ections from within the confines of Grimm's...n to Tiahuanaco and the Peruvian jungle I shall duly tell him of the catalyst which compelled me to those cursed black vaults in ancient Ur, should Hildebrandt allow me another visit. Yes... Giza, Karnak, Thebes... I see them now once more! In the grip of a waking dream, I walk those restless sands again. Egypt... here my journey began, and here I took the first steps towards... take place before "The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur") ...From the expeditionary journ...The heat here is damnably oppressive, and all day the omnipresent sand has been whipped up by an impudent wind, making progress all the more difficult. At dawn, I pinpointed the location of the Great Pyramid's secret chamber which my old friend Professor Caleb Blackthorne and his benefactor Lord Blakiston had discovered several months previously, but ingress to its concealed depths 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 the light of only one candle, seeing only small sections illuminated one by one, and refusing to recognize or connect the darkened and unseen areas to the entirety. ...Working from the geometric calculations which I prepared before our arrival here, I have studied the alignment of Cheops, Chefren and Mykerinos. It is as I suspected. Tomorrow, I leave the the imperious and hoary mausoleum of Khufu and seek answers within the Great Temple of Kar...What oblations to the grim chthonic deities of the ancient world were once 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 lore was carved into the stone to preserve it from the ravages of the great deluge. The surviving knowledge...dent Surid, heeding the warnings of his priests, erected certain repositories of long forgotten knowledge 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 even now descend from its granite dias to once more stalk the shifting sands on c...The alignment of Cheops...By the erudite tongue of Herodotus, I have found the answers, ...Arcane secrets inscribed in the ancient Coptic papy...The Pyramid's legacy co...The Theban guardian ris...The Silent Watcher stalks, behold the Sentinels of Karnak...e. I understand now the true nature of that knowledge which was revealed to me deep within the shadowed confines of Karnak's timeless temple. Telluric energy, harnessed by the ancients... triggered by lunar rays and solar radiation, channeled to impart static charges to rock strata and lines of natural power running through the earth. Neuro-electric energy generated, developed, creating light, separating inertia from gravity! And what more? The fourth state of matter, forged countless millennia ago in the hearts of burning stars... fettered, channeled, for creation and destruction! The secret of the great monuments of the ancients! Yes, 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 through which the sun's light cannot pass, great ice-ages enshrouding the globe. And what is this? The forces of evil, of chaos... servitors of the sinister gods of the universe... manifesting upon the tellurian sphere? What dire agents of malignity were unleashed upon mankind? Bringers of carnage and destruction, pestilence and decay! The Z'xulth! ...crets once known by the forgotten peoples... ancient 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. The sigils and glyphs I beheld carved into the ancient stone of Karnak (which I somehow understood implicitly), the visions I experienced within the temple, it is all quite clearly compelling me to the next stage in my grand voyage of enlightenment. According to the inscriptions, the truth, the key, awaits me within the ziggurats of ancient Sumeria. I hear the call of the ancients, beckoning me to that aeon-veiled place across the unforgiving sands. We shall depart at once. I feel sure I shall find that which I seek between the two rivers, at the place of the seven cities. Yes, I shall surely meet my destiny within the mystery-haunted cat...(From the pyramids of Egypt, to the ziggurats of Sumeria, my grand journey of enlightenment must continue. Praise the Ancients!) ...The Keeper of the Ancient Lore of Ur:...Hearken to the warnings of the Ancients... tread softly those sacred and unforgiving sands. Do not break the seal of the seventh city! ...The Chief Cultist of Ur...The Gate must not be opened. You dare not awaken the Dreamer! ...The lore of Babylon ins...s now compell me to the ziggurats... ...aking dream, I hear the call of the Ancients. I shall find that which I seek between the two rivers, at the place of the seven cities... in the Catacombs of Ur! ...(For the outcome of Doctor Ignatius Stone's expedition to Ur, see "The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur" on the fifth Bal-Sagoth al

