Shadows Out of Time

There is tangible proof — in the form of marginal notes— that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt…

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise.

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”

I

Wind! A howling tumult that made hurricanes seem like zephyrs, in a landscape of black congealed lava and upthrust crags. Lightning blazed crimson above. Whenever it ceased for a few seconds, I somehow knew I would have been lost in utter darkness if my eyes were human — and also, in that searing environment, my eyes would have boiled and burst in those same few seconds.

But my eyes were not human, and nor was I.

Scaly legs ending in irregular stone-like hoofs rattled on the fuming rocks I traversed. I stalked bipedally, and it felt as though my massive limbs moved slowly, as in old stop-motion special effect — and that, too, was an earthly, human thought, my own thought as Roy Orlanski of Scranton, now chasing tenure at Miskatonic.

I did not know where I was or what I was, now. I knew my bulk was more than elephantine, that I could neither smell nor hear but had other senses, and that my field of sight covered three quarters of a circle. It also extended above me.

The noisome sky, filled with vapour, dust and cinders, rolled apart suddenly as though torn by a cyclone. In the gap I saw the moon. It filled a quarter of the heavens, and glowed a hot pinkish-white, but some of the craters and markings were the ones I knew. Its radiance spilled across the world, bright as a burning mirror. It revealed naked cliffs and headlands, and below them a sea — an ocean — of blood-red pulsing lava that surged to the tidal forces of that monstrous moon. Dark slag formed on its crests and then cracked wide.

Sluggish waves broke against the quaking headlands and threw red spray a mile high. Masses of rock fell into that molten sea, sending up slow, seething splashes. Under my hooves the land tilted, quivered, and I knew it was an island of lighter rock afloat in depthless fury.

Two objects like artificial islands, or vast ships, passed across the glowing face of the moon. One of them descended towards a strange, jagged structure atop a mountain. Somehow I knew that mountain was my own destination.

That was when I woke.