Hey there. I'm posting this here for reddit.com. I've been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and playing some Minecraft. Here is what I made. It's a short story based on LC, illustrated in MC.Okay, first off, I'm not going to do a TL;DR. It's a short story. Either read it, or don't. And please, before you post shit about how I'm gay or a retard, read the whole thing. I put a lot of time into this, and I'm not about to see it get downvoted into oblivion because a few of the otherwise stellar group here don't like reading. And the only reason I'm posting it on Deviantart is so I could post it in one whole piece, not broken up into other parts. If you're a dA member, I'll be posting this later as a writing submission so you can fav. or comment on it.ANYWAYS! Here it is. Tell me what you think!**THE JUDGMENT OF SHERMAN DOWSETT**By WINSLOW DUMAINEI am writing to you from a place of extreme anguish and despair, with the desire to warn you of events that have transpired within these walls and beyond. My name is Sherman Dowsett, and I was tasked with a few others to investigate the peculiar archaeological formations in northeastern Greenland. I was with Samson Presley, my former professor at Arkham University, his wife Millicent, my assistant Horace and Oscar, his apprentice. Our party was further bolstered by a negro savant Helen, who had mastered several of the local tongues and could perform as our translator. With us, we had four paid guards, as we knew this area to be a cauldron of fierce, senseless creatures, bloodthirsty occult mysticism and savage locals.We landed at the port city of Nord, June 14th, 1866. We could not stay for a night, so we gathered our possessions and began in the direction of the point of interest. The landscape was untamed, and it was more than six hours into our trek that I became thankful that the navigational duties were left in the more able hands of Professor Presley. Outside of being a true survivalist, Presley was roundly entertaining during our expedition. He regaled us with tales of his near-capture by the hands of pirates off the coast of Puerto Rico, and of the time he strangled a leopard with its own tail.On the sunset of the third day, we finally arrived at the dig site. The site itself was no larger than the ground floor of an inn or bank in Nord. It was mostly flat, save a few cobblestone spires. It was wholly uninteresting, but I was confident that something of relative value would come from this expedition. We made a fire, ate a light meal and celebrated with a small glass of Sherry that Helen had brought. We slept beneath the watch of the guards.I awoke abruptly to find our fire stomped out, the guards slain along with the butchered Horace and Oscar. Helen was murmuring to herself, holding seeping wound in her stomach. The professor and his wife were kneeling before several men in flowing black rags. They had their faces painted crudely with ashes and white grease, so that they may look like grim specters of death. I do not know what turned in me at this point, but whatever it was; I can only thank this strange instinct for my escape from the ghouls that had slain my party. I slowly reached my hand to my pack, which had been using as a pillow of sorts. I retrieved my shovel and began to stand up, being mindful of any possible sound I could make. My heart was throbbing like the War-drums of the Tsculpa Pengo tribes of the Mongolian wilderness. As I stood up, I felt a hand firmly grasp my shoulder, and apply pressure as to try to push me back down. In one quick motion, I spun and caught the ghastly thing in the side of his jaw with my shovel and began to run.As I fled, I felt sharp pains of anguish, pains I hadn't felt so acutely since the death of my son, as I finally began to comprehend the deaths of my assistant, and the pending death of my colleague. I had no chance of fighting them, and I had no other choice but to run. So I ran.I ran until the sun was well overhead, I ran without stopping until I collapsed upon a sand dune. I hadn't expected such a soft foothold, so my balance was compromised. I was at a beachhead for a lake. I rested there, fairly certain that I had not been followed too closely by the Things that appeared last night.Upon thinking of these creatures, I noticed that I could scarcely recall any details of the night before. I had to spend several minutes of determined cogitation in an attempt to recover even the slightest memory of the events that had occurred. I felt pain, sadness and fear. A great consternation was burrowing its fangs into my heart. I knew something horrible had occurred, but I couldn't quite describe what it was. My friends had died, but I knew not how.I spent several minutes thoughtlessly resting before I stood up, and took in my surroundings. I was beneath a great, snow-capped mount and near crystal clear water. It would have been idyllic, if not for the terror that had found me here. I decided to continue in the direction I had been going earlier. I crossed the water.I walked silently for the rest of the day, occasionally pausing for a fearful sip of water or to rest my legs.Just before the dawn of the second day of my escape, I beheld an awesome sight.Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it was some kind of ancient castle of sorts, built into a free floating island. The walls were massive and at least a meter thick all around. It had a turret and incredibly old oaken doors.I entered without knocking and began to shout for any residents to come forth. I was eager to meet another human being, eager to eat, eager to rest. I felt hope for the first time in days. Inside the walls, something appeared to me, something stranger than an ancient castle in the middle of an Archipelago.Inside the walls, there was an arboretum, smoldering torches and livestock milling about. The smell was of fresh air, of cleanness and life. The animals were clean and appeared happy. None of them bore any signs of domestication; no collars, bells or tagging of the ears.I climbed the ladder of the turret to get a better view of my surroundings.From one end, I could see the path that I had taken to reach this place.From the other end, I saw that the residents that I had yet to encounter, had installed some kind of greenhouse and let it fall into disrepair.I descended from the tower and left into the arboretum again. Upon investigating, I discovered a pair of wooden doors that lead into a small and modestly decorated home. Clearly, someone was living here and recently. On the floor was a well worn tome, handsomely bound in blackened leather. The characters on the front of the book were unintelligible, presumably in a language from the region. I decided that now was as good of a time as any to being writing down my experiences here, as they may someday be useful.The sun began to set, and I knew that I would have to sleep here for the night. I did not know if I was any safer within these walls that I would be outside, and I struggled in the sheets of the bed, pondering a multitude of horrendous thoughts. Perhaps the owners would see me as an intruder and kill me on sight? Perhaps the ghoulish figures I had seen so long ago were the rightful residents of this place? I did not know.I awoke several hours later, no more refreshed than I had been before I lay my head down. My stomach was spinning and I felt that I was hours away from auto-digestion.I realized that the only way I could survive is in the slaying of one of the many sheep that gathered around my residence. In doing so, I felt akin to some primitive man who, after being abandoned by his Gods, sought a replication of the heavenly manna by felling a cloven-hoofed creature beneath the moonlight.I ate, and fell back to sleep, and slept dreamlessly.I awoke the next morn, alive and somewhat rested. I picked up the tome from the floor and began to read what I had written. Only a few things, the running, the ghouls, the shovel, made sense to me. That is to say, I could recall them but I found I could not recall the rest of the writing. I remembered striking a hooded man with a shovel, but the rest is blackness. I recall a few things I saw while running, but again, the rest is indefinable blackness.I exited the fortress and found the outside world exactly as I had left it. Lovely, lush, but utterly devoid of any kind of civilization, save for the questionable presence of this odd citadel. The sheep I had slain the previous night was gone, perhaps dragged off by some night-prowling predator. I can't say that I would've wanted any more of its steaming entrails for break-fast.I returned to the bedroom and decided to look through the cases and storage vaults that covered the walls. Most of them were filled with dirt, assorted stones and sticks, but one of them was totally empty, save for one mutely ornate iron sword.I examined it carefully, but even my years of education could not point to any distinguishing features that would point to the culture of its creator. It was clearly an ancient item, or at least made from exceedingly primitive sources. The blade was irregular and passed from sharp to dull along its edge. The handle was little more than a thicker clutch of iron, but upon closer inspection, the handle seemed to be crafted with extraordinarily minute details, etchings of suction cups and tendrils, as if the bearer was grasping a mass of tentacles. It wasn't balanced and felt oblong and heavy, and after a few moments of trying to hold it steady, I found that the sword wasn't exactly 'unbalanced' but that it was swaying and gently heaving itself in directions that contradicted the will of my grip. When I brought my face closer to the hilt, I could hear some sort of hissing whispers, susurrant voices and yelps so quiet, so near total silence, the listener was driven to consider their own madness and auditory hallucination before considering the sounds came out of the blade. I kept it on my person out of fear. The rest of the day, I spent walking around the isle, upon which this castle rest.The island was edged with sand, gravel and earth. Walking along the border, I truly felt as if I was the only one who had ever stepped foot on this land, truly terra incognito. There were some points that I could stare out to the water, a lake whose name escapes me, stretched out so far, I could not see the land at the opposite end. While I was still a bit in shock, I felt at ease. A calming of my fears. "If this is where I have come to meet my fate", I thought, "I'm glad I get to meet it here."Upon further cogitation and examination, I felt that the castle looked more peculiar than I had when I first laid eyes upon it. The stones on the wall did not seem to have degraded, nor did they seem to be assembled from multiple rocks. With a closer look, I found that the 'cobblestone walls' were actually solid rock, but carved and weathered to appear like cobblestones. As bizarre and confounding as this may seem, the castle looked as if it had come out from the sea, surging forth from the bedrock. It was simply chance that it had found this island to emerge from. Perhaps! Of course, I do not know if any of these things can be found accurate. This is simply my hypothesizing.Another interesting aspect on the topic of this castle was the 'stone halo', as I decided it should be called, around the island. At the top of the walls, there was a platform dug into the earth and sand, and it wrapped around the entire island, until it rejoined the wall on the opposite side. I spent a long while trying to determine what it was for. It was not a walking platform, nor could it be used for agriculture. The only conclusion I could draw was that it was some kind of defensive