[The Imperator of the Night (Hearken to the Attestation of the Sinistrous):]
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For it is the iniquity of man which compels him to these tenebrous gates,
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seeking opiate dreams and the alluring embrace of oblivion...
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Know that I have cavorted beneath the horned moon with repellent fiends, and
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liberated virgins from the burden of their maidenhood.
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(Supping deep of that sweet ichor and revelling in the sanguineous megrims my
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ophidian tongue has wrought.)
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Tyrannic I am where the Serpent dwells, the lissome embrace of the succubi,
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Like a wolf in the fold, red of tooth and claw, enthroned beneath black
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nether-skies.
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Shadows stalk the viscid gloom, (beware the) blades of the assassins,
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The call of Ul-Yeh in the air, the crystal skull is shattered,
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A veil of cloud about the moon, (fevered) dreams of (trenchant) steel and fire,
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Hearken to the slithering, the envenomed kiss of night.
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[The Imperator of the Night (Thus Spake the Chronicle of Shadows):]
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Such adoration bestowed upon me beneath the cryptic moon!
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Caressed by ululant lotus-stained tongues...
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(Behold the true purity of that which lurks concealed beneath the mantle of
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shadow, and let the deluded, debauched sybarites flee in terror from that
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darkness which they profess to embrace!)
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Beyond the spheres of light and darkness, beneath distant pallid stars, I bring
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the iridescent glimmer of forbidden truth, seared in the crucible of blasphemy!
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For amorphous they come, steeped in the fetor of ten thousand years,
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Abhorrent colossi spawned from the sinistrous cosmic spheres.
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And upon their tongues, vile secrets so terrible sweet madness is a redolent
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balm!
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[The Imperator of the Night (Revel in the Triumph of the Dark):]
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I shall glut the maw of that ineffable nameless evil which lurks forever in
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the soul of man, for so it is written in the Chronicle of Shadows...
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[29 October, 1893]
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They came in the night, and butchered five of my party, the terrified survivors
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fleeing with the first wan light of dawn. The fiends seemed inexplicably to
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be an extension of the night, as if their misshapen bodies were actually
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somehow composed of the darkness itself. Even as I gazed directly at them,
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I found I could not truly focus on their stygian forms... their bodies
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appearing to shimmer and shift like the ripples of a heat-haze upon an arid
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plain. My ammunition, discharged in vain, is all but spent... and now, as night
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unfurls its malign wings once more to enshroud this desolate and forsaken
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place, I wait alone for the sunrise I fear I shall never see. At dusk I
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discovered a hidden alcove in the time-raught surface of the great monolith
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which stands as a mute sentinel before the entrance to the colossal temple;
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a moss encrusted crevice concealed from the eyes of man for I know not how
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long. As the darkness massed about me, a strange miasma seemed to grip my mind
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in tenebrous tendrils, and I beheld that horrifying and immemorial edifice
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which I now feel certain once cast its diabolical shadow upon the Gate of the
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Sun. It is all true, everything I feared, everything which I dared imagine
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only in the blackest embrace of the most narcotic malignity. There are Six
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Keys To The Onyx Pyramid, which conceal a terrifying truth never intended to
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be grasped by the woefully fragile mind of Man. I now pray that no unfortunate
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soul ever again stumbles as close as I to those cryptic axioms which lie ever
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in wait between the incorporeal veils of light and shadow. I would offer up a
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prayer to the divinity which once I worshipped, but I know it would echo
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emptily through the abyssal reaches of the unheeding cosmos. As I scrawl this
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final entry in my journal, the sun sinks with a chilling finality below this
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now alien horizon. I know the shadowy figures shall soon return to claim me.
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I must fortify myself for the onset of the night...
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-----------------
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The Chronicle of Shadows
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| Bal-sagoth |
