The Deluge After the Ice

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”  
 ― Edgar Allen Poe
  
“Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph”  
 ― Robert E. Howard
 
 
It was the witching hour, too late to be night yet too early to be morning. It was that time in which the physical and the spiritual worlds collide, in which it is easy to picture specters of all kinds about you.  

The smell of stale sea water hung heavily the air. It was a strange mix of aromas – dead fish were certainly present (their type of decaying flesh is unmistakable) – but there were also other things that could not be placed so easily. Reeds, seaweed, and other less-obviously-organic protrusions stood out of the water, as if they were fingers grasping for the surface.

The entire atmosphere was pungent, as though the environment was reflecting the coastline’s state of spiritual decay, manifesting physically what was already present morally. Fog, unusually dense for this season, rested above the slow-moving river, making navigation impossible and putting the finishing touch on the macabre scene.  
 
Had any passers-by been in the area this night, they could have stumbled upon a most peculiar specimen near the mouth of the great serpent river. On the rocky shore, next to the tattered remains of a strange, over-sized canoe, lay a stranger’s body. He rested flat on his stomach, with his head reposing on its right cheek, barely allowing him space to draw oxygen in his unconscious condition. The stranger was unlike any man the Miskatonic tribe had ever seen in person, but resembled closely what their dreams and myths told dim memories of. His hair and beard were red like a setting sun, his skin pale like a full moon on a cloudless night. His clothes seemed to be made, at least in part, of a kind of light, shining stone, covered incompletely by a strange form of badly-tattered animal skin. His body bore many cuts and was bruised all over.  

Were this sight not remarkable enough, the locals would have found the shiny stone object hanging from the stranger’s belt equally extraordinary. It was like an elongated spear point, but with strange rivets on the end, as if it was meant to be wielded as an oversized flint knife rather than as a normal instrument of war. As long as a grown man’s arm, it seemed to be made of the same foreign stone as the stranger’s clothes and, had there been any moonlight, it surely would have reflected Luna’s rays the way clear water will cause them to dance. Without doubt this was an object of great magic and wonder – a product of the elder alchemists and the conjurers of old.  

The wise men of the Miskatonic nation, especially the shamans who traveled to the far north to learn at the feet of the masters of the Yellow Order, still keep the tales of the red-haired giants and the magics they commanded. In the days prior to the Great Deluge, before the Earth was struck from the sky and the glacial wall melted overnight, a race of men like this stranger dwelt on the shores of the Eastern Ocean.  

Tuatha they called themselves, lords of a host of cities on the great Narcotis plane, a rich green land near the mouth of the serpent river which has since been swallowed by Amphitrite. Boundless seafarers, they traveled the entirety of mother Earth, serving as allies in the Incan court even as they sold the copper of Mich-I-Gan to the Pharaohs of Khemet. A noble race they once were who fell before the waves, beings the Miskatonic’s eldest ancestors regarded as go-betweens amid men and gods.
  
For countless ages all was well between the two races of red men – one red of hair and the other red of skin – but all that changed when ThemOnes emerged from the Land of the Setting Sun.  

You see, when the ice wall was shattered by Marduk’s bolt, an opening was presented. Those who had long dwelt in the terrible Outside could now enter Eden, and wreak havoc on its otherwise peace-loving folk. Enviously these Outsiders had regarded our green and bountiful realm, for their own lands were but frozen wastes. They largely remain so now, and we can scarcely imagine how desolate they must have been in the all-land-ice time. Trapped indoors for the long, merciless winter months (travel was absolutely unthinkable in the coldest parts of the year), one has little to do but to think, to stir, to hate… Gradually they became depraved and deformed, more beast than human.  

When an opportunity was presented by the spirits above, the Outsiders rushed into the green-land, overwhelming it like water upon rocks at high tide. They let out all the frustrations, hungers, resentments, lusts, hatreds, and envies that had accumulated in their souls over countless generations - and left none alive in their path. As many as the Tuatha as could (from among those few who survived the flood that is) fled by boat to the sea, never to be regarded again by the Miskatonic folk. 
 
Until, apparently, this stranger was conjured from the ether by a mysterious and perhaps cruel act of the Fates. It is an unquantifiable shame that none were near to assist him in his final moments, what wonderous things could he have told…     
But wait! A stirring - the stranger draws breath and  
painfully, as if with great reluctance
opens his eyes. Clearly disoriented, he gradually regains his consciousness, his pain dragging his senses back into focus.  