structure, designed to keep people from entering the castle from the opposite side, and entering through the roof. But in a desolate area, what enemies could they fending off? There was nothing around for miles. No wolves or other beasts of prey would be inclined to enter the walls, and even if they were roaming nearby and hungry for flesh, they would surely sup upon the bell-less cattle or the freely walking swine.I returned to the castle as evening was well underway. I was not hungry, so I went to sleep immediately.I dreamt this night, of horrors and bizarre impossibilities that revel in their unspeakable nature. I found myself many fathoms beneath the sea, in some bogged cavern. I could feel my arms writhing beyond my mental control. There were insects crawling beneath my skin, my skin was speckled in sores and cysts. I watched in a dull, muffled agony as some large larvaetion, wormlike and made of many bulging proglottids, would exit through a disgustingly dilated wound on my bicep and slink its way down my arm to burrow into another purulent hole. The pain and horror were beyond comprehension. The heat was truly diabolical, blistering, sweltering waves of heat. I felt as if I was being boiled in the belly of some deathly oven, like the unholy conflagration of hell was already lapping at my skin.I felt the pressure at my temples and in my chest. I was somewhere many kilometers beneath the crust of the earth. I was in a cave but an inhabited one. I was in a long carven hallway, kneeling on the hissing-hot stones that made up the floor. At the opposite end of the hallway was a wooden door. I could see the warbling ripples of heat through the panes of glass. I began to crawl, or shuffle towards the door. With every motion, I could feel the dense, squirming things writhing about beneath my skin. It took me several minutes of slow, grinding progress to reach the door. I lifted a hand to the knob, and immediately woke up from my dream.Upon awakening, I immediately vomited, and proceeded to do so until my stomach was painfully empty, and then I heaved up nothing but phlegm and saliva for several minutes. I was covered in sweat. I sat in a heap in the corner of the room until mid-day. I rose from my cowering pile and left to sit outside in the sun.I do not believe I had a complete thought until sunset. My hope was shattered. I felt more alone and frightened now than I believe I have ever felt. I knew I was hungry, but I knew more that the churning, gnawing sickness in my stomach was far more powerful than my desire for a meal. There was no wildlife around me. At sunset, I reentered my home and lay to sleep next to the bed. I could not bring myself to rest in the bed, as the sheer chance of returning to the place of my nightmares was more than enough to make sleeping on the cold stones a more appealing option.I rested there for about two hours, eyes transfixed on the plain stone ceiling above me. When I finally succumbed to sleep, to my appalling astonishment, the dreams continued from where they had left off.I was again replete in sores, fields of scabs and obtusely angled gouges in my skin. My hand was still wrapped tightly around the door knob. I threw my body weight into twisting it, and again into heaving myself against the door to have it slowly swing open. The bottom of the door growled as it ran across the sand and gravel, collected beneath it.The door was opened to reveal something more terrifying to me than to any other man. It was a small room, with a brick-and-mortar well placed in the center of it. I immediately recalled the death of my son, Alan, three years ago. It's a vision that has haunted my nightmares and an image that has burrowed into my psyche. I would wake up shouting and sweating, twice a week at a minimum. He had gone missing, in the summer of 1863. I had hired an investigator to supplement the police actions, but it was of no use. He had been kidnapped by some unknown criminals, dragged to a field in Sussex, beaten with sledges and cast into a well. A woman had found his body after she noticed the clouds of flies grouping around the water-hole.The image that won't leave me is that of my only son, horribly twisted and with bones broken and exiting his flesh, forty feet beneath the mouth of the well. I only saw this ghastly sight for an instant before recoiling in horror. I became deathly ill and pallid and did not speak a word for three days. That image haunts me still, taunting me with its primeval, inhuman humor. I felt a swelling in my stomach and felt that swelling rise in my chest.I vomited in my sleep, and I awakened to find myself kneeling on the wooden floor in the center of the house. My hands were folded in prayer, my lips moving in a silent penance to some unknown deity. Before me, there was a large blooded hand print, sans thumb. I felt my throat quiver with words that wanted so furiously to exit my voice box. The sounds that exited my mouth were not sounds of my voice, but of some deeper, more vile and more guttural wheezing, rasping groan. Like a siren, this alarming droning left my throat. I felt the muscles in my back spasm and twitch painfully. I fell backwards and, as if the words were being pulled directly from my unwilling person, these unknowable phrases exited me:A candention in tiresome smokesVulgarity ave! Supine. Ave dogshit.Eta. Meta. Larvaetion. Vulvum Obscurum.The covenant mir' dereliction.Hail Antlers, hoof and tooth engnarled.Caroming carrion down thee wholeMesophagus tranquiliaryEnplumed, abgulfed surrial.Malformed information. Ego warp.Behold my genius and despair.Voided heatswell ovum supreme.Spin misanthropic worlds et al.Sanguine cruror eta, meta, vobiscum.Ghastness, uselessness, set ablight pathGo against light, to nil' things graspFuror malign golgothic lickspittleSuppurator awakor unfurlornDead suns orbit in meThe me. Isis et stasis et