Thus spake the inquisitor Morghi. But it was whispered abroad that the persecution of my master was due to other reasons than merely the theological lapse into heretical practices whereof he stood accused. For this Morghi was himself become a thaumaturge of some reknown; but as he ascended in the mastery of the penumbral arts, ever he found to his dis-gruntlement that the great Eibon had transcended his every achievement. Whether from pious horror at the sin of daemonolatry, as he so vociferously claimed, or from the simple jealousy of a lesser magus for one who hath excelled him in the mastery of the uttermost arcana, it was indubitable that the hierophant would never rest until Eibon had expiated his iniquities in a manner sufficiently sanguinary and gruesome as to prove exemplary to all others who wavered withal in their rectitude.
In the fullness of time I came to fear for my master, for all too well didst I know the somber truth of the imprecations spewed forth upon his name by the fanatical Morghi. In those lustrums which had followed upon the demise of Zylac, during his wanderings through many lands, Eibon had in sooth become a devotee of the obsolete and interdicted cultus of Tsathoggua, as he himself hath writ in his Chapter the Fifteenth. This demon dwells in the gloom of subterranean N'kai, a cavernous region situate beneath the roots of Mount Voormithadreth in the high Eiglophians. And thither did Eibon descend in the daring and valor of his youth, led by Phraaponthus, the shantak-bird, the which beckoned him on, deep and ever deeplier, into the Abyss.
Thereinto he descended in search of such tenebrous and demon-guarded lore as might only be had from the vile and unspeakable lips of That which abideth from the eldermost beginnings of the Earth unto this very hour amidst the putrescence of the Pit. And what he sought, he gained: for the Abomination Tsathoggua is equivocal and ambiguous of mind, and doth not invariably view all mortal men with malign or anthropophagic intent, but taketh, betimes, an odd quirksome liking for some of they who descend thither to the place whereat He wallows, in quest of Elder Lore.
Thus had I cause enough and more to entertain fears for my master, knowing that like his father afore him he had hearkened to the whisperings of the Black Thing that squatteth in the gloom of N'kai. Oft, indeed, had he urged upon me that I should betake myself thither and do likewise, for only thus (he would solemnly reiterate) are the Ultimate Mysteries to be plumbed. But ever, and that steadfastly, did I decline to do this: for I am of Varaad, and from that day, now ages gone, when first our ancestors came hither into these parts from dreamy Kamula amidst the Hills of Zalgara in time-forgotten Thuria, fled before the coming-down of the warlike Atlanteans, have we Varaadishmen worshipped the tribal goddess of our forefathers. From that far day to this have we staunchly adhered to our tutelary totem, which be, as all men know, Ixeera the cat goddess. Mayhap it be true that the goddess be naught more than the primal fetish of my race, as mine own master hath oftentimes admonished; but ever have
I devoutly numbered myself among her celebrants. Even now, as I indite these words with reed-pen cut from the fronded calamus, dipt in the inky exhudations of the squid, one of Ixeera's small and supple felidae rubs its round and silken head athwart my knee with many affectionate slumbrous purrings. Not for such as I, the worshipping of Tsathoggua!
But to return to my History: in ordinary times 'twould have been of scant concern to such as Eibon of Mhu Thulan, did the frenzied zealots of Yhoun-deh rave against him spitefully, for he dwelt afar off at the uttermost extremity of Mhu Thulan, and all that region from Pnar to the polar sea hath never been subject to the magistracy of Iqqua.
But in the past hundred year or such, the cult of Yhoundeh had risen to ascendancy; not only in Iqqua, where it first displaced and then drave out the antique worship of quaint, ichthyoidal little Qualk, the kindly god of fishermen; but also in the great city of Oggon-Zhai, where of old the folk thereof made homage to Kathruale, whose fanes be now neglected overmuch; in Zuth and Naroob, too; until at length all of the land of Zab-damar which fronts upon the sea groaned beneath the dominion of the ecclesiarchs of the elk goddess.
And ever since Prince Tuluum followed his aged grandsire, Xactura, to the throne of Iqqua, have the priests of Yhoundeh wielded both the power temporal and the power spiritual over that sea-affronting realm: and in the reign of Raanor, who succeeded Tuluum, the princedom of the Iq-quasians laid claim to Mhu Thulan, or to those parts thereof the which bordered upon their country to the north, which is to say the westernmost portion of the province, and established jurisdiction and authority over that desolate region formerly untenanted by men, if not in sooth dominion thereover. The present Prince, Pharool, second of that name, had yielded supinely to the encroaching usurpations of the hierophant as meekly as ever did the four sovereigns which preceeded him. Thus had Morghi not only the sanctions of law but also the royal prerogative to indict the Master Eibon, the which authorities he was not overlong to employ against him.
It was in the vernal month of the Year of the Black Tiger, in the third lustrum of Queen Cunambria's reign, when my master came suddenly and in secret during the nocturnal hours unto my lapis minaret which overgazeth the glories of Varaad. Seven-and-forty years had transpired since last I had clasped his hand, or looked into his smiling and hooded and cynical eyes, or heard his wry, humorous, once-familiar mode of speech; but in all that time, whilst that I had grown grey and infirm and was much stricken in years, he had not altered by a whit. Albeit that he was then attained unto the prodigious age of one hundred and two-and-thirty, having by thence eclipsed by no fewer than eight years the span achieved by the venerable Zylac, he seemed nonetheless still nimble and slim, unbent by age, his sly and mocking visage smooth and unlined, and his deep sardonic eyes undimmed.
With him he bore a plentitude of books and scrolls, of graven tablets and of folios, the which I recognized to be the choicest and most valuable tomes and treatises from his librarium; and these he beseeched me to preserve against theft or harm and to keep safe against the occasion of his return. There were amongst this trove many a tome or document of sor-cerous lore most precious and exceeding rare—aye, precious beyond the dreams of avarice and rare above the keenest aspirations of the bibliophile. And when I inquired of Eibon wherefor I shouldst ward these books and scriptures, he but grimly smiled and answered, saying. So that they fall not into the hands of Morghi! And, these admonitions having spake, he said naught more, but bade me a brief farewell. And never again thenceafter did I look upon his face, or leastwise not with the eyes of the flesh. For not long after this did there come down upon him the ireful Morghi, and the henchmen of Morghi, whereupon befell the strange and full marvelous evanishment of Eibon from the bourns of men, and with him Morghi, too, whereat the world still wonders.
In the years which followed upon the heels of these events, have I toiled over the scrolls and volumes of Eibon, and perused the dark and terrible volumes of equivocal lore thus bequeathed into my keeping. Not the least amongst the which were the Voormish Tablets, whereon of old the dreadful arcana of the troglodytes wast engraven by uncouth and bestial paws; and that which is still decypherable by men of the Pnakotic Manuscripts; and the Kadath Record, whose nightmare pages contain much that is suggestive of an authorship in no wise to be considered remotely human nor even mammalian; and those of the Rituals of Yhe which survive into our epoch to preserve those black myths which are the terrible legacy of elder Mu; and the Parchments of Pnom, containing both the Greater and the Lesser Exorcisms of that magus, together with his unwholesome speculations into the true origin of man, with disturbing hints of a parentage cosmical, awesome, blasphemous and, happily, unproven.