Kthaahthikha

In the second hour of morning a shaft of light broke through the rubble. It illuminated a young man in a puddle, his whiskers and hair matted and streaked with filth. He lay asleep, dreaming (it seemed), the one foot twitching from time to time as he awaited death.

The shaft of light, touching as it did mostly upon a cheek, began to creep slowly up the young man's face and around to the back of his head. It felt softly over the scratches and raised vertebrae, then drew back and slipped down to examine the hands - red-raw with digging at the concrete and steel.

A rat scuttled across the floor. It paused, staring blankly at the shaft, then slipped back away underground in a puff of dust. Particles rose up and drifted through the light, creating a glittering jewel bar that shattered as a droplet broke its course. The young man remained oblivious as the light slowly, carefully coallesced, and wrapped itself around the poor soul's gaunt, pallid, wretched form.

The tail of the light was the last to enter the pocket. It whipped about across the floor, raising swirls of dust, and was drawn away as, with utmost tender care, the illumination bore-up the man and carried him down through inky tunnels, onwards to the core of the porous earth.

Through vents, it bore him, and descended carefully the chimney crevices besmirched by untapped coal. Along a low gallery barely higher than an infant's eye it drew the sleeper further and further into the encroaching, abject blackness. In time, perched atop a looming, gaping gulf, the light moved forth and fell, ever and anon, dropping through countless unviewed strata beyond the very living Earth's dimensions.

Cave mouths swept by it. Caverns, blooming about the pair, revealed ghastly sightless apparitions stalking amidst barely glimpsed monoliths. Chutes from rivers that held roots in the Andes and the Himalayas, tumbled by in cascades churned to silver and cream. The roar of water grew about where once the rush of wind had reigned, and crevices in the chasm's edge showed luminescent seas where strange phosphorous beings snaked amidst the waves and thousand-toothed, betentacled entities reached-out into the void, their sinuous necks bearing jawless maws desperate for the feast.

In time the light passed by these horrors, falling into realms its nature showed as pitted, scarred and furrowed like the desert termite mounds. Great ants, the oldest of the Earth, moved from door to door, and winged ophidian harpies leapt from these granite battlements, sweeping about the tumblers and clutching to try and examine this curious prey. They followed long, a hundred leagues or more of falling slowed by eldritch means, before abandoning the nimbus and its burden as the shadows thickened, enfolded and condensed.

To darkest Cthon had the travellers reached. Now all about above and below was only the dense counterpane of night, as overhead there dwindled a single spark that quenched itself amidst stifling, dank despair. In the unseen vaults that girt them queer daemonesses seethed, the hundred thousand onyx brood of Ayaphet the cruel. Down below the earth had they crept, and sought to gain entrance to that impregnable iron hull, the Inner Wall which bords the globe beyond its inner fires.

Implacable, they were, these serpent-haired temptresses; hunched about the carcasses of unwary drakes and ghouls. In times passed they had sought to subjugate this realm, skulking through hairline crevices and reaching for gilded thrones. The Shadow Queen herself had launched ten thousand wights against them, and in the fires beneath where Cairns now lies a war had raged that drove them back, those ravishing night-things bent upon consumption of whole realms.

The light blazed fierce, yet in that shapeless void all beams fell short. No thing gleamed nor glimmered save the young man, stirring now and then in rest, a prize that two hundred thousand eyes followed down past their jagged aeries.

It was about this point that the chasm began to narrow. A slender chimney, juts made half its span. The light drifted through the midst of these prominences, catching now and then the faintest tracery of shape, the slightest warning before a stone loomed large below. Out upon these juts and crags the daemonesses swarmed, reaching-out their smooth black arms to clutch at a hem or sleeve. The light shone tenfold in its brilliance and the less adamant shied away, yet no true power could that beam exert save timid, ill-executed lashes of its shining tail.

This whip it was that Aezra caught, ecstatic nocturne queen. She clutched it in her taloned hands and keened in sharp delight, others crowding round to grasp flesh or jewelry and aid her in the feat. The light was halted, hung beneath a straining pendulum, as creatures slipped outwards on the rocks, suspended below and maintaining holds in the slightest of imperfections.

It was with some grave misgivings that the light, drawn ever upwards, let loose the young man and allowed him to fall downwards, wakening, into the shadow's gaping maw.