During the battles that took place between the Gray Accord and the dregs in the Western Tundra, many soldiers recounted terrifying visions that they saw when under the influence of the nightmare-gas. Having interviewed several soldiers for accuracy, the Grand Library would like to record these visions for posterity:

Your thoughts descend, crushed beneath terrible force - there is naught but darkling shadow and suffocation, the sea's power infinite and inescapable as it devours you. There can be no movement within such dread, only the sea's slow constriction as it seeks to bury you amidst the deeps.

Like some lava vent at first, but then like the mouth of a volcano, a glimmering eye opens forth. Its immensity blots you into mere shadow, and its gaze accuses you, demands of you - as though charging you with crimes beyond all mortal or Immortal reckoning.

Your mouth opens wide, as though to scream, but water chokes the noise from you such that you can only hang suspended in silence. You struggle to break away, but the fearsome eye turns from you. The immense sea which crushes down upon you is stirred to motion, dragging you forward, forward, blotting out your protest as though you were naught but a mote of dust.

An unspeakable force halts your tumbling course, and you rise upward out of that dark and midnight sea. There are figures three, and nothing more can be told of them save that they are great entities. These three are cast in blackened silhouette by a moon which stands far aback, its rays like bristling, argent spears.

Chains fall upon you in a raucous clatter. You struggle, you fight, you roar with breathless lungs toward the moonlit heavens; surging, raging, demanding, even begging - you seek absolution from the inevitable, but still the bindings fall, imprisoning you and all your kin. The realization of defeat falls upon you, and you rage, rage, in a red and vicious fury, thrashing salt and ice and water into foam until there is naught but darkness and stillness... forever.

Forever, until forever ends. A great clash that any could sense, even the lowliest of mortals - and you are no such thing! You wait with eagerness and bloodlust as Shadow falls upon you, choking you, cloaking you; but as it creeps in, your bonds sunder, and so too does your mid. In desperation, in horror, you turn and seek to tear the blot from yourself. You strike true, teeth a-tearing, and with revulsion see the other half of yourself falling away, away, down into crushing blackness.

And yet, in spite of this terrible wound, you live. You live, and you are strong, and the other darkling half of you has fled you to coil and slither along the fresh waters of the continents, far away from you. You are aware of yourself, as you were not before - JOX, you are called, JOX, JOX - and those infinitesimal wretches that live in mortal fear of you name you LEVIATHAN!

There amidst the oceans you twine like emberous rage embodied, arising to claim the ocean's great beasts, the ships of merchants and sailors and pirates that dare to cast their puny shadows upon you! The ocean is yours and no other Deity's, and you defend your wyrm's claim with the deepest and cruelest of your dread powers. They insult you, mock you, by their mere existence - and they must be smote asunder unto the briny depths.

Yet there is a great war a-raging, there yonder upon the islands and continents which remain alien and anathema to you; a great war, whose deities do not pay heed to claims nor dominion. Heretofore they had kept from your waters, but now they spill across it like offal, offending your senses, staining your waters with their awful miasma.

Rage, rage, red and bloody - up you rear from the dread depths of the sea, and forward you lash like the whip of a mortal slavedriver; forward, attacking, your serpent's form carving ice in twain. Ready for war, ready for conquest, you think to set the tundra a-boiling, to drown it and the dark spires that lie at its borders.

Then pain - pain, agony, yet enduring, not fain to be so easily shrived. Your eye turns, and you glimpse the sky itself parting, veined like lightning, cracked like a cerulean mirror. An existential fire seethes through the breaks and downward, and in that moment, SHE strikes - She, the stripling, that weakling and opportunist!

"Father," She calls in the plaintive, squealing tongue spoke by Her ilk, "Father, I've felled it! Look!" Her spear is a tower stretching from the deep earths to the high and unmade heavens; Her eyes are empty, two bloody voids which gaze down upon You with bright and shining triumph.

Each second, an eternity; each eternity, a torment. You are nothing but a worm, a wretched beetle, a maggot - the worst of all Their insults! When clarity occurs to you, you arise from it, coiled, bound, and seething with humiliated contempt. "Dream," She whispers, and Her voice creeps across you, fills you to your very brim, and you sink, down, down...

Time passes, slow and sibilant, whispering at the edges of your mind, and that terrible warp which the She-Stripling wove persists. Soon, like a plague, it infects you; soon, like an obsession, it steals across your mind, and robs you from yourself amidst a storm of dreadful dissemblance.

Time - time! Inescapable and hateful time! Would that you could escape it, break it, just as you wish you could break She that speared you here! You can taste it, so near, so near...

...the mortals are coming to feed you.

Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 9th of Arios, in the year 481 MA.
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