[REDACTED] 


I'm not sure | understand. Are you saying that you sympathise 
with her? 


Sympathise? | don't know... No. | can't say that | do. She'd kill me 
just as soon as look at me, just out of spite. Because she is spiteful, 
she'd kill me just to watch me die. But what she's trying to do... if 
she does it, then she [REDACTED]. 


You are also on record as opposing her terms of confinement. 


Because it's dangerous. Like | said, she's spiteful. Every little slight 
in her eyes she saves up, and the only way she knows how to repay 
an insult is death. Chaining her to the wall like an animal... when 
she gets out, and she will get out, she's going to kill everyone who 
had the slightest thing to do with it. She won't settle for anything 
else. 


You have also paid her several visits in her holding cell. 
... yes, | have. 
What do you talk about? 


[no answer] 


shown the six-eight-two pictures again to know how serious that can 
be. SOP for an SK scenario is to remain in your current secure area 
until a security team unseal the blast portals. If you are not in a 
secure area, move as quickly as you can to the nearest one, 
following the thin red line on the wall near to the floor, and follow 
standard security protocols for entry to the BPs. 


“Now, then you have EK. First of all I'd like to show people this set of 
photographs, and a short presentation. If you begin to feel sick or 
faint let me know.” 


He shuddered at the memory. He hadn't vomited but several around 
him had, and the smell made the rest of the afternoon’s lectures a 
highly unpleasant experience. ‘So,’ he mused to himself, ‘/ should 
find a secure exit portal and await relocation to a perimeter bunker 
to await further instructions.’ . 


“Where’s the fun in that?” he said out loud as he turned the corner. 


Then he nearly tripped over the mess on the floor, and began to 
rapidly re-evaluate his decision. 


The Broken Fifth 


The clockwork gears in Brother Diagram's head ached. 


Yes, they ached. It was nothing like the slow, dysfunctional grinding 

of a poorly calibrated Cognition Engine. Besides, he had just had his 
parts fully serviced that afternoon. Every cog in his body was ticking 

at full capacity. 


Yet his gears continued to ache. They ached, throbbed even, with a 
perfectly organic and (he shuddered at the thought) fleshly sort of 
pain. 


It was worse than rusting over or corroding. 
It was downright UNMECHANIZED. 


Brother Diagram looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, which 
was almost all he ever used the bathroom for since he had his 
digestive tract refitted. Through the glass lenses of his eyes, he 
could see the dull weariness that had glazed over them. 


What was he doing wrong? Over forty percent of his body had been 
Standardized. Devout he was to the rebuilding of MEKHANE. He 
even had a part in the restoration of one of the Sacred Components. 
Yet he felt no peace from the Broken One. No amount of meditation 
could remove the knot he perpetually felt in his brass stomach. 


He hadn't felt one bit whole since the dream invaded his system six 
weeks ago. 


Dreams are, by definition, irregular to the Standardized mind. At 
best, they are inefficient and unproductive constructs, meaningless 
to the realm of reality. At worst, they can clutter the mind with 
disorder and heretical thought. This was common knowledge to 
anyone who had read The Schema of the Patriarchs, and Brother 


Diagram had it memorized down to the very last iota. 


It was for this very reason that Brother Diagram had gotten himself 
retrofitted with the newest Cognition Engine in production. Up until 
six weeks ago, dreams and other idle wanderings of the organic 
brain had been fully eradicated from his mind. 


Yet this dream lingered. This impure, heretical product of the unholy 
Flesh continued to pervade his thoughts, entangling itself in the cog- 
work of his otherwise perfect psycho-mechanical faculties. He often 
had to excuse himself from morning prayers and daily rituals, which 
his fellow Brothers in the monastery frowned strongly upon. Light 
chores wore him out. Even the ticking of his very own mechanisms 
were beginning to get him — well, ticked. 


As he pondered over this, Brother Diagram began to feel every 
piece of metal in his body heat up. The teeth of the gears in his head 
began to creak and groan. He knew exactly what was going to come 
next, and — there it was — without further warning, the dream 
projected itself directly upon his eye lenses, try as he might to 
repress it. 


He was standing on the roof of the Cathedral, surrounded by a vast 
sea of stars. The ticking sound that had followed him ever since his 
conversion — the ticking he had always taken such comfort in — 
was absent from the complete silence around him. Yet he was filled 
with an odd and overpowering sense of familiarity, as if he had been 
there his entire life. 


And as silently as the night surrounding them, MEKHANE 
descended down from the stars above, His ceaseless mechanisms 
bathed in their dim white glow. The awe of seeing the Almighty in 
His whole and glorious form froze Brother Diagram into place. 


"Oh Lord, if | am pleasing in Your sight, let me be One with You!" he 
exclaimed. It did not matter how many times this dream was 
replayed in Brother Diagram's mind; his conversation with this 
simulacrum of the Broken One was always identical. 


