The Stone of Ubbo

This One lies beyond the Gate at Kaddat in the Frozen Waste, immersed in slime in the Grotto of Vapors. It was written by the Sorcerer of Mhu in his Scripture Without Name that no man may look upon a true likeness of Its features and survive to tell the tale of That which he hath seen. There it is also recorded that Obo Sadlath is the idiot god, the shapeless mass which gave form to the Shuggotts. Elsewhere, in the text of Bahlvadra, it is told that the One called Black Wind, or Ni-Arlat Hotep, Death Wind of Aegypt, will act as messenger for this Obo Sadlath, bringing madness and death to men who make bold to call forth the idiot mass, and destroying mortals who strive to read the Elder Keys through the Eye of Kaddatt (a lens of milky crystal known to the ancients but long lost in the Frozen Wastes).

Excerpt from The Whispering of The Wasps

The snows melted and the sun dried out the flooded fields of the island, leaving a crust of mud over the rows of flattened corn stalks and the narrow asphalt roads. Withered ears of corn lay discarded along the road sides, looking like grinning, mummified mouths full of rotten teeth. There was a new, welcome warmth in the air. The wind gusting among the pussywillows and reeds beside the river and through witch-gnarled patches of blackberry vines in the glens spoke of elder patterns of ritual that had long since been forgotten by all except Kraval, the lonely old sculptor, who listened closely as he turned and examined the stones that could be found in odd, unexplainable piles all over the island.

Sometimes the wind sang and sometimes it chanted, and sometimes it merely whispered in the hushest of thin voices--the toneless voices of Ubbo-Sathla. Kraval had learned of Ubbo-Sathla from the old pigskin covered book he had found cleaning out the hut abandoned by the Gypsy. In the book he had read that Ubbo-Sathla, the shapeless mass, lies sprawling and seething amid foul fumes, surrounded by star-hewn tablets, which, if Kraval understood the book correctly, were none other than the oracles which the Old Ones had called the Elder Keys.

Often the sculptor dreamed of finding the burial ground of Ubbo-Sathla in the distant northern climes, and of stealing the graven tablets, but he knew this was a virtual impossibility, for the Gypsy's book was hundreds of years old, and told of lore handed down for tens of thousads of years, reflecting an eldritch knowledge that had dissolved into myth far too long ago for its truth to be untangled from the knotted mesh of superstition and error by any modern investigator.

Still, Kraval listened and understood the intent of the wind's message, if not the literal meaning of its archaic expressions. And while he listened, he worked, turning over stone after stone, searching for the one stone which he had long envisioned himself some day finding, the one containing a form to be revealed by the liberating blows of his hammer and chisel. The windy voices guided him in his search, and they seemed to have spoken during the night just past, assuring him that today would be the day the stone revealed itself.

It wasn't much past noon before he found the stone he sought. That this was the correct one, the stone of which he had dreamed, he had no doubts. Already, he could feel a form trapped within it, the essence of its shape emanating in tangible waves of energy radiating from the rock. Wise men of science said that hard stone only appeared to be dense and solid, but was really an amalgamation of infinitesimal particles bonded together by invisible lines of force. That was part of the secret of Ubbo-Sathla, too. And his trained eye was able to peer into the structure of the stone, to see the true form imprisoned within.

The stone weighed fifty or sixty pounds. Carrying it the two miles back to the truck was an exhausting chore that left him drenched in perspiration and out of breath, his forearms aching, for he was no longer young, and was in imperfect health.

He eased the stone onto the bed of the truck with a feeling of deep satisfaction, for anticipation was so keen that he was already congratulating himself on the work he would soon accomplish.

Once the stone was safely transported to his humble hilltop studio, the sculptor immediately set to work on it, chipping away more and more extraneous material with each successive blow of the hammer on the chisel. Soon, the crude shape of a primitive head appeared. Wide staring eyes formed, eyes that were as round as searing suns and as open in wonder as those of a savage caught in the act of communicating with his gods. Flared nostrils and sealed ears and a thin-lipped mouth were revealed as the music of the steel tools rang in the air. The hammer blows became more careful, breaking away smaller and smaller chips of rock, and the image became more refined, its features more precise. After long hours of hard labor and deep concentration, the work was completed. Chisel and hammer dropped to the floor as the sculptor sank back in his chair and let out of sigh of relief. Kraval studied and then admired and then rejoiced in the beauty of the stone head for half an hour, proud of its perfection. The form had been freed from the rock, its inner essence released.

Then, bone-tired from his long day, the sculptor went to bed, too numb with exhaustion even to eat a simple dinner, leaving the stone head sitting on the work bench by the open window. Starlight shone down upon the stone as the sculptor lay inert, sleeping the profound, dreamless sleep of the dead. The wind from the island whispered over the smooth features of the stone face, lovingly tracing the line of the nose, the curve of the brow, the orbs of its strange, staring eyes. The voices in the wind--voices of Ubbo-Sathla--sang ancient melodies not heard since the archetypal form had been trapped within the stoney mass long cycles ago, and the tightly sealed ears of the stone head opened like blossoming flowers to hear the dissonant harmonies carried on the wind. The voices chanted ritual choruses while the pale stars shed their mystic radiance on the smooth stone face, and the face opened its mouth to reply in kind. The voices spoke in an archaic tongue not uttered since the rock piles that covered the island were first deposited, and the stone eyes turned up and gazed with unmistakable recognition upon the innumerable stars studding the black sky.

By morning Kraval was dead, his corpse a dry husk on the bed. On his work bench, a meaningless stone mass was discovered by the villagers, who had always considered the quiet, reclusive artist an undesirable and potentially dangerous misfit who would never contribute anything of value to their community. In its abstraction, the stone bore no resemblance to the visage Karval had chiseled, having no eyes, nor ears, nor nose, nor mouth. Villagers who saw the unfinished sculpture--the final product of the artist's undistinguished career--wondered what it was intended to represent, but none of them could hazard a guess at what monstrosity the sculptor had begun to craft when death had overtaken him.

Considering the stone an ugly and useless eyesore, the village fathers ordered it cast into the river. The old book where Kraval had read of Ubbo-Sathla and of his messenger, the Black Wind, was judged to be heretical, if not blasphemous, and was hastily burned along with other trash from the sculptor's studio. The wind still sings on the island of stones, but there is no one there left to heed it save the wasps, and they have a song of their own.