static.An unverse ad infinitum. Laws undo.Warmhole white eta, meta gray light.Zero pourn into first zero.End The.I hissed and shook, gasping out the final two words repeatedly. I was completely without control of my body, my voice. I felt as if another being had taken control of my person. Completely spent, I drifted off into sleep. My dreams resumed where I had left off, but this time, I felt different. I felt as if I was waking up into reality, from the dream of my previous possession. I felt reality and the accursed realm I was occupying were beginning to merge, that the laws from one universe were bleeding their contradictory influence into each other. I was at the base of the well. The stones were shaking; the door was vibrating with a deep, onerous churning noise. A cacophonous display of grimness and cadaverousness. A gnawing sound, like that of some teeth, enormously gigantic, grinding away at bones, squashing and crushing food into an unknown gullet. A rumbling drone of organs and intestines belching and flushing out material into secondary and tertiary components. Some perverse urge rose up in me, driving me to peer over its edge, into the ambivalent abyss. The end of the portal beheld a tremendous mouth filled with broken and crooked teeth, slowly rotating in its place. The mouth gnashed violently and expelled heated plumes of a stench so vile and unearthly, I instantly wished for anosmia to be given to me.I gazed into this monstrous maw and felt a sense of doom more precise and defined than any other feeling I'd ever felt. I knew now that this universe does not want me or any of my kind, nor does it particularly care for my species. I felt something collide with my head, something firm and animal. I reared back from the edge of the well to see a floating deer carcass, broken and mangled, floating down from a hole in the ceiling and gently sliding down the well. Carcass after carcass descended into the well while I watched in squirming terror. They were suspended without any anchor to the world, to gravity or reality itself. The great gnawing, rending discordance was sending throbbing pain waves to my temples, the noise was howling with such a tenacity that it seemed to be rattling out from within my own skull.Strangely enough, there was a greater sound than this horrid moaning, it was the sound of a great slithering of scales against stone, a mucousity of a certain power that it sounded to be swarming many fathoms beneath me. With that noise, came a greater sound, that of a crushing of stones, a tectonic display of raw earthen power. I could feel the vibrations and tremors creep up my spine. The carrion stopped flowing downward on their alien static tether, and hung in mid air for a brief pause. Two stags, split open and ensanguined, lightly knocked into each other and began to spin slowly in contradicting directions. To my confoundment, they began to reverse their flow and started floating upwards. The stones beneath me bore vibrated the gravel and debris, telling me of the power of the changes taking place in this awful citadel. As the trail of dead does and stags came to an end, the final member was half masticated and torn apart, and some of its organs and chewed bits were floating in space beneath it. It was at this moment that the quaking sound became strong enough to wake me from my hypnotic slumber.With a gripping fear, I found that the noise of the earthquake had its origins in reality and that the sound was poking its influence into my dreams, as foreign noises can. It felt as if the earth was shaking, in that natural phenomenon I had never experienced, and at a caliber I had never heard of. I braced myself against the wall, and realized that my previous hypothesis concerning the origins of this castle were proving true: the earth was seeming to experience birthing pains, and I could feel that the walls were slowly moving away from the island. This castle was moving out from the sea, inch by dreaded inch.A moaning and whining of stones could be heard, as if the mountains were speaking through the rocks. The uneasy churning of earth made such a maddening sound, like the sound of an aged dreadnaught, forever creaking and whistling in its harbor-grave.With a great twisting and squeaking, the wood flooring began to shiver and break. It started slow, bursting rivets and sending nails out of their sockets, but it eventually hit a kind of critical point and portions of the paneling exploded violently, sending dust and slivers across the room. When the debris cleared, I could see a deep gouge in the heart of the room, and from it rose a plume of noxious gas, stirring the dust and filling the space with methananous deathstench.With creeping caution, I edged near the hole. I choked on the ungodly stink and peered over the brim, with the sword baying and swaying, murmuring wild absurdities and yelps. Beneath the floorboards was a deep and wide mineshaft, complete with glowing torches and several sets of ladders affixed to the wall. I was dumbfounded by this discovery. Perhaps this whole area was some kind of colony, a mining community or some forgotten village. Maybe this pit is their catacombs, and I am defiling their sacred stones by placing my feet upon them. Maybe I was wrong about the castle surging from the sea, maybe it was settling, perhaps the former inhabitants fled when they found their homes sinking into the waters? Or I could have been right about the castles trajectory, and maybe a famine or plague exterminated the life here? But if that were to be true, would there not be any signs of the former inhabitants? And what miners would devote such time to the pristinely dedicated craftsmanship of the false-cobblestone carvings upon the walls? And where does the more pressing and bizarre matter of the sword fit into all this madness? The length of devious metal twitched