Hastur

1 day ago

@kingofYellow[KY]

The first crossing. It was beneath a moon of jaundiced pallor that the pyramids ceased to be monuments of stone and became something infinitely older, something for which the minds of men possessed neither name nor merciful understanding. A trembling radiance seeped from the seams of those cyclopean blocks, first as threads of wan gold, then as torrents of impossible yellow fire. The desert itself seemed to recoil. Sand fled in spiraling sheets from the ancient foundations, while the heavens above grew black and empty, as though the familiar stars had extinguished themselves rather than bear witness. Then, with a sound deeper than thunder and more dreadful than any earthly tumult, the sides of the great pyramid unfolded, and where its limestone heart should have been there yawned an abyss into a country that could not belong to our universe. Beyond that monstrous aperture stretched a firmament drowned in yellow twilight. Black towers leaned beneath alien constellations, and far below them an oily sea reflected the light of twin suns whose rays seemed to illuminate not objects, but thoughts. From this hideous elsewhere came shapes draped in tattered saffron vestments, things whose proportions mocked the geometry of living flesh. Their limbs bent where no joints ought to exist, and beneath their fluttering robes there shifted suggestions of mouths, fingers, and pale appendages which retreated whenever the eye attempted to comprehend them. They did not walk from the gateway so much as gradually become present within our world, acquiring substance as nightmares acquire certainty in the moments before waking. But infinitely worse were the eyes. They poured from the pyramid in silent multitudes, disembodied and glistening, drifting through the Egyptian night like some obscene constellation torn loose from heaven. Great lidless orbs floated above the dunes while smaller eyes swarmed about them, their pupils narrowing and widening in dreadful unison. Some gazed upon the desert. Some stared upward toward the terrified stars. Yet countless others turned toward the cities of men, and there was in their scrutiny an intelligence so ancient, so patient, and so utterly devoid of human sympathy that those who met their gaze understood at once the terrible insignificance of mankind. For in those yellow depths lay the memory of worlds that had flourished before Earth possessed oceans, and the promise of worlds that would continue long after our sun had become a cold and forgotten ember. And beneath that impossible yellow sky, as the horrors continued their soundless procession from the opened pyramid, there came from beyond the threshold a whisper which no ear heard, yet every living soul understood: The pyramids had never been tombs. They had been locks.