Compilation of very short novels inspired by various art, mostly revolving around fantasy or sci-fi, each of them taking place in a different world.
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After days of travel, I finally see it, at the end of this sinuous and winding path, all in peaks, towers and arrows sloping skyward, resplendent in the glow of a permanent twilight: Chrana, the abandoned city.
Up there, the knell rings, and every shot is like a torch thrown into the night, which tears the shadows and reveals their monstrous secrets. I cannot bear these visions but I am incapable of ignoring them. The nightmare does not care that we look at it, that we listen to it or that we feel it, it sticks fast in my mind like a worm in a fruit and refuses to let itself be dislodged.
Pale pulls on his bit, each stroke of the bell makes him whinny, he does not want to continue. But it must! I shorten the reins still further; we will continue to move forward. In Chrana's library, I will find the answers to the horrors that swarm in my head, etched on my retina. It must be, there is nowhere else the forbidden old knowledge that will deliver me.
I arrive at the doors and Pale throws me to the ground, he will not go further. When I get up, the terror makes me back in the city. It is no longer Pale, it is a mass of flayed skin, oozing pustules and white filaments that float in the air like seaweed underwater.
Down below I hear them, their claws scrape against the stone, their scales are rubbed and their eyes dead...
I flee in the labyrinthine streets of the city. It is empty, dead, not a sound resonates except that of my disorderly passage while the walls rise to the sky and I get smaller with every step that brings me closer to the library. And in doing so it fills with the cacophony of sounds of the things that pursue me.
I hear them... The bark cracking when the corpses tear themselves from their trees in the village... The beasts, their faces eaten by moss and mushrooms, jostling to catch me, bumping into each other, getting tangled, merging... The farm animals, skinned to the bone, walking on their splintered bones, their white and broken teeth protruding from their bloody gums in a macabre smile... The parodies of men, on the beach, covered with scales and the loose, drooping flesh rising out of the water, the skin of swollen corpses encrusted with barnacles, purple around the anemones' feet and their milky eyes rolling in their sockets... The birds, chasing me through the forest, infested with worms digging in their red flesh from which suppurates a blackish blood while white maggots burst their orbits...
I run, stumble, fall and get up in the big stairs of the palace, at the top I would find the library, at the top...
I hear it... him. The monster. The creature. The God. The thing... An unbearable view, beyond reason, his eyes, everywhere, his tentacles, omnipresent... He advances, in the background, behind his horde, I know, I hear, I hear them, the gurgle of his immense mouth and the clatter of thousands of fangs that are so many legs for him to move...
I crash on the last step, I start to roll... I do not want to go down! My nails break on the stone and my fingers scratch. I regain my footing, and pass the door of the citadel. The library! Quick! I have to find it! Find the answers, no matter the questions! ... There! The immense door marked by a book from which emerges a flame! The library!
I enter, I slam the shutter behind me and lean against it. I am safe, before me extend the infinite rays of Chrana's great library.
All empty.
Translated from French with the invaluable help of my friend Tycho. May he never need to seek Chrana's library knowledge.