and twisted in my hand, yearning for freedom like a leashed hound.Maybe a sane man would've run from this event. Maybe a sane man would never have walked into the unknown territory with armed strangers searching for relics and hidden history. Or, conversely, maybe my sanity is proven with my curiosity. Or maybe my sanity has no say in whether or not I am curious, and the events that lead me to this point are purely because of my irrationality. Perhaps I was brought here by my own hubris. My urge to seek out the primeval influences, the shrouded mysteries of our world is what drove me to my career, and, I thought to myself as I descended the whimpering wooden ladder into the uncertain void, it may drive me to my doom.I dismounted from the ladder and stared down the carven halls. While I knew otherwise, I still felt as if I was the first person in many millennia to have walked here. The stones were layered in lichens and had been eroded by leaking water. I could hear faint sounds of trickling streams, and I could see the signs that this place had once been flooded, and probably only recently drained. There were still patches of sediment, dried moss and algal formations attached to some of the lower boulders.I stopped myself and stared at the sword in my hand. It appeared foreign, more so than normal. I knew that I had found it here, but the act of recovering it from the chest was an unrememberable event. I shook my head and realigned my focus.I walked the only path that was available to me, which lead in to a quick hook down a flight of hewn stairs. This opened into a larger room, with an enormous wall of 'cobblestone'. Some of the stones had moss growing on them, still somewhat alive. Perhaps the water was here only weeks ago? There was certainly enough moisture in the air to carry it for a fortnight.In the center of the wall, there were two steel gates and above them were two large levers. One pointed down, the other pointed up. I took the downward facing lever and pushed it up, and after a few seconds of chugging gears and cogs, the door beneath it swung open.Another staircase was carved to my immediate left. The stairs were wet and had a slight current of water running down them, sourced from a hole in the wall, eroded and worn from hemorrhaging water. After the upward climb, the stairs opened into a notably serene room, almost like a sepulcher or mausoleum. I looked to the ceiling to find that I was completely under water, and the perpetually falling waters above me were suspended in the air by an unknown force. It was almost as if I had stepped into some sort of mystical diving bell, lit by a few torches and tinted a withering blue by the lambent moonlight. The sand and other shining particles on the ground danced in their phosphorescent glow, and crunched softly as I tread upon them.At the end of the room was a hallway and door, disturbingly familiar but difficult to place. As I drew nearer to the portal, I recognized where I had seen it before. My heart began to beat faster and a sweat grew across my brow. This was the same door that I had seen in my nightmare vision. I swallowed hard and braced myself. My knuckles were white, wrapped tight around the rebellious sword.The old door was the only object separating me from the unknown contents of the room beyond. My throat tightened when my sprained memory regurgitated flashbacks of my son's corpse. I tried to shake them away, batting off invisible gnats. "God damn me", I prayed bitterly "God damn me for striking him. He'd never have run off. God damn me."I shut my eyes and turned the knob, and let my body weight slide the door open. My heart sank into the ever-weakening cavity of my chest. The well was there, before me in all of its repellant glory. The dread of seeing the watering hole was compounded greatly by the dream-visions that had preceded it. There is only so much I can delegate to coincidence before having to accept the supernatural implications seen here. Perhaps it was sheer chance that found me before an underground watering hole, but it would be a definite stretch of reason to say that my otherworldly nightmares and possession was all part of this one compounding coincidence. I let my hand fall off the door knob.In approaching the mouth of the well, I noted that the sounds of gnawing, of the destroying of food were mercifully absent. All that remained was the sound of trickling water and creaking echoes bouncing throughout the caverns.I did not know what to expect when I looked into the well. My real life experiences taught me to see ordinary blackness and the twinkling shimmer of water, but they also contradicted themselves with images of my son. My only son. And while I cannot determine which is worse, the final image I partially expected to encounter was a stilled pair of mandibles resting at the opposite end of the portal. Upon looking, I saw none of these things, but what I did see managed to crush my spirits and fill me with a new fear. The well had another ladder within it, going straight down to some unknown, abysmal point.I clambered up and sat with my legs hanging into the maw of the hole. I retired the sword to the ground, and noted how the muscles of my hand jerked before locking up briefly when I relinquished it. I've not ever been a man of tears, but I do not wish to imply some sort of bravado to my personality. I simply never felt comfortable in weeping. My anger, my pain, my frustration. Blackness and unrememberable events. Blame and back to pain. A bloody cycle.In reaching for the sword, I noticed my hand was replete with suction-cup marks, like little sores or the teeth marks of leeches. I closed my eyes and picked the sword up and carried it down the ladder.I dismounted after a fifty-meter descent to find another nondescript hallway and an old wooden door. Upon opening it, my mouth hung agape. I stepped