Song Lyrics

The following are excerpts from handwritten notes discovered
Secreted in a hidden alcove in the west wing
Of the Phillips-Ervin Museum, London, England
Sealed in a leather canister, the aged script was accompanied
By an ornate bronze key of unknown origin
The author of the journal remains unidentified
And the artifact was only chanced upon following the museum's partial destruction
During the spring of 1941

Fragmentary entry I:
I have come into possession of a certain ancient book
A collection of arcane scrawlings reputed to have been derived
From an even earlier transcription, allegedly lost during the great fire of 1666
The Chthonic Chronicles!
I cannot disclose here the precise and rather unsavoury means
By which I acquired this weather-worn tome
But I immediately recognized the veracity of the fevered inscriptions contained within
Apparently derived from an incomplete Latin translation of the original source material
The text sporadically lapses into an indecipherable
Tongue which the transcription cryptically notes as being Old High Atlantean
Glyphs, sigils, occult pictograms
Six score and ten oblations to some malign entity of colossal evil
Some diabolical avatar of the Z'xulth
Khthon!
I must delve further into the foreboding depths of this great black book

Terrifying axioms, shadow-haunted lexicon
Clandestine cults, ancient spells, cryptic rites, the summoning!
Lore from time immemorial, acolytes, diabolists
Blackened tome of blasphemy, the Chthonic Chronicles!

Lore derived from ancient tongues, Grimm's Hold Sanitarium
Oblations here, six score and ten, this avatar, malevolent!

Fragmentary entry II:
Caught in the maleficent whorls and verticils of this dark tome
But what lies at the heart of it? A vespertine viper's nest of sublime wickedness!
What I discovered within this shadow-haunted volume was a terrifying
Axiom so inestimably terrible in its magnitude
That it would shatter all man's carefully orchestrated views of the cosmos
And render utterly redundant previous theories on the origin of humankind
Lore dating from time immemorial lore surviving in the records of long extinct civilizations
Be it inscribed upon parchment now crumbled to dust
Etched into the sand-whipped, glyph-scored stone of hoary temples
Or committed to verbal traditions long since ingrained into some collective tribal memory
This is no globally common myth cycle
No collection of universally allegorical folk tales
It is all cold, pitiless truth!
And yet, such enlightenment has not been a prize easily won
I have communed with native shamans, consulted with misanthropic diabloists
I have confronted the martial agents
Acolytes and cultists of clandestine sects who would see their knowledge safeguarded at all costs
Hildebrandt and the Quorum have treacherously attempted
To have me commited to the baleful confines of Grimm's Hold Sanitarium
Yet I have circumvented their insidious plot to put an end to my vaunted research
Damn their traitorous eyes!
I must confer with Blackthorne upon his return from the Peruvian expedition
Or mayhap Stone if ever the poor wretch regains his sanity

Stygian gramarye, etched with blasphemy
Whorls and verticils, black with baleful spells
Vespertine conjurings, doomsayer's prophecy
Pellucid lotus-dreams, spawn of the elder fiends
Cryptic halls, squamous mass, malevolent diabolist
Black desire, nighted woe, shunned and forbidden tome
Brooding dark, deepest night, ritual, abhorrent sight
Whispering, malignity, hearken to the summoning!

(This black desire, this nighted woe, this vile shunned and forbidden tome
In the brooding darkness of the night, now witness this abhorrent sight
The whispering, malignity, now hearken to the summoning!)

Fragmentary entry III:
What titanic demi-gods once strode the boiling surface of the young earth
Treading the shattered surface of mighty Pangaea beneath their ersatz feet?
What fearsome entities were already inestimably ancient
When mankind himself was naught but a collection of mindless random atoms
A viscous puddle of gelid protoplasm teeming with the raw materials of life
Transient cells of primordial slime,
All naught but malleable and tractable clay to be worked at by unimaginable sculptors
Immortal star-spanning fiends!
What inhuman eyes even now watch the inconsequential toilings of man from afar?
The answers to these questions of denied primacy
And direful cosmogony were too repulsively horrific to contemplate, and yet
I knew the truth!
And more terrifying still
The Z'xulth and their villainous agents of depravity even now walk among us!
But what price these revelations?
What dire agents of malignity safeguard such cryptic axioms against the prying intellect of man?
I must confesss, oftimes in the brooding darkness of the night
I have sensed their malefic gaze upon me, lurking
Inexorably dogging my every step,
Their existence perceived only as some unnamable sense of fearful unease
And the occaisional glimpse of black shimmering against black in the depths of the teeming shadows
I hear them whispering when the mantle of darkness silences the world
And the sibilant words they utter are not for the minds of men to know
O'how I wish I had left those vile and fathomless depths of cryptical lore wholly
And mercifully unplumbed!
O', how I long for the assuaging balm of ignorance
To once again soothe my ravaged mind!
But such pleadings are, of course, ultimately in vain
I must keep my wits about me. Even now the stars align
The celestial spheres moving into the prophesied positions of the great astral conjunction
Am I to be ground to dust between the grand gears
Of this pitiless cosmic engine of destruction?
The die is cast, the endgame nears
Wait they come, they come for me! Is it Hildebrandt
Or something far, far worse which stalks me this night?
The key
I must hide the key!

Byron A. Roberts, Jonathan Maudling

The duration of Six Score and Ten Oblations To a Malefic Avatar is 6:11 minutes and seconds.