This will be my final post. The visions that have started to haunt me are terrifying, and I almost don’t dare to write them down. However, I know that they are not figments of my imagination, but a truth that has always been inside me, waiting to be awoken by the murals on those godless walls. I don’t remember all the nightmares, but as soon as they started, I wrote them down because I felt that they were important. They are just shattered pieces, but they still tell more than one might ever want to know.
In my first dream, I found myself on a hill that rose above a wildly sprawling jungle, while the cries of agitated animals from the surrounding trees pierced my ears. My skin was covered with thick brown fur, and the impressions that reached me seemed incomplete. The sun was not visible as a thick blanket of clouds covered the entire sky. Nothing seemed too bad, yet a part of me knew that something was coming, something that would approach from beyond the sky, bringing with it a transformation that would change this jungle and this world forever. The clouds were grey, dreary, distant, and seemed oppressive, robbing life. It was a sea of bleakness, but it did not stay that way for long.
Suddenly, it was dazzlingly bright. The sky seemed to shine with the lights of a thousand suns, and the clouds were swept into a vortex of glaring light and distorted, warped air. Only for fractions of a second, I could see the huge stone, surrounded by sparkling streaks, striking the earth and causing everything to fade away in a hot, searing flash.
Slowly, my vision cleared, and I felt as if time were speeding up, as if I could see the site of the impact cooling over centuries and the dust thinning, the molten earth turning back to stone, and a gigantic crater gaping where the object had struck. My thoughts seemed to suddenly dissipate, and vast beaches and deep canyons passed by. The world seemed to change: the climate, the lands, the animals, and the plants…
Everything changed.
Everything… changed.
That was the thought I woke up to the following morning, the thought that planted an uneasy, foreboding feeling inside my heart. Images of that crater ate into my mind. I saw that seething, deep hole over and over again in front of my inner eye, even when I tried to distract myself with walks or my work.
Nothing helped. I was almost compelled by unknown urges to quickly fall back asleep that evening. Soon I found myself dreaming again, back at the crater, looking down at its bottom, far below me.
But at the crater, it wasn’t just a crater… something else was there. I could sense it. Somehow I knew that it wasn’t just the earth that had been ripped open, but something more. The place itself had been violated, receiving a gaping wound that was bleeding strange, alien influences into our reality, immaterial and erratic.
It bubbled down there, intruding from far away. Had our world collided with another? Had a connection formed to an unimaginable elsewhere?
The air was cold and a sulfurous wind whistled around me. I could hear nothing but the wheezing cries of the wind. A force inside me pulled me down, urging me to look at whatever was happening there. The urge to know was back. I hated myself for it, but I just had to know what cruel abnormalities were waiting for me below…
Slowly, I began to descend, the rocks black and frozen like tar. It was several hundred meters to the bottom of the enormous crater, and I proceeded with caution to avoid slipping and falling.
Finally, after what felt like hours, I reached the bottom of the crater, where the air shimmered and reflected distorted, warped swirls glistening in the midday sun. I felt as if I was peering behind the veil of the world, gazing upon a distorted elsewhere that was closely interwoven with our reality, everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a miracle! What new lands would await someone who passed through those shimmering patterns? What wisdom, what insights?
Questions flooded my mind. Did the crater still exist, millions of years later in our time? Would I be able to find it? And if I did, could I locate that crack in the fabric of the world and pass through it to the immaterial spheres beyond? Could I become the greatest explorer in human history…?
Like a disease, these thoughts had poisoned my mind. I was still relatively far away, still carefully climbing over the bulging crater walls, but the closer I got, the more I wanted to step through. Suddenly, I felt cold. It was as if all my joy, all my urge to explore, had been stifled and smothered by oppressive terror.
I began to fear for my life, although I was still aware that I was just dreaming. An old dread welled up inside me, and my eyes wandered around in panic, searching for something unusual, but there was nothing except the warped patterns.
And then, suddenly, they emerged from the distorted, swirling glimmers.
They were tall, very tall, measuring perhaps three or four meters. Their legs were similar to those of a human but thinner and almost gnarled. The upper bodies were unusually skinny as well and almost like ours, though their arms reached down to their knees like rampant, growing white branches, where they sprouted those six-fingered claws that disturbed me more with every additional passing second. Their necks measured about a meter and seemed rigid and alien, as did their melon-sized heads with their two giant black eyes and their wide mouths containing needle-like teeth.
They stepped out of the warped breach, more and more of them. It almost looked like they were flowing out. Slowly but steadily, they began to climb up the crater walls and toward me. I was horrified to notice that one of the creatures seemed to be looking right at me with its ungodly eyes as it crawled with its long arms twitching strangely.