in the room, the school house that I was educated in up to the twelfth grade. It was completely accurate. The paintings on the wall still bore the original brushstrokes, the names were still signed with the appropriate names. Even the bookshelves were cluttered and unkempt as they were when I was enrolled here. As I investigated, I felt a pitching, turning in my stomach. Anxiety and nervousness. I sat on what was my desk to study my feelings. I felt hunted. Some primal fear. Someone could find me out. I tried to recall what I had done, but could only rely on the clues around me. Minutes passed of my mind consistently drawing blank card after blank card, groping at straws randomly, when I had an epiphany.It was the summer of my tenth grade year, I recall the last day of classes. Most of the original students hadn't shown up for weeks, due to the season and their duties on family farms. I liked it there, but I felt like I was too big a fish in too small a pond. While I wanted to attend school in the city, my parents had to move to the countryside for work. I did not resent this, but I did understand that I could have a better education in an institution, rather than a school house. The teacher, Miss Fuller was a young and lovely woman. While I hadn't considered it until just now, I may have had a bit of a romantic inclination towards her. Her untamed briar of thick, golden hair, her freckles and, though I am sure this is more revealing to my own proclivities than it is to hers, I admired her organizational skills like a wooed simpleton. I would show up to class and talk to her before the day began, and I would frequently stay late to help her get her possessions in order before walking her half-way to her home. Now that I think about these things, it does seem rather odd for a boy of my age to be accompanying my teacher on a walk home. Perhaps she was just as interested in me as I was of her. Regardless, there would be no saving of my grace in her eyes if she ever found out what I had done.She had two cats, Brian and Adam, and they would follow her to class nearly every day. Because she let her class pick their names before determining what gender they were, the female American Shorthair was given the wildly inappropriate name of Brian. It was this time in my education that I had hit that awful, awkward stage of pubescence where the fascination with myself had reached a dangerous point, where I would actively disregard the feelings of others so that I could enhance my own woefully undeveloped agenda. While it seemed a laughable and impossible wish, I knew at a young age that I wanted to be an archaeologist. The death of cultures, mass graves and the end of the human race, all these tragedies and cataclysmic events called out to me. I wanted to inspect and discover, to have the heightened senses that only a well educated, well experienced man could have. For a reason I cannot recall, and I must stress that I do not understand why I was driven to do this, I abducted the both of her cats after the last day of class. I followed her to her home, and beneath the illuminating moonlight, I captured the feline pair and made off with them into the forest. It was there, in that pallid glow, I killed both cats and wrapped them in cotton cloth and attempted to preserve them with honey as an embalming agent. I placed the two in a suitcase, and buried them beside a birch tree. I marked the tree with a cross and did not return to that forest until school resumed three months later.During the summer, I did not ever think about the burial. I had a normal summer of housework and aiding my parents in their work. When I finally returned to the forest, I dug up the suitcase and checked their progress. I decided that they were coming along well, but needed another month of preservation. In the twenty minutes it took me to exit the forest, I had nearly completely forgotten about their burial. I do not know why it was so easy for me to forget my sins then, considering how haunted I am now. Miss Fuller seemed visibly distraught when she entered for the first day. She was quiet and reserved when she tried to call the class into order. The students calmed down when they realized something was amiss. She explained the disappearance of her pets, and while she had three months to cope with her loss, coming to class must have been a trial for her, with no purring friends by her ankles.Even then, even when faced with the reality that I had caused so much grief to someone I just now realized I had feelings for, I still had no remorse. I didn't even recall the cats. The memory faded from my recollection. Two months later, having completely forgotten of their burial, I returned to their grave. Grass and flowers had grown over their tomb; it had been a wet summer since I had left them. I exhumed the leathery casket and opened it up. Inside, there were four cats, wrapped and embalmed similarly to the first two. With them, there was an assortment of other creatures, all of equal or lesser size as the cats all wrapped and embalmed. I knew the mummification to be mine, but I did not and do not recall performing any of them. I thought on this briefly, before taking the suitcase and leaving to the school house. It was still hours away from daybreak, so I laid their casket at Miss Fuller's desk and performed the dissection by candle light.The cadavers were perfectly preserved, but I felt no pride. I expected them to be perfect. I completed one dissection, with parts removed and labeled before starting the next. Another perfect mummification. The sunlight was edging over the horizon, beaming golden rays through the tops of the trees. I disregarded the hour and continued with my work. Even the forgotten moles and mice were expertly preserved. I hadn't been bothered by the waking of the birds, chirruping melodies and presumably plotting