Saturday, July 20, 2013

Servants: The Crepuscular Mysteries

So, as I stated before, the Nightlanders don't really have any use for servants. They don't go on recruiting drives, like, say, the Slender Man or the Archangel does. People aren't lining up to work for them, since anyone who does work for them is more like to become bisected and rearranged than anything else.

But there is a group of cultists that worship the Nightlanders and have been around for quite awhile: the Crepuscular Mysteries. They appear to be some form of mystery religion, like from ancient Greece or Rome, steeped in obscure rites and rituals. I haven't been able to learn much of anything about them, since they are super duper secretive, but I did get my hands on one pamphlet they printed. Unfortunately, all in contained was this passage:
As the sun's rays die away in the heavens, twilight emerges from the earth. Twilight: a great army of the night, with thousands of invisible columns and billions of soldiers. A mighty army that from time immemorial has contended with light, broken in rout with every dawn, conquered with every nightfall, held sway from sunset to sunrise, and in the daytime, scattered, has taken refuge in places of concealment and has waited. 
Waited in mountain chasms and urban cellars, in forest thickets and depths of dark lakes. Waited as it lurked in ageless caverns in the ground, in mines, ditches, corners of homes, recesses of walls. Dispersed and seemingly absent, yet it fills every nook and cranny. It is present in every crevice of tree bark, in folds of people's clothing, it lies beneath the smallest grain of sand, clings to the finest spider's thread, and waits. Flushed from one place, in the twinkling of an eye it moves to another, availing itself of the slightest opportunity to return whence it had been banished, to break into unoccupied positions and flood the earth.
As the sun expires, a twilight army, silent and cautious, moves out in serried ranks from its refuges. It fills the corridors, hallways and poorly lit staircases of buildings; from under wardrobes and tables it creeps out into the middle of the room and besets the curtains; through cellar airholes and through windows it slips out into the streets, storms in dead silence the walls and roofs and, lurking on the rooftops, patiently waits for the rosy clouds to fade away in the west. 
Another moment, and there will suddenly spring up an immense explosion of darkness reaching from earth to heaven. Animals will hide in their lairs, men will run home; life, like a plant without water, will contract and begin to wither. Colors and shapes will dissolve into nothingness; fear, error and crime will take their sway over the world.

It's apparently from a short story called "Shades" by Bolesław Prus. No secret code I can discern, although the whole thing has a vague creepiness to it.

Them 16: The Nightlanders

Let's get this out of the way right now: these guys look like shadows and they organize shit. You may be thinking: well, that's fucking stupid. What are they going to do, organize my house?

Well, yes. They will organize your house and your internal organs along with it. They will move things according to their own Eldritch Feng Shui and if that means suddenly your lungs are now two inches to the right and you can't breath, well, tough shit.

That used to be all the information I had on them -- sparse, right? But I found this journal during my travels written by a town hall record-keeper.

The shadows have moved things again. I know it was them. There are more shadows here today then there were yesterday. Shades of shades. Are they ghosts? Shadows of dead men come to haunt me in my golden years?
[...]
They make patterns in the dust. They move the cabinets and the curtains and the books and I can see there is a special pattern to them. It is not random. There is a method. There is a pattern.
[...] 
The pattern is life. They are spelling out the entirety of life for me to record. Their patterns hold secrets that have been lost for millenia. Information that was never recorded before, information they are giving me. I am their records-keeper.
[...] 
They are showing me such wondrous things.
[...] 
I can't stay here much longer. This place is too empty for me, too lacking. I need more patterns. The shadows are showing me a way, a way to a place of where the patterns are complete. Where the information flows.
They will bring me to a land of perpetual motion and eternal night.

I don't know what became of the record-keeper (even his name is lost -- it's scratched out completely in the journal), but I assume he either died or became one of the few servants of the Nightlanders. Let's hope it is the former.

Back again.

I'm tired. I'm tired and I'm hungry, but all I have that's edible in the fridge is a can of tuna. I think it's edible.

Okay, yep, that's edible. Doesn't really satisfy my hunger, but it's better than nothing. I'll need to order some more food tomorrow. Can't go outside.

Where have I been for the past year? Gathering information. Gathering all possible information I can about Them. Anything and everything. The ones I knew about and the ones I didn't. I was on a Mission from God (if he exists), so I went out and I found everything I could.

And now I'm going to share it all with you.