watch now, and the lost souls run wild,...In a time long forgotten... the day we'll find a way, we're lost beneath the stars,...utside the world in a fallen land, turn a...We stand alone in a silent dream, lost within eternity,

ore! In the grip of a waking dream, I wal...hs was denied me by a partial collapse of the age old edifice's stone ceiling. Excavation is evidently impossible, lest more of the mighty tomb come crashing down about us. At any rate, Blackthorne has studied the incredible inscriptions within that hidden alcove exhaustively, and in truth my own interests lie elsewhere in this desolate sand-flayed landscape. The traditionalists believe that, in keeping with Egyptian tenets, only mundane things such as new air shafts and ever more ornate sarcophagi are yet to be discovered deep within the tunnel networks of these cyclopean monuments. Feh! If only they knew the true extent of this great cosmic puzzle! They are as fools who view a tapestry in a darkened room by th...ce offered solemnly beneath the stygian skies of this sweltering place, I wonder? What sublime power awaits the aspirant, the querent who dares seek answers in those shadowed places where men of lesser fortitude fear to gaze? Blackthorne often berates me for what he calls my preoccupation with the arcane, the occult, the sinistrous lore of the chthonic... he insists no good will come of such delving into nighted realms. Ha! The path to elucidation is seldom devoid of thorns, the road to knowledge rarely free of perils! I seek enlightenment, and by the erudite tongue of Herodotus, I may have found it! Ancient tradition of this land has long spoken of strange flashes of light emanating from the depths of pyramid passages and temple catacombs. Over a thousand years ago the Arabs wrote of the transient walls and hidden chambers of these monuments; of secret doors moved by an unseen force and of implacable sentries who guarded the secrets of the temples with dour tenacity. What I found this evening gives credence to all that and more. Is the lore which I discovered carved into the ancient stone of Karnak's temple the next fragment of the cryptic conundrum which I have dedicated my life to solving? The Coptic papyrus states that, upon the walls of the pyramids and the temples were inscribed the mysteries of science, astronomy, geometry and physics; inscriptions of unknown peoples and lost civilizations whose... to withstand first a great flood, and then an all-consuming fire which was prophesied would come from the sky. Masoudi, in the tenth century, described automata; titanic guardians of stone and metal which were placed to guard the treasures and the entombed lore, and which were tasked to destroy all those deemed unworthy, all those who dared enter the chambers unbidden. I see them! The hoary sentinels of Karnak unfettered! Rising from their sandy tombs to smite the intruder, the raider and the interloper with righteous fury! And what is this... was there once a glimmer of life within the sightless stone eyes of the Theban guardian? Does the silent watcher at Giza eve...The Silent Watcher stalks, beh...secrets... answers. A rogue celestial body passes inside the orbit of the moon, becoming a captive of the earth's gravitational field. The world tilts upon its axis, its revolution slows, the planet shifts farther from its parent star... one of many such cataclysms. Asteroid strikes, floods, firestorms, the sky swathed in a veil of darkness th...nt Atlantis... time-lost Lemuria... Hyperborea, Ultima Thule, utopian Atland and its enduring legacy. Fragments, memories... descendants... the Incas, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Britons, the Frisians, the ancient Sumerians. Yes, it is clear to me, like a diamond worked to perfection in the skilled hands of a master craftsman. T...eiform tablets bear a grim, darkly porten...In a waking dream, I hea...AN / ROBERTS, BYRON A.

Light the path beneath the blackened, burn...Winter's dawning on a lost, fallen god. ...Pray now, united in a lifetime, hold on. ...Silent forces from a past life return. ... for the silence in a world so alone ...A lifetime of misery....A lifetime of lies.

Thomas S.Eiselberg, a very rich man, who ...Many miles beneath the ground. as the ...Here today the red sky tells his tale,...Moon, my long-lost friend is smiling f...And each will find a home,...or ever, beside the silent mirror...I want to take a drink of water...I want a drink...I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink.

Thomas S.Eiselberg, a very rich man, who ...Many miles beneath the ground. as the ...Here today the red sky tells his tale,...Moon, my long-lost friend is smiling f...And each will find a home,...or ever, beside the silent mirror...I want to take a drink of water...I want a drink...I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink.

Thomas S.Eiselberg, a very rich man, who ...Many miles beneath the ground. as the ...Here today the red sky tells his tale,...Moon, my long-lost friend is smiling f...And each will find a home,...or ever, beside the silent mirror...I want to take a drink of water...I want a drink...I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink....I want a drink.