flight formations for the southern migration. I heard the light crumbling, crunching of sand and gravel in the distance and my head instantly snapped to look outside. She was coming. I blew out the candle and scrambled across the floor, crawling along on all fours to evade being seen by the windows. I dove into an old chest that kept bibles and other educational tools and attempted to position myself so I could peer from the crack of the chest. She entered slowly, transfixed by the creatures on her desk. She let out a wail of surprise when she recognized Brian and Adam, and immediately began to cry. I felt a blank, empty emotion in my chest. I felt like I should feel broken and sad, but I didn't. I knew that I had hurt someone, but it simply did not register to me. I was just trying to further my education. She was my teacher, so she should be able to appreciate that!I sat on my desk, deep underground, and thought of my sins. My God, what a mess I have become. An abuser. A killer of innocent creatures. It was then that a peculiar memory furrowed my brow. When Miss Fuller was panicking, having seen her dead pets on such a gruesome display, she quickly hid herself in the book closet at the front of the room. She was in there for several minutes, and I realized that I could not bear being caught hiding. The first students would arrive shortly, and while class was in session, I would not be able to leave the chest. I, in a quick and silent motion, exited the container and bolted off into the forest.I hyperventilated for several minutes, and then proceeded to forget that any of this had taken place. Perhaps 'forget' is not the right word. To forget a memory is not to completely black-out the entirety of the event, but to simply mistake its occurrence for something more mundane. I removed these dreadful moments from my mind and proceeded about my teenage business as normal.I, in the underground impostor version of the school, stood up. I approached the book closet with care and opened the door to reveal nothing of interest. Books, in shelves, as any closet of similar nomenclature would contain. I reviewed the titles of the books, just about each text I could recall reading at some point in her class. Oddly enough, there was a column of about four shelves with books that we had never covered. While the other shelves had a few unknown titles, these four rows did not have a single book that I could remember reading. I began to move the books out of the shelves, placing them atop other astutely organized books on neighboring shelves. Once I found what appeared to be a door behind the shelves, I began to throw the books out of the way by the armfuls. With kicking legs and cleaving sword, I smashed and splintered the shelving enough to reach the hidden knob on the other side. I turned it and revealed an extension to the ancient cave corridor. I ducked and squeezed through the smashed up planks and toppled a few towers of musty textbooks before I could stand erect.The corridor was linear, yet labyrinthine. As I walked through it, I could feel the heat swell and the moisture become more of a nuisance. I began to hear a crackling, like of fire or molten steel, and a queer baying, whipping sound. It was strange, but I pushed forward. If there was to be an end to my nightmares, it would be at the other end of these halls. I plunged deeper and deeper into the earth, with my path taking wild corkscrews and sharp turns, as if it was avoiding unknown obstacles in the stone. At the end of the path was an essentially straight staircase leading up to a larger, more open room. The heat saw me sweating profusely, and there was a foul, sulfurous stench hanging in the air. In the large, open room was a door, wooden and out of place in a vaulted chamber.I steeled myself and turned the knob. Behind the door, I found no sneering retread of my life's most grievous failures. I was not mocked by some otherworldly source of spiteful revenge. What I saw was an open portal, as if I was stepping into madness incarnate. It was a tremendous cavity in the cave, with a partially destroyed stone pathway, with fragments of stone still floating freely in the air. Like holes in a stuck pig, there were wounds in the walls of this gargantuan excavation bleeding magma. At the end of the floating pathway were three black rings with violet cores. The violet essence snapped and bit at the dust and sparks floating around it, clearly in some sort of non-sentient pain.Stepping over the gaps in the walkway I could feel blasts of superheated gas singe the hair from my legs. I approached the portals with reverence and trepidation. No matter how unholy, how wicked these gateways may be, I was humbled to be standing before something of such accursed magnitude. In all my years of study, I have never found any reference to any such architecture. No religious writings could precede such archaic gates.The violet void had small tentacles phasing in and out of existence. They slipped around and grasped at the air fruitlessly. As I stepped closer to the portal, they migrated towards me and began to wrap their suckers around my arms and legs, pulling me towards the void.I exited the void just as soon as I had entered. My eyes were blinded by some pernicious force weighing against them. I held my head and rubbed my eyes until my vision returned. I was in darkness and choking heat, a heat I cannot stress enough, so hot was the air that I felt that would soon expire from exhaustion. I was sweating more now that I have ever in my entire tour of Egypt, when I was part of an expedition studying the tombs of Nephren-Ka.On all fours, I lifted my head up, only to quickly hang it down again in despair. I recognized where I was. I knew it all too well. I was in the attic of my childhood home. The spare bed, the tools and books, the work benches and other unneeded bits