MEKHANE looked down upon him, and, in ways indescribable, 


motioned for him to come closer. Brother Diagram approached 
slowly and reverently. The Lord beckoned him even closer. And 
when Brother Diagram and the Lord were only a few inches apart, 
He spoke: 


"Who are you to say that | am not whole?" 


His voice was nothing like Brother Diagram had ever imagined. 
Although the words shook him to his alloy core, they were soft and 
gentle, like a moonbeam diffusing through a canopy of leaves. 


"...1 do not understand, Lord. | beg of you, help me to understand 
your Mind and your Will, so that | may be whole!" Brother Diagram 
pleaded. 


"You will come to understand. You will understand, and you will 
know how brokenness is whole." 


"What does this mean, O Lord?" 


"You are now whole, as | was once whole. And yet you are empty, 
as | was once empty. | was one of the first to understand, although 
many were told. | was broken, as you will be broken. And now | am 
full, as you will be full." 


The words of MEKHANE melted in between Brother Diagram's ears 
like water into desert sands, their meaning showing itself 
momentarily, only to disappear forever. 


"Please, Lord, help me understand. How may | serve you more?" he 
pleaded once more. 


No reply came from the clockwork deity. Diagram noticed that the 
stars behind MEKHANE were getting brighter — no, rather, the dark 
was losing its darkness. 


"Please Lord!" he pleaded with greater intensity. His eye lenses 
were filled with tears, although he had had his lacrimal glands 
removed years ago. 


"You have all been told, but they do not understand. | called you to 
be with Me, as | was called to be among the stars. | was never 


whole until | was broken, and now | am full. Who are you to say that 
| am not whole?" 


Before Brother Diagram could say anything else, MEKHANE had 
disappeared; the darkness had likewise faded into complete 
absence, leaving a field of stars silently dotting a background of not- 
dark. 


With this, the projections ended. Brother Diagram's components 
returned back to normal, except for the aching of the gears in his 
head. But it would come back. This was the fifth iteration this week. 


The fifth iteration this week. 
Fifth iteration. 


Fifth. The word seemed to bounce off of the inner walls of his metal 
skull. It was tearing him apart, breaking him down from the inside. 


He had to tell someone. 


No, he thought to himself. This is heresy. No Mind can even begin to 
contemplate the glory of the Broken One in His wholeness. This is a 
work of the Flesh. 


He had to tell Brother Superior. 


No. MEKHANE would never make Himself known through an 
aberration of the organic brain. Even if this were so... He would 
never tell His people — His clockwork servants — to strive for 
anything but His rebuilding... right? 


He had to tell the Church. 


NO! This is an ABOMINATION! An impure corruption of 
Standardized Thought! It goes against the Writ... his logic processes 
ceased momentarily. Did it go against the Word? He recalled every 
passage pertaining to MEKHANE's direct revelation to His followers. 
Had He ever said He was broken? Had he ever asked for His body 
to be rebuilt? 


A bead of lubricant-laced sweat trickled down his temple. True, 
MEKHANE had asked His people to join with Him. But what did it 
mean to join with Him? 


| called you to be with Me, as | was called to be among the stars. 


Brother Diagram fell to his knees. MEKHANE would be restored. But 
not in this world. Not with the corroded pieces of metal and alloy He 
purposely left behind. 


Flesh decays. Machines fail. Even darkness will eventually fade. 
But the stars... 

He would tell Brother Superior. 

He would tell the Church. 


He would tell the WORLD. 


For the first time in six weeks, the gears in Brother Diagram's head 
stopped aching. 


And for the first time he could ever think of, his ticking clockworks 
ran in continuous — and complete — silence. 


The Broken God Of Ayrshire - Chapter 1 


And so it was that the Old Ones could no longer abide the horrors 
begat by Meknah-Re, He That Breaks Men's Souls Upon the Forge, 
and together they tore him limb from limb and cast his ichorous 
appendages far and wide, that they might never find each other 
again. His heart was discarded in the dunes of Shar-Harad to be 
devoured by the drifting sands. His tongue was cut out and weighted 
before it was thrown into the impossible depths of Lake 
Schwartherz. His entrails were left to freeze upon the plateau of 
Leng. His brain was burned and its ashes scattered amidst the 
scorched remains of Sarnath. His eyes were hurled into the cosmos 
where they linger still today, known by the heathen Dogons as the 
Invisible Twins of Sirius, that still glare enviously at us today. His 
manhood was cut from his flesh and mounted erect before the ruin 
of Lost Antigo, a warning to any that might dare to approach that 
damned place. It is said that there are still those who follow the God 
That Has Been Broken, and would gather up those cursed hunks of 
divine flesh and put them back together if they could. Should that 
day ever transpire, a terrible doom indeed will fall upon the world of 
man. 

