Elysia by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online

to tell me? They're free again, and more powerful than ever. The Great Old Ones are back!'
    'Very nearly correct,' Kthanid answered at once. 'But no,
    they are not yet "free", as you have it — not yet. But their time is close now; soon they will have the power to be free; even now the constellations move into certain patterns which never should have been. Azathoth, which you knew in your world as the power of nuclear fission, is the betrayer. The mindless- nuclear chaos and confusion which spawned us all is a force of Nature and may not be denied. Out there in the vasty voids, gas clouds gather and Azathoth lights them to suns; stars are born which complete a pattern whose configuration is the one thing come down to us from a time beyond all other times; and yes, it would seem that for . Cthulhu and those you choose to call the Great Old Ones — after all these eons of time — at last the stars are coming right! Look!'
    Face-tentacles reaching out toward the huge ball of crystal on the onyx table between them — that milky shewstone whose entire opaque surface seemed slowly mobile, like a reflection of dense clouds mirrored in a still lake —Kthanid showed Crow a distant scene. For as the Earthman stared at the crystal, slowly the milky clouds parted to reveal a picture of an almost sacred place:
    Elysia's Vale of Dreams, at the foot of the Purple Mountains far to the south. Tiania had taken Crow there once, to that mysterious place. Mysterious, aye; for there, cut into the royal basalt, were the Thousand Sealed Doors of the N'hlathi, hibernating centipede creatures whose slumbers had already lasted for five thousand years and were not due to be broken for as long again. And the pattern of the doors — each one of which was thirty feet in diameter, sealed with bands of a white metal that no acid might ever corrode — was as the shape of a huge whorl against the face of the mountain, like the spiral of Andromeda.
    It is the spiral nebula in Andromeda!' came Kthanid's thoughts in answer to Crow's own, however unspoken. 'Each portal indicates an especially bright star in that mighty whorl. Now let me show you something else — ' and again he reached out with his face-tentacles.
    Now, superimposed over these thousand portals to the burrows of the immemorially dreaming N'hlathi, Crow saw Andromeda, how perfectly its principal stars matched the pattern of the doors. 'But see,' Kthanid indicated where Crow should look, 'there are three doors where no stars exist; but at this very moment spatial debris gathers in one of these places, and in the others ancient suns bid for rebirth. Gravity forms mass . . . and soon the raw and elemental power of nuclear genesis- will do the rest. Ah! Seer
    For even as Kthanid had spoken, so another star had blazed up, newborn and bright, central in the circular panel of one of the great basalt doors. And now only two spaces remained to be filled ...
    Kthanid turned his great head from the crystal, and at once milky clouds rolled as before across its surface. And: `So you have seen for yourself,' said the Elder , God, 'how time narrows down for us.'
    Crow kept his patience, knew that Kthanid constructed his case this way the better for him to grasp the whole picture. And sure enough:
    `Another portent,' said the golden Kraken in a little while. ' The giant poppies put up their shoots in the Vale of Dreams. Aye, and the N'hlathi stir in their burrows. It would seem that their ten-thousand-year cycle is broken. Soon the N'hlathi will waken and graze on the seed of the poppy, but utterly out of their season. And it is a matter of legend that this has only ever once happened before — when Cthulhu and his cohorts rose them up against universal sanity! And so you can see, this too is a bad omen .
    Now Crow must speak; he controlled his mental agitation, tried to ask only ordered, logical questions: 'Then the N'hlathi are harbingers of doom? I've heard it said that the history of the giant