The Template

Mist-covered roads hung like a hue of gray matter over the monotone city of Goshen, just thirty miles west of Mishkatoshen. The fog bank rolled in as Robert Dudley took haste out of his dark granite loft on Teal street. An unfathomably mediocre part of the city, it was quite the jostle of headstones bearing outstretched cafes and dingy accented specialty shoppes. Few dared to venture out into the early morning hours of Goshen, as their demeanor bared a striking playfulness of erudite secrets and infused hesitance. Vacant whispers clinched the silence as Robert slowly strode down the monkish-like brick roads, just passed 18th street - known for its barrage of godless cynicism and impromptu muggings.

The voyage onward to Robert’s place of business was also leisure in its suggestion of he being analyzed. He possessed a silver tongue which an assemblage of faculties could replicate with the writings of Greek philosophers. The rough and tattered looking man - Robert - transcended modern abandonment with a torrent of reckless tenacity. Almost certainly, he was beginning to show splendid vacancy towards what had happened to him just a year ago. Robert knew not of what possessed his boisterous roster of sightings; frequently admonished of the nauseating fear of stillness and regret.

The middle aged man sat himself upon his reclining chair, recounting - with his less oppressed student in that very same war-torn office he, himself, had witnessed countless horrors of hindsight - the earliest circumstances which surrounded that isolated night. Authenticity was a mental acquaintance upon sly analyzing of materialistic cosmic forces. Robert Dudley, at his earliest known alias, led the commercial death veil between psychology and adolescent intelligence; slanderous concerns upon the temperament of scholars alike. Details of such curious and mesmerizing anathema - a shadow out of time - haunted the words and tones surrounding Robert Dudley’s current state of mind. It was in no form or void that sufficient ethereal consciousness was the intoxicant. Certain respects were given to the beings Robert Dudley had encountered on the foggy morning of March 24th, 1919.

The beings he described in his memoirs were in no shape of prehistory, but Robert’s recollection of events were steadily wearing on his mind. It was a multitude of distantly relevant monolithic events, sprouting Stygian groves of ice-covered obelisks. Embossed with scrutiny, Robert was abound in fear.

“Planes of ice were the blanket for something more devious. I ought not venture into the caverns below, for far more terrifying and gorgeously vile eminences lurk below, unquestioned in their rivalry and paramount deism. They, these beings, concluded amassed a variety of worshipers, but dealt no hand in the earnings of wealth or prestige.

There were chasms with shockingly brilliant Roman-like pillars, detailed in a fine and unutterable language which reveled in chiseled beauty. The pillars shot hundreds of feet into the air; unexpectedly carved from limestone and ivory. My search team and I delved past these colossal ghost Egyptian-esque cities; paying homage to what was a scenic background of hostility.

Sprouting up from below hundreds of feet below the ice-covered plane, we descended upon a glossy zenith which appeared in an onyx colour. This sculpture was of utmost brilliance in its own inactive and damnable way. What struck my team and I most about this oddly phosphorescent sculpture was the inscriptions held on the base. Most in a dialect which seethed with wicked intentions. Ban’ee’ltph. A rather dominant figure but barely distinguishable in appearance upon the great monolith. Depictions were faint and our gear was becoming more and more fragile with the ever growing frigid temperatures. We could only survive another hour before succumbing to frostbite. The search team and I had found what we had been searching for for years. A long lost culture.

Knowing our famine was imminent, the team and I fled the scene, but not before stumbling over a flat black tome, bound with ivory and wrapped in a fine, yet faint, gray-blue sheet, carved out of the bedrock from below. The front of this mysterious block shown forth an embossed carving of a figure with four alligator-like tails in place of its mane. The head of said figure pierced our minds with its wildebeest presence. Just above the figure read - presumably - the name of the tome: Ab Aeterno. It was far too heavy of a tome for one of us to pick up with both hands. Whoever - whatever - made this, must’ve been of some great importance.

In this tome, we peered with great hesitance. The stories and paintings were crude, its iron-hewn bindings were tightly quilted with years of rust. The oddities contained within mumbled thousands of years in the past as well as the demise of humanity. Scribblings of nocturnal imaginations gave rise to hideously deformed beings - presumably alien. Words which have yet to this day made appearance in the world around us. Ban’ee’lthp, Octin’jusp, as well as M’il’jyn. These three figures stood unequivocally higher than the lesser equated figurines whom were merely touched upon in the earliest of chapters. Gorgeous imagery of what could be known as these Elder Gods were transfixed into this tome of dominant knowledge. I felt a rush of vivid terror as I expressed vast lunatic enthusiasm for our grasp of something one of a kind.

This Ab Aeterno appears to be biographical in nature. Certainly not of this world in its pretentious adjudication. While stumbling upon the faint ramblings of this odd scribe, we felt a trembling underneath our feet. A sign of diffused retreat. Slight shifts in the Earth speculated that the team and I were trespassing on something far beyond our comprehension. Alas, we could not procrastinate any further.”

Robert awoke in his state of unconscious bantering, calm and collected. He was succeeded in time allotted by his foundation of oddly interpreted constants. His decadent peer pitifully looked onward as his mentality could not possibly fathom such intricacies Robert Dudley had mentioned. He conjured up a radiance of delirium with lurking sparks of imagination as he stood from his seat, rubbing the flop sweat from his forehead. Unbound by his vivid rewinding, the successful Mr. Dudley confirmed a powerful message to anyone researching his files.

Intelligently, Robert returned to his thought-impressed state of excellence while agitated at the unreal thought of his protege knowingly noting his every faceted detail in uncanny decadence. Robert unknowingly turned perturbed at the thought. He glanced about his office in a virulent mental stage, dangerously vacating his protege out.

Mr. Dudley paced his room in a troubled disorder. What hypothetical length of cumbersome occurrences could have provoked the man to wander about such an ill-conceived notion that he must read the Ab Aeterno in full? A dark and gloomy power poured unusual and deranged telepathic frequencies onto the man’s already bankrupt soul. He must acquire it once more. Even a well-defined scene of deliverance satiated every compressed fiber of his mind.

A slow beating was heard from a short distance as Robert delivered a hastened stop from his pacing. His eyes were infinite in their gaze, the man’s heart raced in an asymmetrical pattern as he slightly turned to face his rather undaunted library of a variety of volumes of random novels. There, slumbering on the floor near his bookshelves shown itself. Oppressed by the fading discourse, Robert Dudley heaved himself onto the great book to further his crumbling wonderment of lunacy via the Ab Aeterno.