“By Utnapishtim’s beard” our hero grunts in his own strange tongue, “what level of hades have I come to?”    

THE MAN does not remember where he is, nor how he came to be there. THE MAN does not even remember his own name. His mind is full of a vague sense of dread, horror, anxiety, and…grief? He does not know why but in the deepest recesses of his mind
though he would never think such thoughts out loud, not even to himself
he is afraid on a level he has never experienced before.  

He senses the wounds on his body, but reasons that, since he yet draws breath, they must not be fatal. The chainmail must have absorbed the worst of the blows from the arrowheads, the axe blades, and…
The swords!
 
It had been those of his own race which had struck him, in league with those strange ones whose name he could not yet recall.  

Still lying prone, the stranger extends his right arm, digs into the gravelly dirt, and pulls himself slowly up the rocky beach. Shots of pain course through his torso, but he knows better than to waste time thinking of such things. He knew not how long he had laid in this desolate spot, and could not know how close his pursuers
was he being pursued?  
could have come.  

He attempts to draw to his feet, but his legs fail him. THE MAN hits the ground gracelessly and wheezes as he struggles to keep himself upright. Putting his weight on his elbows, he draws a few deep breaths and prepares to move again, but is dumb-struck by the strange world in which he awoke. 
 
About twenty paces ahead of him the rocky beach terminated against a dense forest. From what he could see, the trees somehow seemed too large, too profuse to be natural. Though still fogged-inundated, his vision told him that the weeds, brambles, and grasses were likewise of gargantuan stature. A careful observer could also discern that the landscape was growing gradually lighter, as though the sun itself was afraid and, reluctant to rise, had sent a few rays ahead as a scouting party before committing to the actual work.

The first hints of dawn provided no comfort.  

Yet, years of hard living had left THE MAN with a physical resilience few in the modern world could boast. Though his memory had not yet returned to him, he would eventually recall his life in the old country, along the Moorish frontier in Iberia. THE MAN’s entire Earthly existence had been defined by a life-or-death struggle, caught between Saracen saber and Spanish blade alike. Both the Sultan of Cordoba and the King of Castile had designs on his people. Officially, they each wanted to subdue peasant rebellions and keep a people of questionable-belief in line. But behind the closed doors of their castle vaults, they were afraid that these strange old ones might know things that they could not even dream of, that their sheer ancientness and utter-foreignness veiled terrible secrets. They were correct.

The Tuatha had weathered countless storms of people; endless migrations, diseases, and calamities, and had seen them all off. The sadistic priests of Carthage are gone, yet the Tuatha remain. Hannibal and his elephants have crossed their mountains and walked into the pages of history, yet the Tuatha remain. Rome and her legions have returned to the clay from which the Creator first made them, yet the Tuatha remain. If they must learn the faux-Latin of the espanoles and the faux-Akkadian of the Moors to get by, so be it. THE MAN’s people will remain long after these races too have passed into legend.   

Squinting with determination, he rose wearily to his feet. Taking a few burdensome steps toward the remains of his canoe, THE MAN bent down and
taking no heed of the unsettling crackling sounds which came from his joints  
retrieved one of the rowing oars which lay haphazardly among the wreckage. He would use this as a walking-stick as he loped into the primordial wilderness. Without clearly remembering why, the stranger thought this was a wiser direction to tread than along the coastline where THEY might yet find him.

2

The small island of Ingonish had long been one of Michel de Blois’ favorite places in the world. Sheltered from the sea by a natural harbor, the island rests within the bay of a larger atoll near where the missionaries of St. John first landed in the New World. In the years prior to the Deluge this place had been the top of a large hill, but now it barely rests above the waves. Yet, the fact that it is above the water line meant that this landmass could offer testimony of times lost to the memory of men. 
 
The sages of the Miskatonic had been gifted premonitions of what was to come and made preparations accordingly. They sent their people to the high Adirondacks before nature’s teardrops swallowed the world, yet they themselves remained behind – anticipating that other tribes would make for the same refuge. Not wanting to risk their treasures falling into the unholy hands of those creatures, they took instead to the high (-ish) hills of their own country, and buried their secrets there. 
 
You see, for countless generations folk had buried their dead in mounds piled above existing hills, causing the Earth to climb higher to the heavens with time. These mounds, often  
deliberately  
indistinguishable from the natural landscape served as ideal caches for their inheritance. And even if the waves would overtake the highest hills of their country, the stone cylinders gifted them by Pharaoh would succeed in keeping their treasures preserved below the sea.  

