From: "John & Christy Thompson" To: Subject: Chaosium Digest v36.12 Date: Sunday, December 08, 2002 11:11 PM Chaosium Digest Volume 36, Number 12 Date: Saturday, Dec. 7, 2002 Number: 1 of 4 Contents: * AN EVENING WITH ASMODEUS (CTHULHU Fiction) by Michael Blenkarn with contributions from Brooke Johnson Editor's Note: This issue features a new piece of fiction by Michael Blenkarn. For more of his excellent fiction, check out the Archive. "An Evening with Asmodeus" is a sequel to "The Whippoorwill House Affair" despite the last part of that tale not yet having been completed. Michael assures me that "Asmodeus" contains no real spoilers to the ending of "Whippoorwill House" so feel free to read it without such concerns. As always, submissions are needed and encouraged so keep them coming. Enjoy! ANNOUNCEMENTS * CULTS COMPENDIUM AVAILABLE FROM WIZARDS ATTIC At long last, the magnificent Cults Compendium is available for sale from Wizards Attic. Softcover is ISS 1608, $45. Hardcover is ISS 1609, $60. In general, this 352 page volume is very similar in layout to the first two. The book contains 44 cults, including all of the cults from Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Trollpak, and those printed in White Wolf and Different Worlds magazines. Associated background articles from Wyrms Footnotes and similar sources give you a complete breakdown on how rune magic, spirit magic, elementals, and runes play their part in Glorantha. Wrapping up the book are all of the designer's notes, some of which have never been published before. A vastly improved index makes this material accessible all in one book. Topics are vividly detailed with the addition of over 50 new pieces of art, bringing the total over 110 snapshots into cult life (and death). Lastly, genealogies for the various pantheons along with an updated cult compatibility chart surpassing even the one found in the Runequest Companion are herein. In the end, it is a book that provides untold hours of Gloranthan reading and gaming fun. To purchase the book, go to http://www.wizards-attic.com/NewReleases.html or http://www.wizards-attic.com/IssariesLicense.html. You can also order by phone, fax, or mail; go to http://www.wizards-attic.com/Contact.html for details. Cheers, Stephen Martin Issaries, Inc., publisher of HeroQuest, Roleplaying in Glorantha 900 Murmansk St., Suite 5; Oakland, CA 94607 Phone: (510) 452 1648 Fax: (510) 302 0385 See our extensive web site at * ISSARIES, INC. ANNOUNCEMENT GLORANTHACON VIII UPDATE March 7-9, 2003 in Toronto, Canada "Orlanth is Dead. Its time to party!" The sons and daughters of the Goddess gather for ceremony and celebration. The convention features an array of Gloranthan freeforms, adventure modules and seminars, together with select games from other roleplaying systems such as RuneQuest and Pendragon Pass. Plus, the official launch party for Issaries Inc's HeroQuest roleplaying game! Our Guests of Honour include the _Rad_ Emperor himself, Greg Stafford, and the rumoured head of the Imperial Secret Service, the indefatigable Mark Galeotti. Supporting luminaries include Nick Brooke, David Dunham, Martin Laurie, Robin Laws, Stephen Martin, Sandy Petersen, Roderick Robertson and Ken Rolston. Even barbarians are welcome under the healing rays of the Red Moon. Soon, all Glorantha will be under Her benevolent gaze. Highlights: Some of our featured events include the HeroQuest Launch party, Gaming With Greg, Gloranthan Lore Auction, Eat At Geo's, Gloranthan Computing, the GTA dinner, Lawn Dart Wars, the Imperial Lunar Handbook seminars and all things Gloranthan. Featured Live-Action/Freeform Game: Birth of the Goddess Can you become one of the Seven Mothers? Or will the Goddess just become fuel for cruel Carmanian sorceries? Written by Mark Galeotti, we discover what really happened in Zero Wane. Recent News: Our schedule is up on the website: Check out for details - we have over 60 events planned with more arriving every day. Moon Rites: Jelenkev Variorum, volume I Moon Rites is a 60 page collection of Lunar material featuring articles, fiction, scenarios and artwork from some of Glorantha's most talented explorers and shapers. It includes excerpts from Greg Stafford's Lunar novel, Gladiators by Martin Laurie, Crime & Punishment by Mark Galeotti, the Crimson Bat, decadent cults, myths, encounters and more! Moon Rites will be printed in conjunction with the Chaos Society, proud publishers of Tradetalk and other fine Gloranthan works. For a limited time, Moon Rites can be pre-ordered through our website, while supplies last. Cost is $13 US ($21 CDN) - if you order before Dec 21, 2002, we will cover the cost of postage in North America. Check out as well. Contest: Win a game with Greg! Greg Stafford has kindly offered to run a game of HeroQuest for six lucky players. Two seats will be awarded to randomly chosen pre-registrants. Other spots will be awarded as prizes during various events during the convention as well - check out our schedule for details. Call for Events: If you have an event you want to run, contact . Your