of housewares were arranged in a disorganized mess throughout the room. The stench of sulfur and death was overwhelming. My stomach, empty though it was, was tying itself into fitful knots. I stood up. All this time of my personal hell, this sword has been taunting me. It scorned me by whispering foul words, too wound up and soft to understand. I knew it hated me. Amid all the incomprehensible nonsense it babbles out, I could hear it rasp, disquietingly clearly, the phrase 'Your Death.'I left the attic by the ladder at the end of the room. I was in the second story of my house, facing my bedroom. I checked in on it, to find all my childhood possessions in their right place. The same was true of the bathroom. I entered my parents' room, with a childish hope that they would be present and could relieve me from my suffering. They were absent, of course. Connected to their room was another smaller room. At first I thought it was a closet, but when I saw the red blankets tucked in neatly around the edge of the crib, I knew otherwise.I sat at the edge of my parents' bed, fighting my own mind, struggling to avoid remembering what this bed implied. My baby sister. Mabel. Images flickered through my mind. I felt dread. Sickening, torturing dread. Guilt. I stood up, looked in her room once more before returning to the attic.I stood before a chest, wooden and trimmed with iron plating. It was probably one of my grandmothers luggage chests. I undid the latch and opened it up, saw just an instant of its contents before gasping and shutting it.Mabel. Gagged and wizened. Dead. Her death was ruled accidental. I don't know how. Blame never fell on me. I did what I did. She was crying, I was helpless and alone. I just wanted the crying to stop. I did what I did. Some daemon, some creature, some entity of unutterable genius was taunting me, tormenting me with its boundless knowledge of my trails, my suffering. With these black symbols, in their deathlike simplicity, I was forced to relive the most painful moments of my time on this earth. I did what I did. I am sorry, but I know sorry means nothing. Death is forever. I am so sorry, Mabel. Mother and Father. I am so sorry. I wish I could have been a different child.A different man. What made me this way?I can't ever escape me.I walked down the ladder and proceeded down the stairs into the ground floor of the house. I could hear the muffled rumbling of tectonic movements. The heat was extraordinary. I held my head and sat on the ground.I wept. For the first time since I was a babe, I wept. For fear, for anguish, for guilt, for pain, I wept.I felt shooting pains in my hand, but they were dulled by the numbing nature of the hellish, sweltering waves of heat. The suckers on the hilt of the sword were burrowing deeper into my flesh. Biting me, sucking my blood. My hand was red. Using the blade as leverage, I lifted myself up, and made my way to the front door. I opened the door and beheld a mass of volcanic rock. I craned my head and could see that this was a cyclopean staircase that leads to the surface of the earth.The rocks were dagger sharp and unstable; I slipped and fell several times in my way up. In falling, I suffered many cuts and wounds that quickly draped my flesh in thin films of blood and mucous. Just before I surfaced, the volcanic stones gave way to masses of dirt and grass. When I finally stood on solid ground, outside of the tunnels and caves that I had been traversing for the past hours, I was broken in defeat. In every direction, there were lakes of magma, superheated molten rock was pouring from the craggy formations in the sky. There were foul, mushroomed growths, glowing in their damning majesty, dotting the landscape. Mountainous, many-tentacled creatures floated through the air, spitting fiery death to the masses of rotting humanoids in the distance. I turned to see the hole I had risen out from, and found that it was a mockery of her grave.It was a place of rending, of torment and malediction. I stumbled in my heat-choked stupor to the edge of the ocean of magma. Total annihilation, total defeat, total failure. I surrendered. Whatever God damned me to here, I knew I had earned my stay.With my free hand, I managed to remove the sword from its parasitic grasp. I reared back, and threw the cackling blade into the bubbling depths. It sunk without disturbing the surface. I looked at my hand. Covered in sores, partially digested. In my peripheral vision, I saw a figure rising up from the scoria. It was many feet taller than me, with an odd, mollusk shaped skull. Its mouth was an empty hole, surrounded by dozens of thick, waist-length tentacles. As the slag slid off his shoulders, it revealed his molten armor. A breastplate and gauntlets made of the crackling stones, hissing and boiling in their nefarious display. In his hand, or what would be a hand if it were not for another mass of winding tentacles, he held the unmelted, unblemished sword.He unhinged his jaw, revealing the soot-black hole that was his mouth. His tongue was like a lump of smoldering slag, shifting and snarling in its infernal fires. As I stared into his mouth, I saw agony and plague. I saw mass graves being dug by their future inhabitants. Nations fall, the extinction of species, river beds running dry and forests burning to the ground. The filth of his disease, the crawling vermin and unknowably horrendous mites and insects swarmed in and out of his molten armor, spiraling around the hand that held the blade. It was then, as he began to walk closer to me that I understood. I knew who He was. I know that He was Judgment.Thanks for reading this! I had a good time writing it, and I had a good time making the world in MC. If you want me to post a download of the level, I'll gladly upload it for you. If you have any questions about different parts of the story, please ask away!