the stars cannot shackle his mind.

It was because Cthulhu is the greatest of warriors that the magi who are descended from the royal line of Babylon link him with the sphere of Mars, god of war, and none are wiser in the lore of the heavens than the priests of the Tigris. As Mars is the conqueror of all who oppose his will, so too is the dreaming god; as fire, the element loving to Mars, hates the water, so does Cthulhu hate the weight of the ocean above his head that frustrates his purpose. The magi give to him the number square of Mars, having five rows and five columns, each with a sum of sixty-five, and the sum of this square as a whole is 325. They teach that the seal of his name traced upon the square and incised into a plate of iron has power to give victory in battle and protects the warrior from injury by sword or arrow, and that its sight is pleasant to the things that dwell in darkness and are loyal to Cthulhu, who spare the lives of those who bear it. But this last is a lie.

here is a cause why the flute plays so prominent a role in the cults that worship the Old Ones in the dark places and hidden caves, away from the ears of common men. At the seething and fiery center of all, Azathoth sits upon his ebon throne within his halls of darkness that no man has seen and survived the vision. He is both blind and bereft of mind, but unceasingly he pipes upon his reed flute, and the pearling notes that rise and fall in measured patterns are the foundation of all the worlds. These notes are more than music, they are numbers. Azathoth ever calculates in sound the structure of space and time. Were his flute to suddenly fall silent, all the spheres would shatter into one another and the myriads of worlds would be unmade and as they were before the creation.