event can be for Hero Wars, RuneQuest, boardgames, miniatures, a Live Action or Freeform game or a seminar topic. We don't mind as long as its about Glorantha! Running an event earns a $20 discount when pre-registering. Running a second event admits you to the convention free. Other Activities: For those who are not wanting to spend their whole time in Toronto dealing with All Things Glorantha, we have organized a walking tour of downtown Toronto, designed to hit some of the museums, galleries and parks. For some highlights, checkout for some hot tips. When is it? March 7th to 9th, 2003 Where is it? Gloranthacon is being held at the Toronto Colony Hotel, 89 Chestnut St., Toronto, Ontario. Call Toll Free 1-800-387-8687 (or 416-977-0707) or link to and reserve your room. Make sure you mention you are a part of GloranthaCon to get the convention rate. Single or Double$109 CDN (about $70 US) Triple $124 ($80 US) Quad $139 ($90 US) Con rates extend from Sunday, March 2nd to Sunday, March 9th. Remember to book your room before February 14th so we can make our room commitment! Pre-registration: Pre registration for the weekend is $50 (US) until Feb 1, 2003. All pre-payments must be received by Feb 3, 2002 GTA dinner is an additional $30 (US) and seating is limited Sign up online at or mail us at: Gloranthacon VIII 374 Glenholme Ave. Toronto, Ontario M6E 3E5 Canada Make all checks and money orders payable to Gloranthacon. Paypal is also accepted. Send funds to Glorantha@Glorantha.com Advertising: Interested in getting the word out at the Con? We have space for 1/4, 1/2 and full page ads in the program book or "Moon Rites." Contact us IMMEDIATELY for details or check out our website. Other Ways to Contact Us: Discussion of the convention and ideas as well as help and advice for events can be found at . Email us at . Hope to see you there! The GloranthaCon Ring ------------ AN EVENING WITH ASMODEUS By Michael Blenkarn with contributions from Brooke Johnson "The circle will be completed. There will be thirteen disciples in the Order of Me'elxekrah, Scribers of the Baphomet in Filth, messiahs to the Shaggai, progeny of Nyarlathotep. The Thirteenth Disciple, flourishing unknowingly among the foetid ranks of the decaying leftovers commonly known as modern humanity, will come into his power. They are what humanity was first designed to be, what it inexorably declined from - they are now inhumanity. They are of the first eon of divinity, conquerors among the beings of the Axis of Perdition. They are the Children of the Dead Sun, Shadow Lords of the bio circuits. The madness swells through the gates of nothingness. A dulcet torch pierces Mechanikanna's excrement - a single tri-lobed eye. They are the rejoicing damned. Leering from the black abyss, ever tearing towards the goal, a million screaming voices ever surging to tenfold. When Twelve become Thirteen, to the thunderous, violating song of the inverse stars, time itself has died." Excerpt from a modern rendering of Liber Maleficia Part One Late September 2001 Dark forbidding streets, rain cascading in washes of glittering cold in the strangely subdued glow of the pale white lamps stretching ponderously overhead. Silence settled chillingly in the last hints of dusky gloom. The two figures hovered in the shadows away from the lonely lamps, motionless and poised. Only the faintest glimmers of light on them betrayed their forms at all - the faint oiliness distinguishing black leather from black shadow, the threatening contours of slim, polished blades barely registering, and the flickering of light on unblinking eyes as distinguishable from the monochromatic smears of their brows and cheekbones. They almost appeared to be constructed entirely of independent facets of light, as if a change in perspective would ruin the illusion of a human shape altogether. A woman was walking briskly through the puddles, lazily swinging a tennis racket, strings protected from the rain by slim plastic casing. The seconds seemed to fracture while she passed, each step a ponderous eternity while the glinting facets moved with arachnid speed and character. There was barely a flicker altering the light levels, but cohesion swirled the fragments of reflectance into emaciated forms that loomed suddenly out of the dark, gaunt, pale fingers grasping eagerly, which though tinctured with humanity, spoke of an insatiable black hunger. Late November 2001 The Christmas decorations had not yet gone up as of yet; the employees were less pleasure-starved than others and were less intent to cling to cloying festivals of materialism. This was jointly a place of work and casual, theological cynicism. Nihil Industries may have been an international concern (in positive and negative terms) but there were still corners of it that clung to the anachronisms of such mammoth institutions. While the Nihil Building in London may well have been a monument to both post-modern business acumen and the innovative ways that concrete can make an even uglier building than a one-room hut made of recycled dung, the last vestiges of