Transcript
Ben (0:00)
Every week here at Haunted Cosmos we release a special story driven show called the Dusty Tome just for our monthly supporters over at Supercast. But while we prepare a brand new season of the main show in the Haunted Cosmos Laboratory, we decided to give all of you a peek behind the paywall. So welcome to a special release of the Dusty Tome.
Brian (0:55)
As years passed and the disaster was forgotten, the the lake, deep blue with serenity but terrible in the wrath of its storms, began to be called Caspian, and man came to find its size to warrant the moniker of an inland sea indeed. But on this day, the day of woe and trouble, where day seemed to fall beyond the thorny desert peaks on the sea's eastern side, the sea that swallowed the city was called just that, the sea, for it was all that those people knew of an ocean. They had not been to the shores of the other vast body of water west of Ararat or through the Bosphorus and into the realm of the Argive ships. To them, the world itself consisted of just their sea and whatever small inward stretches of land they had the gumption and gusto to settle. And it is in this state that the small force of hardy people dwelling in that neighborhood of the world, still so often forgotten about today, would come to taste their first existential turmoil. One among those people, the one who would survive the calamity to soon come, woke from his sleep that morning and cringed with a late sigh at the bitterness of the weather. He groped through his dark room and collected his gear that he would need before stepping out of his threshold and into the still sleeping streets of his home, that same city whose ramparts and stacked homes imposed its will so strongly on the water. The the trek from home to shore was a long one for our hero, and he often envied those who lived nearer to the fishing than he did. His was a daily commute that took him from the westernmost gate, through the forums and squares and temples that lined the central spine of the stone marvel, and finally out of the eastern doors where a desert of writhing and sinister blue water would meet him. Of course, though, as has been said, the water withheld its blue on that morning, opting instead for the inhospitable gray painted upon it by the drear of winter. As he trekked along, wooden buckets slung over back and woven basket bouncing against his thigh rhythmically with his steps, the myriad smells of the ancient world struck him consecutively and fully woke him up. The rot of the sewage, the soiled smell of the mildew and mold stuck in the standing water sections people knew not to go the freshly cooking bread from those who would soon be filling the markets and looking for a dollar, the sweet gu wafting from the hanging gardens, the blood from the sacrifices which had taken place, as was customary in the midmost of the night. All at once, not noticing it due to its familiarity to him, the man had moved from dragging himself through the damped and mossed over pathways to nearly dancing down them, excited to get his tasks done as quickly as possible so as to return home and enjoy the festivities with his family. That day was a day of feasting and rejoicing for the people of the city, for it was a day they remembered the gift of their city to them from the gods they worshiped. It was the sole reason why he was up as early as he was, and it was the sole reason he had found in the previous weeks to be happy or excited or anything in life. Miserable man. He exited the doors nearest to the harbor and loaded his tackle into his boat before shoving off from shore into an almost dreamlike stillness of the cold morning water. Once away from the lapping but frosted waves of the shore, all sound vanished and he was able to look back and gaze upon the triumphant city. He always did this in order to admire its splendor, but that day checked his routine and forced him rather to see the lifelessness of it. It was so early, and the world was so bereft of color that it looked rather more like a mausoleum than a city of men. The still clinging and thick fog and mist shifted its normally sturdy impression to one of uncertainty and translucence. The man wondered if the city he was looking at was real at all, for it seemed as though it might drift away like sand in a strong wind at any moment. Nonetheless, the ghastly version of his home remained and forced him, for perhaps the first time, to wonder if it might actually be a place of evil. The gods, so the tales told him, had given the city to his forebears as a gift for their devotion. They had taught those earlier men the ways of construction and worship and even music and warfare. They claimed always to be benevolent gods, but the man had often wondered if that was the case, why they seemed so insatiable to him. Many times over the course of his life he had heard the solemn proclamation of the priest saying that bulls and lambs were no longer enough for that season's harvest, that they needed to give the gods the blood of men to sate their hunger and need for surrender from their subjects. Each time that happened, he felt a churn in his