So it came to pass that their most precious heritage was preserved, hidden so well in fact that almost all of their own guardians forgot about them. Although, they cannot entirely be blamed for this.  
 
When the evil winds came forth from the sea of the rising sun, carried by the rodents which stowed away in the water-craft of the pale-faced folk, most of the lore keepers fell. It is not entirely true to say that the Miskatonic had no written language, for the runes of Narcotis were yet known to some of them, but the better part of their history was kept verbally – in the minds of the story tellers themselves. When these souls were called back to the Creator, few were left who knew the Great Tale, and none (?) were left who knew it in its entirety.  

Michel smoked his pipe as he pondered all this. He was sitting on a rock overlooking a natural harbor, beholding the sea as the sun was beginning to rise. The dense fog had mostly lifted, returning to that mysterious realm from which it emerged each night. The sea air was beginning to freshen as well, offering a scented sensation which always refreshed his soul. 
   
Michel’s position as a Franciscan missionary had led him to spend many years in the American wilderness. He was one of what the Miskatonic called the Brown Robes, distinguished both from the Black Robes (the Jesuits) and Blue Robes (the soldiers of the French king). In his experience, the Brown Robes cared solely for the souls of the people they encountered, whereas the others were equally preoccupied with conquest and material expansion for King and Pope.  

Years of pastoral work had earned him a unique level of trust among those living on the northern shores of the serpent river. Years of work and, of course, his own strange heritage...  

His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a thrashing in the bushes behind him. A stranger, bloody and delirious, half-stomped, half-stumbled out of the wood line, gripping his chest with his left hand and he gracelessly progressed. Yet he managed to stop dead in his tracks at the sight of Michel, as though he was seeing a human for the first time. 
  
This stranger was undoubtedly from the Old World. His pale skin, chainmail dress, and broad sword all confirmed this. He was supported by a crude walking staff held in his right hand as if for dear life.

For a moment they simply regarded one another, and then the stranger simply fell face first into the grassy clearing. There was no change in facial expression, no bodily attempt to stop the fall, he simply tumbled away like the dry grass in David’s Psalm.  

Michel walked quickly to where the stranger fell, his lit pipe leaving a column of smoke in his path as he went. There was no hesitation in his desire to help this stranger, though he would later wonder at the rapidness of the events that were to follow.   
  
3

THE MAN woke up in the belly of a whale.  

More specifically, he woke up in a large tent covered in a whale-skin. Smell was the first sense he woke with; giving him a strong a sense of smoke, herbs, and…incense? As he slowly sat up, he found himself in what appeared to be a meeting hall of some sort. A large man, clearly someone of importance, sat before him, flanked on either side by noble-looking natives and (did his eyes deceive him?) a trio of Christian monks.

“Bienvenue, étranger,” the chief said, addressing him in French. “Welcome to the north, to the kingdom at the mouth of the serpent’s river.”
   
The chief sat on a simple throne, carved from rock but without the elaborate embroidery of European kings. THE MAN’s vision continued to clear, and soon be became cognizant of several objects in front of him.
 Before the throne was a short table, standing perhaps a foot and a half above the ground. On it three items lay. On the left, a stone tablet with strange carved writing, in the center what looked like a modern European book, and on the right a closed scroll looking like something out of Old Testament times. 
 
“My brown-robed friends want me to offer you a challenge,” the chief continued, “they convinced me that you may be of a friendly race, sharing a common enemy of ours – those who sail the seas with massive, embroidered sails. Pere Michel here has even gone so far as to suspect you as an ally, descended from our friends from before the ice melted and the old world ended. If you correctly solve the riddle I placed before you, we can let you in on a great many secrets.”   

“What I ask of you is simply this: in which of these scriptures is the greatest truth to be found?”

For some reason that THE MAN himself did not understand, a dim memory began to register in his mind. Somewhere, somewhen, he had heard a riddle like this before. Mayhap it was before a Papal inquisitor or a Cordoban tribunal, mayhap it was in the parish school from untold years ago. Perhaps he heard it while a prisoner in Grenada or when he served as bodyguard to a Venetian merchant in Acre. No matter, within merely a minute, THE MAN knew what the chief sought.   

“’You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life.’ In this way the Nazarene addressed those who were infatuated with their own intellect and impressed by their own learning,” THE MAN said, “so much so that they did not recognize the Creator Himself. If you search for wisdom monsieur, you must contemplate the source of all things, and not second-hand accounts of Him.”
  
