The Terrible Sky

I have dreams sometimes, of a place cold and desolate; a table of gray stone amidst a vast, stygian nothing – like a mountain peak rising high into the midnight sky. Indeed, a mountain it may very well be, as I find my breathing to be haggard and laborious as I sit perched atop my knees like a holy man at the altar. Though the place is dark, the stone beneath me is possessing of a robust color, the same as one would see beneath the sun of an autumn sky; this great stone table suspended in dark was free of the abyssal grasp of the surrounding shadow. Nothing, in this bleak place, however, is so terrible, so dreadful, as the sky cast above my head like a great, black tarp.1

Try though I might in my dreams, I am never able to will myself into closing my eyes. That frightful sky encompassed me – entombed me – in its nauseating dusk. Though impossible to see due to the complete lack of color, I knew that that piceous empyrean pulsed and quivered, reaching out to me with tendrils only just too short to contact my sweaty flesh.2

Trembling and fearful, I raise my hands to the thing surrounding me, and I call out to it, I cry out the name of that oppressive creature – for that is indeed what that black expanse was, a tangible, living entity – using a name that I find impossible to repeat with any clarity in my waking hours, though its spelling – as near as it may be in our own terrestrial language – is dreadfully clear to me: Sh'ygugurhaar.3

Speaking the name of this great, old god seems to anger it – or worse, empower it – as it is always followed by a most tumultuous trembling of the stone pillar that forces me to cling so firmly to the rough surface as to leave my fingers bloody and numb, and my body thoroughly beaten from the rocks that are shaken loose and hurled at my prone form by the extreme vibrations.4

The upheaval is never nearly so terrible as looking back into the darkness, and watching in petrifying horror as stars are birthed in the murky pool – pin-pricks of light that grow slightly wider like luminous eyes being slowly opened. With each recurrence of the dream, I find myself looking upon, or being looked upon by an ever-increasing swarm of those malignant lights. Those stars throb and sway on their perch like driftwood on the surface of the ocean as the black form billowed; with the inability to shield myself from the sight, I quickly become so dizzy that my sweat turns cold, and bile rises in my throat.5

Then, the screeching begins.6

Those horrible stars begin to scream, wailing in a million ghastly voices in a volume so great that I feel as though great weights are being thrown upon my body, and yet I can do nothing to protect myself; frozen in fear, I cannot clasp my hands to my ears – I cannot tear my eyes away from that damnable omnipotent. My lungs ache from screams of pain that are drowned beneath the cries of countless ages of suffering…7

And I am trapped beneath the howling stars, forsaken by all that is good and left only with the brutal god Sh'ygugurhaar; trapped forever, for I know that this deity will never release me from its shadowy grasp.8

I sometimes wonder if I would find the solace I so desperately desire if I were to bring a sudden halt to my life, but in the blackest corners of my mind, I know that It will be there when I close my eyes, even if it were for the final time. There are no options left to me, now that I have been forsaken and forgotten in this prison I have built for myself; I will become an acolyte of the God of the Howling Stars, and I will make his name known to others so that they too may be able to feed him in their darkest nightmares – perhaps then, I will be given peace and allowed to rest.9