The following are excerpts from handwritten notes discovered secreted in a hidden alcove in the west wing of the Phillips-Ervin Museum, London, England. Sealed in a leather canister, the aged script was accompanied by an ornate bronze key of unknown origin. The author of the journal remains unidentified, and the artifact was only chanced upon following the museum's partial destruction during the spring of 1941... ...ok, a collection of arcane scrawlings reputed to have been derived from an even earlier transcription, allegedly lost during the great fire of 1666. The Chthonic Chronicles! I cannot disclose here the precise and rather unsavoury means by which I acquired this weather-worn tome, but I immediately recognized the veracity of the fevered inscriptions contained within. Apparently derived from an incomplete Latin translation of the original source material, the text sporadically lapses into an indecipherable tongue which the transcription cryptically notes as being Old High Atlantean. Glyphs, sigils, occult pictograms, six score and ten oblations to some malign entity of colossal evil...some diabolical avatar of the Z'xulth. Khthon! I must delve further into the foreboding depths o...lls, cryptic rites, the summoning! ... tome of blasphemy, the Chthonic Chronicles...Caught in the maleficent whorls and verticils of this dark tome... but what lies at the heart of it? A vespertine viper's nest of sublime wickedness! What I discovered within this shadow-haunted volume was a terrifying axiom so inestimably terrible in its magnitude that it would shatter all man's carefully orchestrated views of the cosmos and render utterly redundant previous theories on the origin of humankind. Lore dating from time immemorial; lore surviving in the records of long extinct civilizations, be it inscribed upon parchment now crumbled to dust, etched into the sand-whipped, glyph..., I have confronted the martial agents, acolytes and cultists of clandestine sects who would see their knowledge safeguarded at all costs. Hildebrandt and the Quorum have treacherously attempted to have me commited to the baleful confines of Grimm's Hold Sanitarium, yet I have circumvented their insidious plot to put an end to my vaunted research. Damn their traitorous eyes! I must confer with Blackthorne upon his return from the Peruvian expedition... or mayhap Stone if ever the poor wretch regains...us-dreams, spawn of the elder fiends, ...lignity, hearken to the summoning! ...In the brooding darkness of the night, now witness ...The whispering, malignity, now hearken to the summoning!) ...mi-gods once strode the boiling surface of the young earth, treading the shattered surface of mighty Pangaea beneath their ersatz feet? What fearsome entities were already inestimably ancient when mankind himself was naught but a collection of mindless random atoms, a viscous puddle of gelid protoplasm teeming with the raw materials of life, transient cells of primordial slime, all naught but malleable and tractable clay to be worked at by unimaginable sculptors, immortal star-spanning fiends! What inhuman eyes even now watch the inconsequential toilings of man from afar? The answers to these questions of denied primacy and direful cosmogony were too repulsively horrific to contemplate, and yet... I knew the truth! ...terrifying still... The Z'xulth and their v...ptic axioms against the prying intellect of man? I must confesss, oftimes in the brooding darkness of the night, I have sensed their malefic gaze upon me, lurking, inexorably dogging my every step, their existence perceived only as some unnamable sense of fearful unease, and the occaisional glimpse of black shimmering against black in the depths of the teeming shadows... I hear them whispering when the mantle of darkness silences the world, and the sibilant words they utter are not for the minds of men to know. O' how I wish I had left those vile and fathomless depths of cryptical lore wholly and mercifully unplumbed! O', how I long for the assuaging balm of ignorance to once again soothe my ravaged mind! But such pleadings are, of course, ultimately in vain. I must keep my wits about me. Even now the stars align, the celestial spheres moving into the prophesied positions of the great astral conjunction. Am I to be ground to dust between the grand gears of this pitiless cosmic engine of destruction? The die is cast, the endgame nears. ...alks me this night? The key... I must hide the key!