I had to wake up.
Relentlessly, the thing approached, and it was as if I could hear those words again, those words I had heard in Marco’s damned hotel room.
“You will all cease… Eslud esmad… just vermin, cattle… “
I couldn’t get away; my dream body seemed bound, my limbs paralyzed. I wanted to scream when I realized it was the same voice. The same voice from the darkness. The same voice from the hotel. Was this creature the same one I…?
It came closer, whispering…
“You will all cease… Eslud esmad… forget…”
I woke up from my dream, seconds before the being and the others had arrived at my location, before they had been able to do anything.
Drenched in sweat, I sat there trying to comprehend and understand what I had just experienced. That day, I didn’t go to work or for a walk to distract myself. Instead, I lay in bed and felt the dreams and memories of those blasphemous walls trying to hypnotize me again. I barely managed to drink a glass of water before I dove into a nightmare-filled sleep once more.
I was torn into strange visions and fragments of past memories told by the murals, forced to remember. I saw the terrible skinny creatures building vast cities and alien factories all across the planet’s surface, gradually diving deeper and deeper into the ancient knowledge of the universe. They somehow extracted it from a strange other place by using advanced gadgets and their own minds.
They already knew so much! They knew what lifeforms lived on Earth and what flora and fauna the planet housed. They had apparently surveyed Earth for a long time with their sensors and machines in search of a new home. It was a hectic search, feverish, driven by the urge to survive, and they had been terrified because…
Blackness, a nameless void, and fear - unspeakable fear.
Their fear.
A disturbing and unsettling sensation grew inside me when I realized that the creatures had fled from something - strange and ungraspable thoughts indicated a cosmic enemy that had ultimately destroyed their home world.
I don’t know whether they had run from another race, a sentient natural disaster, the end of all things, or just an idea bleeding into our world. But they had fled, had run, and so they had come here. The name of their enemy was etched deep into their minds - they called it “Eslud Esmad”.
I saw them meditate, saw them study weird machines and screens. They wore only clothes made from black, smooth, weather-resistant material, when they did not walk through their high towers and gigantic academies completely naked. Their knowledge of technology was vast and beyond my comprehension; most of it seemed like pure magic.
Gigantic monuments of unworldly shapes and sizes had been constructed to honor all that had not survived the downfall of their distant world. These were the only traces of something resembling positive emotions that I could find.
They had a thirst for exploration, a thirst to know, to know everything. In flashes, I saw them cataloging everything they could find. Earth was not enough for the creatures, and they settled on other planets in our solar system, building factories and harnessing alien energies, driven by the spirit of discovery, progress, and the fear of the threat that had once driven them away from home.
I suddenly remembered one of the murals in detail, delirious. It showed them encountering another race on one of Jupiter’s moons. The beings of that race were so foreign and unnatural that I had to quickly forget their depictions - weird, wavy lines and grotesque shapes within them.
I am not sure who started the war, but soon massive battles were waged on the moon’s surface, until the skinny ones… until we… drove the others back and below the ground, eradicating all cities they could find.
I remembered them killing those moon-dwellers, that vermin, that scum…
Despite being highly advanced as well, the native moon beings did not stand a chance. I saw the skinny beings prepare their assaults. Sometimes, I remembered helping them by pulling their machines across the surface of the moon below its yellow, sulfuric sky, by being used as bait to lure the enemies out. The skinny beings fought with horrid technologies, using wandering creatures that were sent to rip enemies into eternal hells and even beings and machines made from shadows. The skinny beings could survive the vacuum of space and hostile climates and environments by using their highly developed minds to shift their bodies to another plane, thus being protected against physical harm.
That… plane… was one of the sources of their knowledge and power. It was a place that was different and alien, a land of ideas, souls, and thoughts. It was the warped space I had seen in the crater. It was the place we move through in our dreams, the place that is everywhere and nowhere, immaterial, and still potent.
As time passed, my dreams started to shift into each other at a more and more rapid pace. They were studying, cataloging, and one day, experimenting. The further my visions took me, the more bizarre and disturbing experiments I was forced to see, experiments conducted on living creatures, and on me. They started to modify some animals by using their advanced biological machineries, producing horrid chimeras. The memory of those suffering misshapen creatures made me yearn to wake up and threatened to rupture the dream I was imprisoned in, but something held me down, something inside me.
The part that wanted to know more…
For centuries, they did research on all races they could get their hands on, degenerating and devolving them, and in the end, modifying them to use their brains for data processing. Again and again, my mind inhabited the creatures they used for their experiments, locked away in strange rooms, connected to tubes, and operated on while being fully conscious, taking away my limbs or organs, studying my reactions exposed to poisons, weapons, and the vacuum of space. The pain I felt quickly ripped me away from those moments each time, and for that, I am grateful.
