"...onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered...he was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again - "You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood." Turn - turn - blackness on every side...."

- from "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" by H. P. Lovecraft

t the bottom of the shallow pit near the edge of the rubble,
Amon found the likeness of the long-dead race molded in clay.
It had the pitiful eyes of the Nashelk, the Healer whose myths
were hand-painted in cuneiform by his father.
He did not pick up the clay idol.

The tentacles were covered in filth, he remembered
hearing a long time ago, although he could not pinpoint
whose voice had said it. From a distance, he saw the hut
that was once pointed out to him when he was still a child,
when initiation was still part of acceptance to the tribe.

He saw the Nashelk in his mind: the hut that smelled of herbs,
burning insect larvae, and a hint of something fetid which
he could not recognize. He remembered the sight of the fire
stoked by the Healer's hidden black limbs alone.
In a corner, the stone carvings from the husk of a dead star.
The mound of pungent salt from a dying sea.
And the bones that nearly filled the hut.

Amon heard the creature make a satisfied smacking sound
when he entered the doorway. "Your eyes do not fear me
anymore," it hissed in a forgotten language. Miles away,
the villagers waited for the invaders with white horses
and swords. They did not mind dying then.
When Amon returned, they would all be resurrected
and marked by the tentacled god. "Open your mouth.
Let me in to your gut." The creature rasped.
Amon did his best not to recoil, and the hands of thunder
reached in, wrenched his red lights out.

When he came back to the village and saw the corpses
of his fallen people, he brought them all back one by one.
Years later, the caves and gouges in rock canyons,
the seas, forests, and mountain fissures were full of them--
the ones who slithered and molted their skins,
the ones whose eyes were slit,
the ones whose hands were taken
to keep their body close to the ground.