IN despair, I withdrew to the crumbling ruins of my palace which stood of old upon the very brink of that profound and shadowy chasm, the Abyss of Yhe, wherein the victorious Elder Gods had hurled the great Ythogtha and had sealed Him therein forever under the potency of the Elder Sign and wherein to this day unbreakable bonds of psychic force imprison Him, even as foul Ghatanothoa is pent and imprisoned in that immemorial and cyclopean citadel atop Mount Yaddith-Gho, and Great Cthulhu slumbers in his Sunken City on the ocean-whelmed and aeon-lost Black Island, and terrible Zoth-Ommng lies chained amid the Deep beyond the Isle of the Sacred Stone Cities.3
Even in the uttermost nadir of my despair, it were unwise for me to neglect the awful duties of my sacerdotal office and thus I turned from a dreary contemplation of this most dire of all the thousand iniquities of the infamous Yaa-Thobboch to that scrutiny and study of the Thirty-one Rituals demanded of my office. This precious document, of which the Earth affords no single other copy4, and which dates from the most extreme and legended antiquity, was indited by the very hand of Niggoum-Zhog, the First Prophet, himself, in the dim aeons before the Old Ones had yet dreamt of creating man. The Secret Rituals themselves were inscribed in fiery and metallic inks upon leaves of parchment fashioned from pthagon membrane, and bound between twin and carven and gem-studded plates of unthinkably rare and precious lagb metal brought hither from dark Yuggoth where it rolls upon the Rim in the most remote of terrestrial aeons by the shadowy Elder Ones. My seething brain a roiling chaos of incoherent images, I perused one by one the Thirty-one Secret Rituals of Yhe, and in the last, most potent and terrific of them all, I found the answer to my dilemma.
For that Thirty-first Ritual contained the dread and portentous formula which is called “The Key That Openeth the Door to Yhe”, and which the primal and elder Prophet warns is not to be spoken aloud save in the final extremity of ultimate Doom.
Therein, in my madness and desperation, I found the answer for which I sought—aii, n'ghaa xutboggon R’lyeh! Iä Ytbottha! A million generations yet unborn shall curse my name!
AND thus was I resolved to open the Door to Yhe, by which term is meant to render null the strictures of the Elder Sign and to release the Primal One, the Abomination in the Abyss, from the chains of psychic force which have imprisoned Him in the depths of the great Chasm for innumerable aeons.
To set free Ythogtha from His Abyss would be at a single stroke to render Him the most awesomely powerful of all the thousand gods of antique Mu, and to thus elevate myself, as His hierophant and prophet, as the supreme and most potent priest in all of the Nine Kingdoms.
The ambitions of Yaa-Thobboth would thus be ground into the dust before my feet; the too easily dominated King Shommog would in a breath be divested of all authority, to the elevation of mine own monarch, Nuggog-ying; the wealth and might of the province of K'naa would drain away like shallow mud before the sucking tides, and my own realm of G’thuu would achieve ultimate prominence over the kingdoms of Mu. What man dares condemn me, if, in the last extremity of my need, I dared set my hand against the tremendous decree of the Elder Gods themselves!
Thus I went down the Hidden Stair to the ultimate and most secret crypt, burrowed deep into the bowels of the planet beneath the age-crumbling foundations of my palace, and there I caused my mute Rmoahal slaves to open the ponderous trapdoor, one single massy slab of hewn and polished onyx, revealing a black depth from which blew ever a chill and noxious wind.
And, steeling my soul, I called upon the power of the Xothic Key, and summoned slithering from his black and noisome burrows the Father of Worms himself, even undying and putrescent Ubb, leader and progenitor of the dreaded Yuggya—the loathly and prehuman servitors of my god, who squirm and slither in the slime about His feet.
Like a great, glistening mass of putrid whitish jelly was Father Ubb, and his squat and quivering trunk supported naught but a swollen and rounded head wherein drooled and quivered ever a pink-rimmed, obscene orifice lined with triple rows of adamantine fangs. Now the Yuggya serve my lord Ythogtha and His Brother, Zoth-Ommog, even as the Deep Ones serve Cthulhu and the Tcho-Tchos their lords, Zhar and Lloigor; and as the Flame-Creatures strive ever to free Cthugha and the Serpentmen of Valusia sought to unchain their lord, Yig, so do the Yuggya tirelessly gnaw at the bonds that hold Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog.
Emerging at length pale and shaken from my converse with Father Ubb, whose unholy vileness and stench is even that of Abhoth Itself, I gained the upper air with relief. But I had won the aid of the Burrowers Beneath to my great endeavor, and together we swore to open the Door to Yhe, though we incur the wrath of the Elder Gods upon remote and rubescent Glyu-Vho!5
I chose the Day of the Writhing of the Aurora as most efficacious for my terrific endeavor; and thence to the brink of the mighty Abyss of Yhe went I forth, with my few frightened acolytes in my train, and in the Hour of the Singing of the Green Vapor I stood upon the cliffs overlooking the profound and gloom-veiled depths of the chasm and made the Scarlet Sacrifice while behind me arose the wailing chorus of my acolytes in the uncouth and alien rhythms of the Yuggya Chants.
I performed the Red Ablution; I brandished the Xothic Key; I traced upon the trembling air in characters of living and supernal fire the Hieroglyphs of Yrr; I performed the Quaar Exorcism; I called upon the Dholes in aeon-forgotten Akio; I employed the lore of the Forbidden Litany; I summoned the Xlath Entities from beyond the extraspatial region of Asymmetrical Etheric Polarity.
I adored the Black Flame in a manner which makes my soul shrink and shudder within me to this hour; I called upon all of the gods of archaic Mu—upon the Great Ones (saving only the noxious and tyrannical Ghatanothoa), and upon the Lesser Ones, upon Yig the Serpent-Father, and shadowy Nug, and Yeb of the Whispering Mists, upon Iod the Shining Hunter, and Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak, the Troubler of the Sands—and upon Him Who Is To Come, and upon Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, who rule the Deep Ones who are His servants in the green sea.
And I uttered in a great voice The Name Which Is Nor Ever To Be Uttered Aloud ....
Above me the stars trembled and burned pale as waxen tapers in an icy and miasmic draught ... all save for the scarlet burning eye of Glyu-Vho, which blazed more brightly than before.
Beneath my heel, the Earth shook with tremors; and from the dimly lit west, where titanic mountains march the breadth of Mu, deep subterraneous thunders mumbled and cold black craters burst redly into flame, filling angry heaven with seething smoke.
My acolytes huddled before me, white faces hidden in shaking hands. And there was a great silence upon the Earth for seven breaths of time.
AND then my heart leapt up within me for horrid and blasphemous joy, for Lo! I had released the first of the seven bonds that had, from the immemorial depths of forgotten time, held prisoner the Abomination in the Abyss.
And He lifted Himself above the brink of the vast chasm of Yhe and gazed down upon His arch-hierophant.
Very terrible was Ythogtha to the sight of men, and more huge than my mind could scarcely accept.