And silent creatures roamed th...And man was but a molecule that God h...And cut beneath the rolling dales a gateway to the sea ...And from the mud a drop of blood was l...rop of blood became a man, the tree of li... in his loneliness, a rib pulled from his...Formed a sweet companion of ... see and ye will be a god. ... rule the Earth and sky. ...n. See what we have lost.

e the fortress like a coruscating sea, painting the stygian heavens the colour of flame. And the high summer's night passed swiftly. At length, the dawn approached tentatively, and with the first signs of the newborn sun etching its promise upon the skies, the martial preparations commenced in earnest. A brief and perfunctory exchange between the Imperial Herald and the fortification's Watch Commander held no surprises, and the Emperor's banner was duly driven into the seared earth before Gul-Kothoth with a chilling finality. Vast siege engines and powerful ballistae were hauled inexorably into position, alongside a battery of katapelte and petrobolos. The one hundred thousand strong Imperial Frontier Army, having planted their regimental blazons into the arid soil, waited with a disciplined patience born of never having met defeat in pitched battle or siege, the dreaded Imperial War-Leopards straining noisily against their iron-link leashes to the rear of the cohorts of conscripts and auxillieries. The pitiless Iron Phalanx and their Lord Militant Commander had assumed position at the head of the army's Alpha Wing, polished swords, spears and poll-axes reflecting the glow from the myriad torches and braziers which still burned about the Imperial Host. And behind them were drawn up the legendary Legion of the Ebon Tiger, Pride of the Emperor, the infantry and cavalry famed throughout the Great Northern Continent, personal regiment of the feared general Baalthus Vane. True to their martial reputation, the six thousand strong Legion were inscrutible in their jet black armour, their sable banner billowing in the chill breeze which skittered over the plain. And finally, astride his azure-shaffroned warhorse and surrounded by his elite guard, the silvern-armoured Emperor Koord himself studied the precipitious gates with a disdainful scrutiny. At the Emperor's right hand was the renowned Swordmaster of Kyrman'ku, an eastern bladesman of preternatural skill and the most revered and expensive mercenary in the Imperium. At his left, the infamous Ogre-Mage of the Black Lake brooded silently, swathed in a stygian cloak and f...ne of the many foes a general must face u...lf! In the hands of a skilled thaumaturgist, it is said that the Crown may be used as a weapon of unparalle... the Trinity is but a myth! No antiquated trinket weilded by a religious fanatic w...t enough to prepare a contingency should ...And so it was that a terrible and inestimable carnage was unleashed upon the field of battle. Colossal stones, firebrands and howling iron-tipped missiles rained pitilessly down upon the hero-hewn walls of Gul-Kothoth. Vast and serpentine cracks appeared in the ancient cyclopean edifice, and hundreds of warriors, both attackers and defenders, perished in the fray, either crushed beneath the ceaselessly ass...ers while I prepare a reception worthy of...d at the command of a decurion, a volley of armour-piercing shafts screamed skywards to rain down mercilessly upon the foe. And even as this transpired, the Emperor's Prime Sorcerer, emissary of the Imperial Court and master of those arts which speak to man in narcotic dreams from the darkest and most silent places, summoned forth that black potency which lay entwined in stygian tendrils within his mind... an ireful power born of they who writhed upon the shores of Pangaea before man's progenitors ever erected their lofty spires to the restless skies. And yet Vyrgothia's Master Wizard, unrivalled Arch-Mage and adept of that lost Eastern order who journey beyond the boundaries of time and space upon those nebulous wings born of the sacred Azure Lotus, rose to meet this power which lapped at the periphery of his mind like a midnight tide, and ...h dusk painting the sky a deep crimson exceed...Like the prow of a blood-hungry vessel of war rending the waves of a midnight sea, a luminescent blade of shrieking cerulean light lanced from the legendary black circlet locked tight within the gnarled hand of the Master Wizard, and clove mercilessly into the glorious ranks of the Imperium. And all who were touched by this ruinous arc of coruscating radiance knew no more... Men and beasts reduced to blackened husks, charred shells of smouldering ash, lifeless effigies which toppled to the seared earth to be dissipated by the whispering breath of the wind. Again and again the ravaging radiance smote the ranks of the Empire, leaving a noisome charnel-pit of nightmare in its crackling wake. The forces of the Imperium were plunged into a howling vortex of disarray, and, faced with the unthinkable prospect of defeat, the unprecedented first routing of the Emperor's glorious army began to become a grim reality. Yet f...e'll damn well take a few of these bastar...r fearsome words in a tongue which was ancient ere the gleaming stars shifted upon the fathomless countenance of the distant heavens, words which in truth were not words, but rather a resonant key which would aspire to unlock a dire power which had reposed shackled since the fall of the legendary Shadow King himself, whose ebon circlet's power they even now sought to thwart. The incantation they gave voice to in the midst of that sanguineous turmoil which engulfed them was not so much heard by those within earshot as perceived, sensed as a vague disturbance in the fabric of reality, as fuliginous ripples on the surface of a hitherto still and placid pool, growing ever larger and more far reaching; an unnerving and unnamable sense of change which insinuated itself into the mind of the listener and suggested with a cold and disturbing quasi-certainty that something of preternaturally ineffable magnitude was transpiring, as surely as a festering and gangrenous corpse would split to spill its noisome gore. And as that maddeningly implacable incantation reached its resounding climax, a momentary silence e...AN / ROBERTS, BYRON A.