The chief simply looked at Pere Michel with an impressed look on his face, and then motioned the entire party to stand up and follow. The assembly walked out of the tent and into the dim light of evening, leading THE MAN by the arm as they did so. They progressed toward the cliffs and, just when THE MAN thought the chief intended to walk straight off, turned sharply to the left onto a staircase that was carved out of the very cliffside. They continued for another fifty or so paces before entering a cave which seemed too perfectly round to be natural.  
 
4

What bothered THE MAN most as they continued was not that the steps were uneven, after all, chiseling out of solid rock often necessitates imperfections. Rather, it was that they all seemed so unnaturally large. Their slight variations could not negate the overarching sense that this odorous staircase was intended for beings altogether apart from men.
  
As they progressed deeper and deeper under the hill, the staircase took them into the center of a large cavern, with twenty-foot drops emerging on either side of the staircase. THE MAN began to perceive cyclopean blocks and crumpling boulders arranged in the distance, as though the gods used them to practice before building the great monoliths of eldest antiquity. These ruins, revealed in the twilight of torches, stood as testaments of eons altogether unimaginable to the modern mind. Silent witnesses of eternity, they seemed to gaze upon the silent procession led by the Miskatonic chief, piercing THE MAN to his very core with their scrutiny. Their sheer ancientness made everything he ever did, or ever even knew of, seem utterly insignificant.   

But this was not all, in the shimmering torchlight THE MAN could see other tunnels branching off in different directions. None of them were properly lit, yet somehow he could perceive their outlines, and immediately knew it wise to avert his gaze. This sense was further encouraged by the turning of his shoulders by one of his guides, keeping his posture aimed at the center of the stairway. He did not need much persuasion.  

Time as we normally experience it had ceased to exist when the procession reached a level floor. The tunneled staircase which they had previously descended had clearly been carved deliberately  
which was, he realized grimly, not necessarily saying the same thing as man-made.  
but the world in which they now found themselves seemed to be a natural cave. The ceiling stood high above them, perhaps one hundred feet using the old measure, and the entire space was roughly oval in outline. THE MAN continued to be led further and further into the Earth, down the gradual decline in the cave floor, and his mind began to conjure ancestral memories and folklore learned from many years on the road.  

The idea that our world is hollow is as old as history, a belief shared by countless cultures throughout time and around the globe. The Old Ones of the Western Desert believed that they were saved from a great cataclysm by the “ant people” who emerged from underground, a belief shared by the Macuxi of the southern orchids. The Tibetans believe in Shamballa, Agartha, and other underground kingdoms. Among the Arabs there is legend of Iram of the Pillars – a city hidden beneath the sand.

THE MAN’s own people kept tales of conquered races which fled to the caverns of Erie and Britannia following their defeat at the hands of the Fomorians. There is scarcely a breed of humanity which does not have a tenebrous tale to tell, and none of them provided any comfort. 

After another ten minutes or so, the party arrived at a precipice overlooking an even vaster cavern, and…words fail to describe what THE MAN saw.  

The place was enormous, descending deep into the Earth beyond where the eye could see. It was a gigantic abandoned city, of a scale THE MAN never imagined could exist in the new world. The whole scene was crowned with huge, vaulted ceilings, reminiscent of the gothic arches of Parisian cathedrals and everything was somehow illumined by a pale blue light.  

Stepped pyramids stood at the intersections of lined streets of multi-story adobe buildings. Each pyramid seemed to consist of seven tiers, crowned by a single chamber in which alters stood. Had THE MAN ever seen them, he would immediately have been struck by these structures’ resemblance of Sumerian and Incan antiquity. The party descended into the city and the chief began to lecture on the world’s antediluvian history. 
   
But all THE MAN remembered was the blue light…and the music.  

No longer did THE MAN wonder how sailors could through themselves on the rocks or into a group of sharks at the sound of a siren. No longer did he wonder at how addicts would stoop to anything to find their fix. Had he not been physically restrained by several of the others he likely would have ran up the stairs of the nearest pyramid to fling himself down as a sacrifice to the gods of the old folk. Restrained though he was, the man’s senses were clearly overwhelmed and he collapsed with a hysterical smile on his face.  

5

THE MAN woke up in the hull of a French galley. He was told that the shattered remains of his canoe had been spotted along the shore and that he was found unconscious in the woods about a hundred paces inland. He had seemed to wake up several times over the past few days but each time collapsed back into a state of delirium. When THE MAN asked where they were, they told him the ship was en route to Quebec, that they had just entered the mouth of the St. Lawrence river which snaked its way through the heart of New France.