Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Twelfth Dognacht and Forty-Seventh Totemphatht

TWELFTH DOGNACHT

Days pass, then weeks. I cloister myself in the garret lodging, emerging only to eat or replenish the supply of titan-self. Though magnificent vistas and glorious sights reveal themselves unto me, none are my own dreamcity of youth. 

But as time slips past, I find I no longer care whether I rediscover my childhood haunt. Rather, it seems paramount that the dead titan’s memory be recorded. I delve deeper into the titan-self, purchasing not just from the first deiphagist woman, but from many vendors in back alleys and side streets. The power of a titan sears my mind day and night. And yet. And yet, when I put pen to paper in order that the titan might be revered, all words fail. The experience of titanhood cannot be translated into mere mortal words.

FORTY-SEVENTH TOTEMPHATHT

My money runs low. Already I forgo meals for more titan-self. Try as I might, no words flow. At the same time, the memory of my dreamcity has faded until only the vaguest impression of that crystalline inverted palace remain. 

Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Fourth Faroe

SIXTY-EIGHTH FAROE
Again and again I delve into the soul of a dead titan, searching for that elusive dreamcity I once called home. Days and nights crawl by, swifter than any bird yet never-ending as infinity. The chunk of titan-self grows small. I dread lest some other seeker find my dreamcity first and profane it with their presence. More titan-self is needed.

SEVENTY-FOURTH FAROE
Every journey to that deiphagist woman’s shop fills me with revulsion. In each passerby’s visage I see malignant marks of deiphagy. These base creatures dine on the great luminous being whose memories I have lived. Unknowing, unheeding, they desecrate a being more glorious than the sun. Knaves. After I find my dreamcity, I will preserve the life of this titan. I will write down each event, each miracle, each great feat. It will be a new epic. A new Gilgamesh, a new Iliad.

Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Nineteenth Faroe

A deiphagist accosted me as I wandered blindly near the abattoir mines wherein the city finds its sustenance. Ducking through a beaded curtain of knucklebones, I found myself facing the first female deiphagist I had ever met. The males of the deiphagists are fish-belly pale, their faces misshapen and lopsided, and their arms stretch almost to the knee. This female, and all others I subsequently encountered, was corpse-grey, and though their facial structure is often distorted, it is not to the extent of the male deiphagists. This creature’s husband, it appeared, was one of the flesh-miners toiling not far distant. She informed me that often these miners uncovered dim chunks of some crystalline but malleable material. As the chunks were not the flesh on which they dined nor the bone with which they built, the miners ignored their discovery at first. But one enterprising worker brought out a fist-sized lump and displayed it at market, where a traveler recognized pure memory of a titan. For titans are unlike the beings which serve them. Their memories and their deeds become intrinsically part of their physical form, just as they are sustained and grow ever stronger from the offerings of their slaves.

Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Seventy-Fourth Luong

At last the labyrinth streets of Akhule Otimnhir swallowed me up with a sigh, and I walked alleys and thoroughfares as a Buddhist walks a mandala. In contemplation I sought to regain those long-dormant childhood dreamlands whence my scintillating dreamcity had come. All that lingered from those carefree days was a memory of an inverted crystalline palace, balanced on its central spire. So much I could see clearly. But remembrance is not the same as experience, and I greatly desired to dwell in that dreamcity once again.

As any Dreamer knows, all forgotten dreamworlds drift slowly into the Void-Between-Voids and rest there for eternity and a day. A dedicated explorer might step among the dusty creations of young Einstein, or wander the twisted hallways and unnatural geometry which Hitler once imagined. I had no such lofty goals. All my desire was bound up in that diamantine palace, to stand at its peak once again and look over my lands.

At times I stood in Akhule Otimnhir’s five-cornered squares watching crowds swirl by, charting patterns of infinite complexity. Exported Victorians haggled with native deiphagists, ethereal beings glided past crinoid things, all interacting in a grim pavotte orchestrated by the pipe of dreams. For even the Void-Between-Voids, the absence of all existence, is subject to the whims of the blind idiot piper. Though in many worlds Azathoth remains unknown, in the Void-Between-Voids some offer prayers and incense to deepen his slumber while others seek realms beyond all thought in hopes they will be beyond his reach. It is in the shops and libraries of such escapists I hoped to find a trace of my childhood dreamcity.

Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Twenty-Second Luong

Searching for that childhood dreamcity, I stepped out from the eighty-first gate of the City of Countless Doors into the Void-Between-Voids, and there I saw much which has been forgotten throughout history, and still more which was never learnt.

Cadaver-titanss wallow there, cosmic beings lost to memory before our civilizations were conceived. In the lee of such fallen titans, massless hordes ebb and flow, their cities anthills upon an elephant’s corpse. Eons flow past and yet these long-abandoned corpses linger on, ravaged but enduring. Many memories and nightmares stalk such deiphagist cities, last remnants of souls haunting those who inhabit their remains. Consuming the flesh of a titan even a dead one, is a perilous act, and to huddle in the aura of unimaginable power brings awareness of cosmic secrets vaster than living minds may safely comprehend.

For an unguessable age I wandered amongst the whiteness of the void, searching for the dreamcity of my youth. My footfalls echoed in temples built before the first human left the cradle of Africa, pleasure-palaces of beings even the most ancient of races knew not, cities which were to Olympus as Xanadu is to London, vistas of such exquisite beauty that even my  memories of mother and wife and child greyed in comparison. But still my dreamcity called to my soul and I wandered on.

Consume, the Journal of a Dreamwalker: Seventh July

As a child, I was sickly. A frail constitution, inherited from my father, plagued me into my early teens. I spent many weeks confined to my bed by racking coughs or fever or any number of other ailments. No doubt my parents worried about me a great deal.  

But early on I discovered the secret of dreaming, of stepping into worlds created by the unconscious mind and taking control. The fashion now is to refer to such a practice as lucid dreaming, but at the time I encountered the idea in a popular weird fiction magazine, it was merely known as Dreaming. The capital stood for the control one influenced over the imagined worlds. Dreaming was my escape from countless pokes and concoctions from doctors and faith healers. Indeed, I spent so much time in the lands of sleep that I constructed a city therein, a glimmering city of gold and precious jewels, inhabited by all the heroes and adventures of my waking reading. Conan the Barbarian resided there, and Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, all the idols of a sickly boy, alongside my sometime friends and playmates and, later, girls whom I admired from afar.