However, in the end, there were a last series of modifications, a last series of experiments. One hall, located in the largest tower and the deepest depths of their laboratories, was where it happened. Where I suffered their curiosity again and again, within smooth and radiant walls, decorated only by black sculptures and statues.
In my dream, I entered that hall multiple times, in the bodies of different people and ape-like animals, but always experiencing a similar chain of events. I knew that the statues, with their black coral-like patterns and sharp edges, were technologies beyond comprehension, devices that could rupture and warp flesh and mind into different shapes, shapes that were designed by… them.
The first time I remember being led there was with a group of friends, shaking and trembling in fear. We were very young, taken by the gods in the morning. They had descended upon our little village and taken the children. Of course, we had worshipped them and had been grateful to be chosen. But when we saw what they planned to do, when they modified the first one of us, we wanted to flee. We realized our gods had been false, that they were monsters, demons! They had deceived us, betrayed us! I hated them, we hated them, our lives were a lie, our beliefs were a lie!
We tried to run, but they paralyzed us and took away our limbs so we could not escape again. I remember lying in a small transparent box, my arms gone, my legs gone, my mouth molten away. I was crying and unable to scream, only pleading with my eyes. They stood there and watched, curious to see what I would do, what we would do. When they took me after some years, I was relieved. Surely, they would let me die. Surely, they would end my suffering, a shred of benevolence shining through their cold souls.
I faintly remember how my mind was ripped from my body and placed inside a fleshy grey lump. I saw it through the eyes of other humans nearby who were still in their boxes; the dream was pain, just pain, suffering, desperation, and loneliness. And I could not wake up. The minds were inserted into clunky servicing and building robots, slaving away for thousands of years without being able to feel or scream, just to think. Just to think… Just to remember what being human had been, once. A long time ago, we were locked inside those prisons forever, unable to move or articulate, just being used as hardware, lost in infinite darkness with only our own thoughts.
And sometimes, they fed me with other thoughts. They gave me experimental and constructed thoughts in the darkness, things to think and feel. On some occasions, my mind just dissolved because it could not take the abstract and alien ideas. The dream never let me live through one of those artificial thoughts but tore me away before their heavy, cancerous nature got too close.
I remember the grey substance on the Cerberus statue that had let me enter the halls, making my body shiver in horror.
Could it be…
No!
I must have stayed in those bodies for years, repeatedly living through different people and their horrid fates, their fears and suffering, my mind being ripped away again and again into darkness. Every time my dream brought me to another person, made me witness my friends and family and enemies being turned into those grey fleshy lumps before I myself was taken into the eternal dark. The experiences…no, the memories made me go mad, and though it was just a vivid dream, I spaced out and can’t remember some of the thoughts I had in the blackness.
This was not the worst, however. Additional research was conducted, time passed, and one horrible day, I did not wake up in darkness after my mind was taken, but suddenly opened my eyes… I did not feel, had no sense of touch or smell, but I could see… I could see… and speak… They had given me back my eyes and my mouth…
I screamed in pain and horror, seeing them look up at me and my new body, piercing me with their gazes and big dark eyes. I do not know why they did it. Was it for fun? No, curiosity?
But those were not the only things they did to us, to our ancestors. I could see other experiments in the horrid boxes where they stored us, ruins of flesh like books on a shelf. Some of us they turned into slug-like, grotesque creatures whose bile they used as supplements. They had whole farms of us, human-slugs being kept in lightless pens or, when no longer needed, set free to disappear into cracks and caves underground. I did not even try to imagine some of them still being alive today, living in their horrendously deformed bodies.
I remember their panicked minds dulled and broken, slithering into holes, into the depths of the Earth, betrayed by their gods.
Despite all this, despite their attempts to advance their civilization, to explore and experiment, despite their vast power, I knew they still feared the thing that had once forced them to leave behind their home.
They still feared Eslud Esmad.
They monitored space as much as they could, but for a long time, nothing was found. It appeared that the creatures were able to extend their lifespans indefinitely because they possessed an eerie knowledge of death, so some of them must have been looking at the night sky for many centuries, searching for anomalies.
Their immaterial fields of mind, which seemed to be similar to our consciousness, grew to immeasurable sizes. From what I can tell, the magnitude of a field of mind determined a skinny one’s social status and power, creating a natural hierarchy.
A word started to flash through my dreamlike state, a word that I had always known deep down. I looked at them and their drive to know…and then it came to me.
Their name.
