The Jrel-Aluk, That Turned Men Inside Out
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment

When you say "scholar," speak the word in the manner of the Komu who dwell in the frozen wastes of Emreca, to mean "speaker of falsehoods." A wise man lies in ways that are both blown away by the wind and forgotten by women; a scholar presses lies upon clay for all the ages. As Amaxathroth the Wise, who bore parchments, I was met with laughter from the mighty-thewed Es-Komu. You - who has but a few score of years before the death demons hook claws into your flesh - would do well to recall this happenstance.

In all the tablets and parchments that tell of the sorceror Mazyar - he who built Harumetha in a single moonless night - there are but two matters the same. That his skin was the dead grey of fungus, and that he alone in all the world dared ask a question of the Jrel-Aluk. Both are lies.

In the age the tall, spindle-spined Jrel-Aluk stalked the Valley of Pillars, many were the men who screamed questions of that most dire of demonkind. Any answers will remain unknown, for each man was most carefully and precisely turned inside out. Women met a most different fate: pulped and powdered down to the very finest, spilt into a pile of dust and puddle of red slime. In the hearts of sorcerors, it seemed the Jrel-Aluk sought most carefully for something that lay within men and women yet foolish enough to risk the broadest of passages through the Grey Mountains.

Mazyar had within his spire a single crystal tablet, upon which twelve mysteries of ancient Yorm were etched. One such was a compelling of demons and men, a hook of sorcery laid within the nerves, by which feeling and action are made as those of a puppet. By this means were the sumptuous chambers of Mazyar populated by the most beauteous, pliant youths and maidens - mere decoration, no less so than the mosaics from far away lands and cloth of impossible colors, for the sorceror Mazyar had no interest in the pleasures of the flesh. Yet he would rather have been swallowed by the Undergod Ythugg and pierced for all time by a thousand stomach-tendrils than to appear less corrupt a sensate than the most debauched in Harumetha. It is a truth that all men - even sorcerors of great might - possess one strange, unseemly weakness that stands as a rock to cast spray in the river of their life.

It passed that Mazyar spoke ever less with the many cruel sorcerors and priestesses of ill-repute who occupied the spires and fanes of Harumetha, the better to cast their blacknesses upon that age. He took to believe scholars who spoke of a hidden sorcery within men and women, a great power diligently sought by the Jrel-Aluk. So Mazyar took his crystal tablet of Yorm and went forth to the Valley of Pillars to ask his question of the tall questing demon, and sorcerously compel an answer.

There, the tale ends, for scholars are little concerned with lies in the form and manner of bards. Of Mazyar, there was no more; the youths and maidens of his spire were taken away, one by one, as concubines and catamites, as sacrifices both straightforward and strange upon stained altars of the Bone Priestesses. Of the Jrel-Aluk, dread legends persist, but no more were the bloody remains of men stretched upon pillars of aeons past, nor the remains of women placed beneath.

So is the world of ages; it turns, and no man sees.

[ Posted by Reason on November 10, 2006 ]