this Teesside office was of a much older school. Whatever sinister happenings were being orchestrated in more developed parts of the company, this was still a place where someone could conceivably simply walk into a disused room, fill it with large piles of yellowing paper, pencil holders and some sort of satirical poster for the wall, or maybe some droll Dilbert cuttings, and within a week be considered a long standing employee and added to the already inefficient and obscure payroll system. In other words, not the circumstances projected by the corporate image. The autumnal light was rapidly diminishing, and the dinginess of the office was slowly masked by lengthening shadow. The room was developing a great profusion of scattered documents like the golden leaves floundering in the breeze outside in the executive car park. Filing cabinets, half-open were littered with them; shelves, stacked with uneven folders relinquished them from overstuffed, pregnant loose-leaf files, and the desk, sliced by the dying sunlight flickering through the dusty blinds, was equally chaotic. The wastepaper basket was almost volcanically disgorging a flurry of notes. The resident of the office was leaned wearily back in his problematical swivel chair, pen tucking messy auburn hair behind one ear, leafing through a hefty bedraggled manuscript. The bewildered look in his eyes bespoke his incomprehension. Sighing, he shifted his posture, crossing one gangly leg across the other with the jerky movements of a marionette. He appeared young, weak chinned, and his thinness was accentuated by his unhealthy pallor. Engrossed in his reading, he barely registered the crisp, militaristic rapping on his door, and only appeared to recognise the existence of his visitor when the man's formidable shadow passed over the light and a bony hand flicked the light-switch with a severe, curt motion. The younger man suddenly seemed gripped by a paroxysm of subordinate, unconscious guilt, as if expecting a reprimand for an imagined offence. 'Mr Seth! I-,' he stammered, gulping for breath and reiterating his words, 'Mr Seth, I did not expect your presence. Please excuse the tardiness.' The visitor smiled coldly, but only with his lips. Over thin glasses he regarded the employee disapprovingly with eyes as warm and humane as an ice pick. His gaunt features rendered him almost cadaverous, and his voice reverberated with deep, sardonic tones. 'I seldom make appointments, young man. Before you relinquish that document, I must ask of your opinions of it.' His voice chilled the weak-chinned man, throwing him back into adolescence and the presence of a horribly feared teacher standing over him. It seemed implicit in the tones of the request that a deficient, unsatisfactory answer would warrant banishment to a nether hell. 'I, I, found it unsatisfactory, my, ah, sir. His last work that we published, 'The Whippoorwill House Affair', was a successful and accomplished piece of work, but this manuscript is, ah, practically incoherent. There seems little temporal grasp, or continuity behind the, ah, meandering. The just seem to be the speculative scribbles of an amateur. The ideas are there, but he, um, seems to find it impossible to use them with any, ah, degree of professionalism. The, uh, well, what I mean is, it isn't publishable. James Aspera's 'An Evening With Asmodeus' is not a novel, but, what would it, um, I would compare it to, let me see, a glorified scribbling of prose on a napkin after several too many glasses of wine, ahahahaha.uh..huh. I, that is, uh..' The weak-chinned man, sweating profusely under the gimlet stare, faltered and trailed off. Seth's mouth contorted into the smile of someone who has studied the technique but had never grasped the motivation factor meant to accompany it. It flickered and then was gone, so quickly that the nervous subordinate felt he'd imagined it. Seth watched him silently for a moment, his eyes scrutinizing the depths of his soul. The younger man felt as manly as a hamster, with Patrick Seth filling the entire universe. When the now visibly trembling man felt almost ready to give up and lie down like a hedgehog in the path of a steamroller, Seth spoke again in his deceptively quiet voice. 'An astute summary. However, Mr Falstaff," he said in a clipped tone that radiated with Seth's lack of regard for said personage, "has insisted on obtaining the manuscript for his own personal evaluation. I appreciate that you still have the last section of it to read, so please give me the rest of the manuscript so that I can pass it on to Mr Falstaff. I give you the remainder of this evening to finish the final section of the book, and furthermore to read through the extra notes and Dictaphone transcripts that I provided, to attempt to wring some explanation from them.' Seth undiplomatically snatched most of the manuscript from the younger man without waiting for a reply. His subordinate cringed, wrapping his arms around himself in a pathetic, empty gesture of self-defense. Seth's eyes narrowed. He revolved on his foot like a drill sergeant