There were some places humanity was never meant to go, things no human should know. We live in an ordered world only rarely disturbed by the merest disorder: a political upheaval here, a million dead in a tsunami there. The whole of our lives is spent in the space of a pore on the paper skin of a spinning ball of molten iron, microbes on the skin of a turtle in a vast cosmic ocean of darkness, and the only way we maintain our way of life is by keeping our eyes focused on those things we can classify into an alphanumeric system inside our rotting flesh drives.
There is history, history beneath our own feet, that would drive a man to claw at his skull to physically remove the knowledge from his brain. I have seen rituals that bring forth things that made my eyes bleed and my soul wither just to look at. Plato was wrong. Stay in the cave.
My travels had taken me to locales exotic and eldritch, and now, floating in the dry Ocean of Zomm, I was to face my final destiny. Out of the shadowy clouds a massive form emerged, seeming to stretch miles in height. Covered in pestilent gray fungoid ridges, it stood as a great tetrahedron shape, each spline sharp and jagged in endless mountainous crust. There was hideous activity along the surface of the shape, a twisting and curving not of traditional motion but of the corruption of time and space in its presence. Arms began to burst outward, growing out while spawning their own arms, a wretched rocky fractal that violated the senses. Truly it could be none other than the defiler of worlds, the cosmic paradox, the dread Thogfasa.
Before I could stop to scream myself to death, it was upon me, clutching me in a spire that felt like gravel covering putrid flesh, drawing me before its hellish face. Infernal screams and cataclysmic cacophony heralded a chasm rending apart along the horizontal ridge, spilling out light of a color no human had ever seen. As its demonic mouth erupted open, a smell like my own death, like a whole galaxy rotting in the sun seemed to smother my entire being.
I coughed and tried to be kind. “Jees, buddy, that dragon breath, though.” There was enough room between where its mountainous spire arm held me and my pocket for me to get out what I needed. “You should try some Spinnamint Gum. It’ll spin bad breath right out with its patented Spinnamonoxilite crystals, leaving your mouth, or whatever that is, fresher than a spin in the washing machine!”
I tossed the pack into the diseased abyss burning hellfire in front of me. And what do you know, that did the trick. Thogfasa revealed things to me that make everything else I’d learned up to then, things that would shatter the strongest being, seem like children’s wishes. The origins of us, of everything, the true nature of our existence, what waits for all of us in the end. It annihilated every individual bit of me. But Thogfasa brought me back, that I might be a harbinger of the new way. For he is coming, not now, but soon, soon enough.
In the meantime, I have been left to rot inside the desecrated ruins of my soul. I do not know when He will return. I do not know what will become of me. And I truly do not know if I am unquenchably mad or horrifyingly sane.
But I do know one thing.
Spinnamint cleans your mouth so fast it’ll make your head twist around your neck until your spinal cord severs.