The… Ebrugh…
My mind drifted into vast temples where we had worshipped them. Priests and cults praised our gods, loving them. After all, they had taken many people and rewarded them, a few thousand every decade. They had taken some of us to paradise, some of our children, and given them a better future! Who knew what those they took experienced! What bliss! Perhaps ascension to a higher place?
We worshipped them, sang ecstatic songs in their name, spoken in foreign tongues. Had orgies and festivals to worship them. After some time to think, I suspect that was one of their experiments as well. I am sure that they just wanted to see what we would do when confronted with the myth of God. How powerful an idea it was. How an idea could control a people.
Then one horrible day, they spotted their old enemy making its way towards the solar system. Desperately, the skinny ones… the Ebrugh… searched for a means of escape, a chance to save themselves, though the threat had already gotten too close. The only way to survive was to find a way to detach their fields of mind from their bodies and then ascend to another plane of existence.
Many of their experiments failed, creating ruins of minds that wandered the lands, sometimes attaching themselves to objects or losing themselves in worlds of dream where they tried to reach their destination by all means necessary. I saw them. I saw them fade into warped space that swallowed and distorted those pioneers, those first explorers of the other plane.
I think the trials disrupted reality all around the solar system, mixing places with the world of mind. Which places were still tainted? Where should emotions and thoughts not surge? Did they still have effects on the world nowadays?
Then… one day… they left.
They were just gone.
We did not know what had happened back then; they had left everything behind: empty buildings, towers, and technologies. Our gods had left us.
They had succeeded.
After conducting all these horrible experiments and going through all these troubles, the Ebrugh had finally managed to vanish from the surface of the Earth just in time. They had managed to ascend to a new mode of being.
Eslud Esmad had already begun entering the solar system, erasing most of the Ebrugh’s cities, machines, experiments, and testimonies of their civilization. I felt its effects in the past, as it ate away at the ruins of the ancient civilization, making me forget, making us forget, and erasing the Ebrugh from our minds and history.
I believe some of their remnants still remain, like the murals and the archive I had found beneath the streets of Rome. Their effects on our planet. Some part of them has survived…
When I came back to my senses, dehydrated and mad, lying on top of my bed, my blanket ripped apart, I did not know what to do or think. But one thing is for sure: my experiences must reach the public. They are just too important to ignore.
I don’t have any proof. A collapsed tunnel, a missing person, and nothing else. But the public must be made aware of this story, this report.
I know I will be hunted down as well and might not walk on our earth in the future the way I do now. Because, if they were to catch me like old Marco…
In terror, I remember the moment down in the archives, the moment when the hatch on the machine opened, making it possible to take a look inside the construct that had chased me. I had seen a big grey lump of that terrible substance, although this one was looking disgustingly fresh.
However, the most horrifying thing was those distorted eyes staring into mine and the warped mouth, crying out wheezing and humming sounds and words, not being dampened anymore by the metallic prison, making horrid screams echo from the walls: “Where am I? What did they do? What are these… alien thoughts? Did you touch the Cerberus? They feel your curiosity and let you in, the old minds inside the stones…!
Please, where am I? It hurts so much!
They let you in, as they did with me! Now they know of you and will find you…
Where is my body? Please, kill me! Make this alien hell inside my head stop! They use my mind; it is theirs now! I want my body back. My limbs… My freedom. My life! Oh please, kill me! Please, kill me, make it stop… the Ebrugh… the Ebrugh…”
I hope that the collapsing ceiling destroyed the machine, freeing Marco’s soul from its hell, though I somehow doubt it. I will never be safe again because of my exploratory drive.
When will they take me? Perhaps today? Perhaps tomorrow? The Ebrugh could be everywhere.
I am certain that the Ebrugh return to our world occasionally, though likely just out of curiosity. After all, they are explorers. And left behind by them had been our ancestors, now able to thrive and evolve, finally becoming the people of today.
The stories told by the walls, by my mind, will ignite fierce resistance in pious men, and many will probably call me a liar and think of this as some tasteless joke or the ramblings of a madman.
Yes, I am mad.
How am I supposed to ever get to sleep again without fearing waking up in a different body or time? How often will those murals pull me back into the past, into those bodies or those pens in the dark with the other slug-like humans?
I hope that I can at least succeed in sending these lines, that someone reads or listens to them, and that my knowledge becomes known. After that, I think it is best to leave this world. I am sorry. I do not want to become like Marco.
Wish me luck…
In moments like these, as I once again walk on the edge of reason and insanity, my thoughts travel back to those empty walls below Rome, still waiting to be filled with additional historical content by the Ebrugh.
Did they plan on returning… one day?
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