August had created a swirling vortex of incandescent light that seemed surreal to my nightvision goggles. The shoggoths and other races didn’t know about teleportation the way the Miskatonic University folk did, which gave us our one advantage.
With more Reanimated ghouls breaking through the shoggoth ranks, there was no purpose in continuing to fight. Running toward the portal, Mercury accompanied me and the two of us jumped through. It was a far different experience than the “skipping time” journeys we’d taken before. Instead, it was like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole.
We never once considered how we were to get out again. We fell, fell, and fell some more with no real sense of up or down but forward momentum propelling us in the direction we’d jumped. The interior of the vortex filled with shifting colors and imagery drawn from a thousand points of my life. I didn’t have the time or inclination to speculate on what that meant. In the end, I landed with a thud on the rocky ground beyond. Mercury landed beside me, stumbling to her feet almost immediately to empty the contents of her stomach. It was neither nighttime nor day where we were, the sky blotted out by an opaque black cloud like the kind gathered around the Faceless Ones’ power plant.
August stepped through the portal behind us, the strange vortex disappearing once he’d passed through. “I’m going to pay for conjuring that thing. I don’t know how, but I’m going to.”
“Where are we?” I muttered, looking back at him. My heavy-assault rifle was still on the ground. “We need to…”
I trailed off when I turned my head to look forward and was left silent by what I saw. It was a massive, iridescent sea-green tower of strange blue rocks, coral, pearl-like orbs, and crystalline growths weaving around a network of abnormally large bones. By which I mean they were bones the size of Pre-Rising skyscrapers, twisting and bending throughout the tower. Thousands of dragon and kraken-like skulls, all belonging to the same hydrous creature, I guessed, were built into the side of this nightmarish monument.
If I looked hard, I could see balconies and irregularly shaped windows that seemed to lead into a Stygian blackness infinitely worse than any mere darkness. Waves of visible radiation poured off the tower, and I wondered if we would die from it before I dismissed that thought. It didn’t matter now. Whether they were harmless or lethal, we were here.
The Tower of Zhaal—for what else could it be?—had no top I could see, but simply rose forever through the skies of this world and other ones. There was a top, I knew, but it existed not in this dimension, but in a space between dimensions. The Tower of Zhaal was like the mythical Yggdrasil, the World Tree that linked the Nine Worlds of the Norse. It was a bridge between universes, and while the Yithians had exploited this in order to banish the Unimaginable Horror from this world, the Faceless Ones had stupidly called it back from the Sepulcher.
At the base of the tower, I saw a gathering of Faceless Ones and Reanimated. There were hundreds of them, scurrying around like ants at the foot of an evil totem pole. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but it looked like they were moving about the base of a much larger camp. The attack on the shoggoths had apparently diverted their forces from the Tower.
Thank God for small miracles.
Mercury looked at the Tower of Zhaal, taking in its dark majesty. “I never thought we’d make it this far.”
“Most of us didn’t,” August said, sighing. “What a senseless waste of life. And for what? The opportunity to knock on the front door of a god? A god who would just as soon gobble us up? It’s insane.”
I thought about Bobbie’s corpse, abandoned in the tunnels to rot. Her death struck me harder than I thought it would. We’d sacrificed so much to get here: Thom, Jessica, Bobbie, and even Mathew—though I’d known him for only a few minutes. Whole cities had been destroyed for this deranged summoning. When was it going to end?
Now is when it’s going to end.
We were on top of a rocky outcropping in the middle of a lifeless, jagged-stone-filled desert, probably northwest of the Valley of the Idols. There was an endless sea of nothingness surrounding us, a Badlands that made it seem like there wasn’t much left of the world to risk.
I’d seen the life that had managed to eke out an existence in the dust and rock, though. I knew it was possible for this world to heal, even if it took a billion years. Even if humanity wouldn’t be around to see it. The Unimaginable Horror was the enemy of that recovery. Good, evil, amoral, or indifferent, it was dangerous to this planet and had to be stopped.
I just wished I had an idea as to how.
“You’re right,” I said, standing up before wobbling on my feet a bit. “This is crazy. Deranged lunacy that will only bring about ruin on everyone and everything. We have to stop it.”
“And I assume our illustrious strategist has a plan for doing so?” August said, sounding more defeated than rude.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“We find the person who would summon … this … into the world and kill him or her,” Mercury said, gesturing to the Tower. “That’ll send it back, right?”
August wrinkled his brow. “It can’t hurt. This is magic far beyond me. Maybe if I had a century or two, I could figure out how it all works, but I’m just doing guesswork now. Killing everyone seems as good an idea as anything.”
Not the most ringing endorsement for our plan, such as it was, but at that stage I was ready to take whatever I could get. We’d been equipped by the Yithians to fight a lone madman and had ended up battling armies. Despite this, we’d managed to make it to a place every bit as alien as risen R’lyeh, the Plateau of Leng, or distant Carcosa. Inside the Tower of Zhaal, imprisoned by magics greater than any ever uttered by humans, was a killer of worlds. A being that had both spawned life on our planet and would end it if given half the chance.
I should have felt overwhelmed, but I couldn’t help but also feel exhilarated. This was a chance to spit in the face of death. Whether we won or lost, we’d done our very best to make it this far. The Great Old Ones might not care whether humanity existed, whether we were brave men or cowards, but we’d stood up for ourselves. I couldn’t help but remember the Hyperborean Annals, those ancient tablets from Commoriom’s ruins that spoke of how their legendary warrior kings had endured similar trials. Humans had been fighting the Old Ones and their aftereffects since the early days following the Elder Things’ fall. Usually without success. I was no Kull, not even Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn, but I felt empowered by my struggle. The strength of a person was not measured in their physical body, but by how much they were willing to test themselves.
“Well, after all this hell is finished, I promise I’m going to take you all drinking. Rounds on me forever,” I said, placing a fist on my chest.
“Careful,” August said, letting out a short chuckle. “I’m going to live a very long time, John. You may come to regret that offer.”
I was about to make a rejoinder when a bullet whizzed past me.
“Shit,” I shouted, going for one of the nearby rocks as Mercury and August did the same. “Sniper!”
I proved to be premature in my declaration, since it turned out there were multiple shooters. We’d faced literal hordes of the undead only to end up pinned down by a bunch of Faceless Ones with guns. Down near the tower base, I saw packs of black mutated dogs with multiple heads and extra appendages charging forward. These were positively mundane by the standard of the things I’d seen in the Wasteland but could kill us nevertheless. Keeping my head low, I reached for the strap on my heavy-assault rifle and pulled it to me, aiming over my shoulder and firing at the creatures coming at us.
“I am sorry,” I apologized to the animals, firing into their ranks. “I only wish to do harm to your masters.”
I had killed about half of the creatures when time seemed to fall still. I turned around and saw, despite this being an impossibility, a rifle cartridge heading directly toward the front of my skull.
Then everything went black.
Curiously, my last thought before this happened was this: How anticlimactic.