-Abdul al-Hazred, Necronomicon, Volume 6 ("On Dead Gods") 


The motor-coach rumbled and shook as it clattered along a seldom- 
used dirt road cutting through the forests of central Massachusetts. | 
sat in the back row, alone (for none of my fellow passengers had 
remained aboard after the previous stop in Ixbridge), bundled in my 
coat against the chill autumn air. Ancient trees unmolested by the 
avarice of man passed by the window as | breathed a sigh and 
clutched dearly to my valise, looking down at my watch. A quarter of 
six, half an hour before sunset, and fifteen minutes to go before the 
bus would make its stop at the desolate, isolated hamlet of Ayrshire. 
| reached into my pocket and retrieved the telegram that had set me 
on this itinerary into the hinterlands of civilisation, reading again the 
short message | had received from Overwatch three days prior; 


3RD OCT 1927 


NO CONTACT FROM PROF EDDINGS SINCE 14TH 
AUG STOP 

LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS GRAINGERS INN 
AYRSHIRE MASS STOP 

MAY BE IN DANGER DUE TO NATURE OF 
RESEARCH STOP 

LOCATE EDDINGS OR HIS REMAINS AND REPORT 
ASAP STOP 

WE SECURE WE CONTAIN WE PROTECT 


It had been some time since Bernard Eddings and | had crossed 
paths, and my heart had sunk when the Western Union man 
delivered his missive that grey Monday morning. Eddings was a 
Harvard man, as was I, though our shared time at that illustrious 
institution was short; | had only just arrived, a doe-eyed freshman 
who had been wooed to the college's renowned football team, when 
he was already well engaged in his postgraduate studies of regional 
folklore. We struck up an odd friendship of sorts when | sought out a 
tutor to aid me with my flagging marks in maths, and when several 
years later, after the war, he had found employment with the 
association | to this day still Know only as ‘the Foundation’, he 
sought me out to offer me a position as well. 


"Have you gone mad, Bernie?" | recall asking him when he first 
proffered the proposition. "I'm no scientist. | can't imagine what use 
I'd be to a bunch of eggheads and doctors in white coats unless 
you're in dire need of a test subject." 


"There's more to the Foundation than just bleach-bare laboratories 
and musty old tomes, Reg," he replied to me. "You've heard of the 
G-Men that Hoover has been recruiting? We're looking for G-Men of 
our own. We need young men with a sharp mind, a keen eye, and 
the ability to go out into the field and get things done, clean, quick, 
and quiet. Men like you." 


"So | am to be a secret agent?" | asked him. "| am sure you could 
find more qualified men than myself." 


"You sell yourself short. You were in the war, weren't you?" 


"Mostly in Belgium, yes." 


"And | understand you were part of the military police unit that dealt 
with the depredations Dr. West unleashed against our own boys in 
Flanders." 


| shuddered at the memory of the horrors | had seen in West's 
chthonic laboratory, the twisted mockeries of science to which the 
doctor's insane genius had given life. "Yes," | meekly responded. 


"Then you've already seen the kind of things our Foundation has to 
deal with. The world is full of incomprehensible monstrosities lurking 
on the edges of logic itself, and we need men with the constitution to 
face them down and keep their senses. The fact that you made it out 
of West's den of nightmares alive and sane proves that you're the 
kind of man we need. Please tell me you'll come with me to Site 19 
next week and talk to Jack about the position." 


| hesitantly agreed, and it was scarcely two weeks later when the 
personnel director, that queerly-mannered man with a strange 
medallion around his neck and a look in his eyes that belied his 
youthful countenance, shook my hand and welcomed me as a Field 
Agent Candidate, and in the six years since then | have traveled 
from the majestic spires of New York City to the desolation of the 
Rub’ al Khali and everywhere in between in the Foundation's 
service. Now | found myself scarcely two hundred miles from my 
own hometown, yet somehow farther away from any civilised place | 
recognized, in search of the man to whom | owed so much. 


When | last spoke to Professor Eddings this past June, he was 
embarking on a sabbatical of sorts, in pursuit of that labour which 
has been his passion for as long as | have known him. Since his 
boyhood in Arkham, the Professor has been fascinated by the weird 
and unique folklore and religious practices that arise from time to 
time in the backwoods of Massachusetts. His thesis on the history of 
Dagon-worship among the islanders of Dukes County remains the 
authoritative work on the subject and earned him the academic 
moniker by which his fellow researchers (and |) respectfully title him, 
and his annotations on the Arkham copy of the Arab's tome have 
proven invaluable in our dealings with a certain pair of Sumerians. | 
had bade the Professor good-bye as he embarked alone on a tour of