and then stalked out, looking almost corpse-like enough to attract hopeful and enterprising funeral directors as he strode away down the darkening corridor. Letting out his breath explosively, the younger man quickly negotiated his way into a deep draw in his desk and retrieved an illicit bottle of Jim Beam for purposes of calming anxiety. He shuddered as he gulped it down and coughed as the potent spirit set his mouth temporarily aflame, then blearily picked up the meager sheaf of papers he had left, intoxication already beginning to take hold. The cheap bulb overhead flickering erratically, he rested his arms on the desk and began to read. Late September 2001 The barest in fluctuations in the patterns of light and shade occurred as graceful evil flowed liquidly out of the sulphurous light of the lamps. The first of the figures blended in and out of shade, each characteristic naturally attuning to the patterns of light around it, melting inconspicuously through blackened night and sooty orange light indiscriminately. Like an assassin, or a hunter - each movement was an essay in supreme confidence and stealth. The woman's retreating back was diminishing along the street, but this was immaterial as she was running in precisely the wrong direction. If viewed from certain angles, contours in the air suggested a repugnant half smile on the suggestion of a gaunt face. Lurking behind, clinging to the shadows, the other figure swam through the air, but with a somnolent, unseeing gait, as if while possessing the abilities of the former, was in some intoxicated stupor. The first figure made what might be ascertained as an assertive gesture to the other, and their pace began to quicken. As they progressed through the shadows, their forms began to coalesce from the natural resources around them. Her feet pounded through the puddles as, clothes muddied and torn, she stumbled with panic, breathing in terrified, quick gasps which spread in a wavering trail of mist behind her. The shadows around her in the streets were constantly distorted, weaving together and shrouding any ghost of reassurance. She felt more than heard or saw the pursuit. Every shadow seemed to suggest those tell-tale points of barely perceptible light that indicated her enigmatic pursuers. Were they running after her with the stealth of trained assassins or merely flitting mockingly from shadow to shadow like spectres with an evil streak of humour? The buildings around her were skeletal, dilapidated, wholly derelict. She stared with bewilderment as she ran. Surely no part of the city was this decrepit? She recognized none of the buildings she ran past, towering piles that hulked silently and desolately, with boarded and broken windows, and walls streaked with suggestions of incomprehensible graffiti. Stark, bent street lamps, like decrepit cerebra lolling on broken spinal columns jerkily arced above, emanating the feeblest of grey glows. This neighbourhood was the natural breeding ground for drug culture, in its graceless and unconscious depravity and decadence. The street seemed to exude an atmosphere of dormancy like a social volcano gathering to erupt a wave of degenerate, shambling ghouls fresh from being punctured by their filthy needles. Looking back, she could discern no sign of pursuit, and thick fog was coalescing fast out of the air, making the street lamps diffuse. No wonder she was lost, with the fog boiling insanely outward to cloak everything in damp condensation and mask the roads enigmatically. She wondered what would happen first, whether her shady pursuers would catch her or whether some socially redundant, gibbering inadequate would spawn from the litter-strewn gutters to accost her with a plaintive whine or a ready weapon. She glanced around again nervously. Yes, there was half a glass bottle, the bottom end smashed into a dizzying array of fragments in clumsy concentric circles. No, the fragments were arranged in some crude, malignant pattern, like a clumsy pentacle. Or was that a trick of the light? The sharp spears of glass at the base of the fracture on the bottle glimmered evilly with touches of crimson. Blood. Had the injury been sustained in the breaking of the bottle or had it been wielding like a weapon? A random Glaswegian voice echoed mockingly in her head, "Stitch that, pal.." Had ritual incisions been made in pallid skin in genuflection to chemical gods? Either way, the jagged tongues of broken glass sliced their way through her already frayed nerves. Panting with exhaustion she threw herself at the door to a building that seemed uninhabited. Surprisingly, the door opened at her touch with an agonized creak. The latch had been broken and splinters of wood circled around the gash in the doorframe that rendered the lock useless. She shut the door as quietly as possible and slumped down into a crouch, whimpering at the horrible aching in her limbs. She heard nothing but the distant static of cars on occupied roads. Her fevered interior monologue continued. What had those things after her been? Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the gloom. Furtively, trembling, she scoured the shadows among ancient filing cabinets. Was that a telltale flicker of chains, rings glittering on a brow? Could she hear the faint jingling of metal accessories? She shook her head dumbly as if to try and dislodge or disorientate her paranoia. Hesitantly she took a few steps towards a full-length glass door reflecting the minimal light on the far side of the room. Maybe there was a back door that she could slip out of, a network of littered alleys that could weave an imperceptibly false trail for her pursuers. As she thought this, two tall and imposing shadows rose up behind her and blotted out the last vestiges of the light. There was a strangely musical clinking of chains and the graceful swish of blades being slid reverentially from leather sheaths. Her back prickled with needles of ice as she perceived them, and eyes hard as fragments of black ice and just as compassionate narrowed in the dark. Then inhumanly quick limbs flashed out of the night holding unutterably cruel barbed blades. The woman threw herself forward in desperation. Late November 2001 There should be at least a modicum of concern among electricians, or the manufacturers of lightbulbs at this point. The prevalence of flickering, inefficient bulbs might be over-emphasized in these narratives, but perhaps not. At any rate, the syncopated jaundice glow of another less-than-standard bulb illuminated considerably more insalubrious surroundings. Droplets cultivated by an ancient tap, irregularly plummeted to oblivion in a stained washbasin. Cold, musical echoes filtered across the air as each consecutive drop united with a stagnating pool. The combination of flickering light, rhythmic dripping and the angry outbursts of distant vehicles had long since become peripheral, unconscious information to Matt Swindell, who sat in a perceptibly disintegrating armchair with his brow furrowed in a mixture of concentration and indignation. He was soldiering his way through the novel resting in his lap. Eventually he slammed the covers shut with an authoritative thunderclap, as if trying to trap the information inside before it had a chance to leap off the pages and fly joyfully away to seek its fortune in the Big City. Swindell tossed the book aside with an irritated flick of his wrist and then retrieved the fragments of a cigarette from an ashtray so overflowing that it resembled an ant-heap that had been cremated. With a look of revulsion and disgust he tossed the dog-end aside after experiencing the interesting taste it had developed, and then negligently emptied the ashtray out of the window. He was fuming, incandescent with rage. Unconsciously he smoothed his hair back in a supposedly calming gesture, inadvertently stretching the skin on his face so that his eyes appeared to pop out like someone had dropped an icicle down his trousers. He walked into his apartment kitchen and fished around in the cupboards, accidentally dislodging a considerable backlog of half-empty bottles as he furtively searched for his favorite spirit from amongst his formidable collection. The resulting explosion of rage echoed off the walls of his flat for some time, especially after one particularly weighty bottle dropped neatly and inevitably in a lazy arc connecting with his right foot. The evening was not working out for Swindell. He had read a heavily fabricated novel by someone who'd made a vast number of disparaging comments about him, and had shown a remarkable lack of tact in doing so. He decided that next time he laid his hands on James Aspera he'd tie the arrogant sod's legs around his head in an attractive bow, then make him literally eat his words by feeding him his book 'The Whippoorwill House Affair' page by page, possibly with a piquant tomato relish. He smiled at the mental image that that conjured up. Admittedly Aspera hadn't made too many mistakes about the events that had dogged the unlikely pair, and Swindell might have tolerated those discrepancies if the man could have been at least a little more responsible, self-effacing or polite about the whole situation. Wearily he surmised that it was foolish to expect Aspera to do any of those things, merely because if Swindell was frank in his opinions, Aspera had about as much strength and co-ordination with a weapon as was needed to burst a balloon at point blank range best out of three, rejoiced in his own craven cowardice as if it was a virtue, and therefore had to move the focus away from his own shortcomings by exaggerating the ones of those around him. Still, he thought, sighing audibly, the damn book was in print now and there wasn't a single thing that he could do about it. Admittedly it was being marketed as a work of fiction, but there were principles at stake. Hey, steak, now there was a golden idea.. Cradling his generously proportioned drink, Swindell maneuvered his way along to his freezer, making sure not to make any more accidental messes. Late September 2001 The first sensation was of sunlight. Uncomfortable, cloying sunlight