stomach that bid him run away from all of it. But he never did, of course, on such a deathly morning he wondered how he had not gone through with his plan to flee, looking upon the points of the towers and the rough edges of the walls where the prostitutes lived. And that light let him see for the first time that it was not only the gods who were menacing their gifts now looked menacing too. A shiver sent down the man's spine, and he turned once more to run not from the city that raised him, but from the idea of running from the city he was surely growing to hate. The hours of the morning waxed, and still the weather did not change. Still gray prevailed, and mist and fog and a cold wind blew over from the eastern shore, hitting the man with a constant push and urging him to work even faster. This the man did, and sure enough was finished with his haul before midday, and despite the foreboding thoughts of evil and flight from his home he had suffered earlier. He looked forward to coming through the dense fog and seeing the familiar spires once more as they welcomed him back to a city at revelry. Surely he would hear the trumpets blare for the beginning of the festival, and the parade would trace down the streets he had walked earlier that morning with royal pomp and finally some rich color to be brought into the monotonously colored day. But what he did not expect to find was precisely what he found stillness and silence hailing from the gates as his boat was pushed along by the wind back to the docks. He boarded her in. There was no trumpet blast, no shouting, no strange fire lit up the tower of the temple to the bliss of the gods. No maidens dancing on the walls, and no soldiers lifting their swords in triumph over the city they guarded. It was eerie noiselessness that rattled the bones of the onlooker as he approached even closer, close enough to count the stones that made up the fortified wall. A sudden change in the day's setting gave him a start. From the west as well as the east, the wind swirled to a torrent until his boat was spun round and round. Black clouds rolled swiftly in to replace the gray blanket over the world, and and lightning tore from its tumorous robes down into the trees on the shore. When the boat stopped turning, the man realized that the wind had wiped away the fog and mist, and though the clouds had certainly brushed a swatch of charcoal over everything, he could at least see more clearly the city that nursed him and all the land surrounding it. He could Also see the sea now stretched out like a dark canvas to his rear and hiding, for it seemed incapable of doing anything else. Nameless things in its depths. And here the hero was dealt a blow by the gods he never forgot, for he looked intently into the water that remained before him between he and the dock and noticed the shape of buoys all along the surface. They had not been there earlier, or perhaps they had been, and he had not seen through the fog. But these strange vessels were now everywhere, blacker even than the water reflecting the sky, and he was headed right for them. As he neared the first line of these objects, he saw a stringy substance wafting off of one into the water, and it made him wonder if they might not be tubular water plants he had not seen before. But they were not this. He brushed his oar upon the first one he was to pass by, and bulging and bobbing with gross lifelessness. The buoy turned over in the water and a face that he knew stared back at him with thin lines of black hair floating behind it. It was the face of his wife, what's more, in the peels of bleached white lightning he could see past these surface bodies and into the shallows of his home sea, where there lay yet more dead. The sea floor could not be seen between the stacked bodies of drowning worshipers to the gods, his countrymen, what manner of plague had passed, what cruel judgment had left him alive while all his people had perished in the night or in the morning? It seemed to him as though earlier, when the city appeared more like a cemetery. He had been right, for that is what it had become. And now, surrounded by the gently swelling waves of the dead, he turned back towards the city in time to see the promontory it stood upon open up beneath it like a hungry Charybdis in her shallow home to swallow up whatever lay above. The city, even to the top of its tallest spire, sank in an instant into the onrushing torrent of waves, to the sound of crackling thunder, and as it seemed to him, ethereal laughter of some deep voiced thing that drifted on the wind, he narrowly escaped going under the waves himself as they rushed to fill the void. And as the seas calmed once more and he looked up from the boat, he saw the slipping lights of Will o'wisps drifting down from the first beams of the sun through a small crack in the sky, past his shaking form and into the water to join the dead. As each line of light fell like a leaf past him, it too seemed to laugh a laugh of divine carelessness, of wicked and selfish, almost childish joviality. The city had perished, and only he remained a forgotten chapter on the banks of the Caspian.