d mesmerized by her arcane mystery ...Goddess of the underworld cold que...er weeping tears of darkness crystallized the earth ..., her bite numbs to the bone ...offins, waiting for the sun to glow ...anguid heart dulled the skies with love's d...She crystallized the earth with water fr

sive examination of the nefarious arcane codex known as The Epsilon ...I feel that perhaps the great discovery whi...ce more have I seen the figures in the night, watching me in silence from the confines of the darkness. ... incoherently about the guardians of the tombs... citing legends from their ancestral past which speak of mysterious travelers who reputedly came down from the stars in great silv...o lay hold of me in the night. ... at last translated the carvings on the stone fragment I unearthed amidst the ruins of Angkor Wat. To my astonishment, I found that it predated the construction of the temple itself by countless thousands of years, and that it spoke of the same subject as did the hieroglyphs I beheld on the ...Wall of the concealed chamber which I and Lord Blakiston discovered within the Great Pyramid in Eg...ive examinations of the edifices at Giza an...The pieces of this grea...have long felt that the Sumerians of Mesapotamia were among the first peoples to attain elucidation concerning the dread matter I purs...u, and most notably the ziggurats at you're...I now know that the Olmechs, the Aztecs and the Mayans were also undeniably key tendrils of this grand global web, and the unnerving truth I h...seems however, that the closer I come to enlightenment, the greater the danger becomes. ...lled him to abandon the party... the man seems simply to have vanished inexplicably into the oppressive, swelter...In light of the disappearance, I opted not to inform the group that during the darkling hours ...ived to be three of the shadowy figures I have previously described moving furtively in the gloom, keeping ever just out of the illuminatory radias...By the time I had brought my rifle to bear, they had melted away into the fathomless shadows of the benighted jungle......The inscriptions on the tablet I discovered...The first section, as far as I can discern, tells of an era thousands of years past when countless great and advanced civilisations, apparently with the legendary Atlantis foremost amongst them, spanned the circumference of the globe. ...The initial passage, se...Of the day, speaks thusly.

The sun sets in her eye...A mystery...arcane ...Summer's on the wane ...Descend again to the sombre fields of pa...The dawn...ne'are to ap...The nightfall weeps alo...it's the darkness that we fear ...To the world we're only st

(The Sixth Key: The Omega Axiom) ...thers would deem it the final descent into madness... whatever the ...case, the last vestiges of th...mind from accepting the full and staggering magnitude of the naked truth then crumbled, fading into nothingness like the dissolution of a night-mist. At length, one oppressively miasmic night, with such malefically portentous lore preying pitilessly upon my sanity, I began to descend through a myriad veils of sombre and swirling shades, finally surrendering my grip on wakefulness. And on that fitful, fateful eve, the last of the dreams came... ...dare not speculate. The vision was mine, the soul too... but the time, the place, the very flesh, all this and more was unknown to me. I stood upon a nighted vista... unfeasibly alien, and yet at once wholly, unnervingly familiar. In my hand I grasped a glimmering crystal which although beautiful in its shimmering radiance, was as black as the impenetrable depths of the most stygian midnight sea. As I gazed into the obsidian heart of the gem, a needle of black light lanced forth from its multi-faceted surface and filled my eyes with a panoply of fantastic hues, revealing to me in between its pulses of massing darkness certain fleeting gl...THE CRYSTALLINE ORACLE: Hearken, o' manling of the Tellurian orb... the Circle closes. Prepare to embrace the agony of enlightenment. Know you of the Six Cataclysms? ...THE ASPIRANT: I do. Six times has the world perished and ...THE CRYSTALLINE ORACLE: You have discovered the true meaning of the six coruscating rings of arcane power? ...THE ASPIRANT: Praise Klatrymadon and Zuranthus! The Six Keys! ...THE CRYSTALLINE ORACLE: Know you of the blackened orb which burned bright o'er ancient Lemuria? Know you of the sidereal flame which engulfed the high seat of power in Ultima Thule? Know you of that martial sorcery woven in the pitiless throng of epic battle? Know you of the astral power permeating the multiverse and the might of the cosmic codex? Know you of the rise and fall of glorious Atlantis? Know you the blasphemies contained within the Chthonic Chronicles...THE ASPIRANT: I know al...THE CRYSTALLINE ORACLE: Have you, o' hybrid child of the cosmos, gazed into the Great Eye of the Universe? ...THE ASPIRANT: I have. ...THE CRYSTALLINE ORACLE:...THE ASPIRANT: I saw oblivion, and damnation. I saw truth, and enlightenment. I saw the closure of the Great Circle Without End. I saw the Sixth Great Cataclysm. I saw the alpha and the omega, I saw the beginning... and I saw the end. The end of all there is