magnified through smeared glass, beating in sharp and scattered shafts down into the cellars. The woman's eyelids twitched and her expression twisted in discomfort, and then hesitantly she shifted from her sprawled position, body screaming affronted complaints at each movement of her joints. With obvious difficulty she rolled into a patch of shadows, clinking as she negligently shifted across the fragments of broken glass scattered around her. With one instinctively searching hand she felt for the tennis racket she had been carrying, and clasped it like a shield to her chest with visibly shivering hands. Judging by the steep angles that the uncomfortable light was slanting along, through the small windows, smeared by dirt and dust, it was some time past dawn and she had lain unconscious in her twisted posture for several hours, easily long enough for the veils of night to be teasingly pulled back. Was it sunlight? It seemed so. The stairs, pitted and cracked, leaned on a precarious angle from the wall, the wood splintering and ancient. When she had flung herself through the glass door without opening it she had not anticipated steps, and the thought of her fall made her conscious of a thousand cuts and abrasions. She winced as every injury flickered with acute pain, and she involuntarily retracted into a fetal position, cradling her obstinately throbbing head with shaking hands. Then a noise suddenly scythed the peace and wriggled into her mind from the offices above. A telephone was ringing in regular jarring bursts that thundered in her head, causing it to throb even more. Stumbling and weaving she miraculously navigated her way up the stairs and half-fell into a messy office, its desk piled with sheaf upon sheaf of official looking documents and the dormant blank screen of an outdated, unused computer. The rings of the telephone seemed to have projected, coming less from a definable source up here as much as having reverberated inside her head in a private ordeal of irritation. Groggily she fumbled among the papers with an unbecoming clumsiness, and finally located the phone beneath an old newspaper. She swept her disheveled hair backwards and tentatively lifted the telephone to her ear. The mocking refrain of the ring instantly stopped. Sitting heavily down in a battered swivel chair she stuttered out a hello, weary fear playing across her features as she eyed the middle distance with something approaching trepidation. A puzzled look spread over her face as a peculiarly dissonant dialing tone echoed from the receiver. After a moment of concerned thought, she furtively hammered a number into the handset and with more determination kept the receiver to her ear as she scanned the desk for a blank sheet of paper. Then she looked puzzled again, as after a few rings the phone reset itself back to dialing tone, which had become noticeably more resonant and discordant. She listened a little more closely. No, that wasn't a dialing tone, but a constant wave of sound emanating from some unknown source. There was the crackle of static electricity there, a faint but insistent hum as of some mechanism as if on standby, the barely audible sounds of machinery and strangely, the murmurings of human voices, though what they were saying was inaudible. These weren't all initially apparent; the soundscape seemed to unfold from one barrage of enigmatic noise to a more coherent amalgamation of those core elements. Unoccupied, her eyes strayed across the scattered documents. A chill passed down her spine. They weren't administrative documents, but collections of completely alien symbols meandering across pages spattered with pinpoints of blood. One symbol recurred over and over. She examined it, trembling, then a rising shriek echoed down the line. A mantra, twisted as emanating from between mandibles rather than lips, words filled with fear as if the speaker had no intention to mouth such blasphemies but was irresistibly compelled by some unseen force. PULL DOWN THE STARS AND BRAND THEM INTO THE SHRIVELED EYES OF GOD. GRIND THE TEMPLES INTO GRAVEL AND TEAR HIS FACE WITH THE SHARDS. SUNDER THE CROSS INTO THIRTEEN STAKES AND PIERCE HIS EMACIATED FLESH. THIS IS THE PROMISE OF THOSE THAT WOULD MAKE US AS INSECTS ... The screaming descended into an inarticulate wail of agony through which a final phrase meandered in and out. LET SATAN CLING FEEBLY TO GOD FOR THEY SHALL BE DESTROYED TOGETHER! Her eyes widened, and she hurriedly slammed the phone down and ripped the connection out of the socket. But the sound still reverberated out of the air, from all directions suddenly as she started to her feet, and staring around her began to back away, brandishing her tennis racket like a weapon. The little twinges and discomforts of her body were forgotten in the waves of adrenaline, and the events of the previous night began to take on a malign significance. The sun seemed to have faded or disappeared; she slowly edged across the room towards the blinds, attempting to be as silent as possible. It was in doing so that she began to perceive the faint but insistent sounds from the cellar below. In her frightened state she fingered the blinds erratically. Out of the dusty window she could see fog lazily drifting across the ground, with absolutely no sign of the sun whatsoever. The sounds from below were becoming louder and deeper, as if the flagstones of the floor were slowly being ground inexorably away by something underneath, or in some imperceptible way, coterminous to them. Her nerve broke, she rattled the door handle in panic and was astonished to find the door swinging ponderously open with a creak of ancient and neglected hinges. Whimpering involuntarily, she crept out into the street. It was freezing, the fog clinging, damp, and snow crunching underfoot. She was hopelessly unprepared for the temperature, hopelessly. She made some attempt to wrap her flimsy coat around her, and then blindly floundered into the fog. Why was there snow in September? Were the buildings different? She couldn't tell through the wreaths of mist. From behind in the office, there was the sound of something grappling its way up the stairs. She fled, running blindly and in a numbing, irrational panic, until up ahead she saw a human shaped shadow, looking diffuse through the fog and moving nervously and slowly. She fancied she heard the figure muttering to itself, in a relieving human tone obviously as worried and bewildered as she was. Gaining a little confidence, she stepped towards it. There was a sudden blaze of malignant green light. Its dripping hair matted to its unhealthily pale forehead, the figure before her spun round. The fragments of flagstone scattered into dust. The first figure brushed the last excrescence from her esoteric clothing with practiced swipes. She was a woman, and possessed the same unearthly, effortlessly lithe quality as her compatriot, unlike the man's companion on the previous night. The second merely gestured irritably, and the residue fountained off the leather clothing and erupted from where it was caked around chains and other metal accessories. The second glanced at the first with a mixture of amusement and contempt as the less efficient figure continued to brush ineffectually at its clothes. Her eyes, agate hard and with a strangely becoming cruelty and arrogance, rose to meet his, which bored back with the misanthropy of gods. Her neck was bared, and incised with a three-inch vertical slash. The flesh was stretched open to accentuate the hole and safety pins glittered to hold the wound sickeningly open. She muttered, an inarticulate gurgle of blood drowning the vocal cords. The silence of the other was somehow more powerful and more unashamedly black, speaking reprimands through the movements of eyes like globes of ice. His jet black hair was bound back painfully tight, a spike protruded from beneath his lower lip as he gave a barbed-wire smile at nothing. They had lured their prey through easily as was often the case. Those little patches where reality was thin and could be stretched in the unlikeliest of fashions; so easy to manipulate. Doubtless the woman had been to busy running to register the moment of transition. She'd find out soon enough. The authoritative man made an imperious gesture and they began to stalk up the creaking stairs, his leather-coat billowing out behind him. Late November 2001 Placing his drink on the corner of his paper-strewn desk, Matt Swindell idly fingered the package that his copy of the book had arrived in the morning before. He made a surprised exclamation as a sheaf of papers fell out onto the carpet and spread in disarray. He hastily collected them together, half hoping they were a list of agonized apologies for his treatment in the book. In fact, he surmised that Aspera had sent him an advance sample of his next work, supposedly another work of truth marketed as fiction. There didn't seem to be that many pages, so Swindell settled back down to read the fragments, enigmatically titled, "An Evening With Asmodeus - Final Chapter". Late September 2001 But this man was human, as human emotions fought on his face as he tentatively stepped forward. The expression on his pale and stricken face almost mirrored her own as she staggered into the green glare, fear exerting its own gravity upon her limbs. Fear and wariness were there, but a strange gratitude at signs of life. He spoke, but her ears barely registered the words at the music of any voice with human tone and cadence. The man started forward, knocking stray strands of his long hair back across his shoulder irritably and hesitantly moving to steady her with his other hand. At last, another human being, she thought. Then she swiveled into the source of the malevolent green glare, and the world dropped into the distance.. (Continued) -- To unsubscribe from the chaos-digest ML, send an "unsubscribe" command to chaos-digest-request@chaosium.com. Chaosium Inc., Call of Cthulhu, and Nephilim are Registered Trademarks of Chaosium Inc. Elric! and Pendragon are Trademarks of Chaosium Inc. All articles remain copyright their original authors unless otherwise noted.