MMMCXLII

Waking in the middle of the night, Judah Loweberg slowly scanned the ruins of his once ornate study. A wave of melancholy washed over him. Each time the time for his metamorphosis came, he turned into an erratic man. He knew that his success was a given, and yet, every time his illness, as he called it, returned, he became a monster trapped in his own mind. Staring at the book given to him by the ghastly stranger on a rainy night, he mused about the public’s apparent obsession with the contents of the book. For some strange reason, everyone in town spoke of it, and yet, according to the stranger, none had ever read it in his lifetime – not besides Loweberg himself.

Pressing his fingers against the ornate golden cover of the book, he traced his digit along with the letters of the title. Loweberg thought it to be amusing the fact that a book titled The Halls of Oppression was a rather tame read. Of course, it contained detailed information about many unpleasantries and macabre topics, yet still, the book felt tamer somewhat than the public’s imagination of its contents. Remarkably so. Remembering his creation had gone missing, he opted to look for the thing once more.

Loweberg rose from his chair, bones cracking painfully under his weight. His frame seemed almost inhuman in its ghoulish form. Pure white, sunken eyes, bones pressing against his skin. A nearly perfect recreation of Death. Loweberg knew he couldn’t afford to be seen like that, not at times such as these when the whole town seems to be swept by a plague of madness, surrounding a mere book. He grabbed his coat and hat, donning both on his bony dying frame, and slowly limped out of his ancient castle, like a living ghost.

Knowing his creation had accompanied him many times to the local inn, or perhaps driven by his love for the divine drink, Loweberg crept into the inn. The moment he stepped inside, he saw the inn had been ravaged as if a bloody war had taken place in the establishment. The ghastly man forced his way toward the counter, bypassing heaps of broken bodies and destroyed property. When he finally reached the counter, he seated himself next to a silent man who’d been fiddling with his drink without drinking it. Loweberg requested his usual poison and struck a conversation with the innkeeper questioning her about if she’d seen his creation. A thing he described as a tall man wearing a mask with three letters in a foreign tongue because of a rare skin condition. Unfortunately, for the ghastly man, she had not seen his creation.

The innkeeper instead spoke of how the dreaded book affected her establishment. Driving a mob of people mad to the point where they compelled themselves to assault one of the prior patrons, before crucifying him upside down and carving arcane symbols onto his body until he died from blood loss and shock. After the death of the patron, the innkeeper said the mob turned on itself and had destroyed everyone and everything in sight. The way she described the scenery seemed a little too blunt for the ghoulish man, but he himself was immune to the visceral effect of the carnage. Lifetimes of his existence have turned him dull and aloof to the human condition.

The innkeeper then mentioned the mysterious book and spoke of how it influenced everyone negatively, including herself, driving him to become a heartless woman. The ghoulish man wondered if she had even read the book. Before he could question her on the matter, however, the silent man beside him smashed his glass across the counter, averting the attention to himself. He muttered something about escaping the halls of oppression of the king clad in a void and then stabbed himself in the neck, repeatedly, splashing his blood all over the ghastly man, the innkeeper, and the counter.

Seeing the look of pure anguish and hatred in the suicidal man’s eyes as he repeatedly killed himself while gurgling like a demon from the bowels of hell amused Judah Loweberg. The ghastly man drank his now blood-laced drink as the suicidal patron finally fell onto the counter and slid down to the floor. Such a turn of events has definitely amused the mysterious man. The innkeeper looked at the corpse with sheer annoyance and she complained she had more cleaning to do. At that moment, he knew he didn’t even have to ask; she never read the book.

Her lack of empathy for the death of a fellow man amused Loweberg even further, sending into a burst of laughter. Paying generously for his drink and unexpected entertainment, he bid her farewell and slowly stalked his way out of the establishment. Largely ignoring the victims of the evil that lurks within the corridors of self-oppression strewn across the blood-stained floor.

Judah Loweberg limped and crawled back into his castle, disappointed he couldn’t find his creation, and yet once he entered his luxurious abode, he felt elation. A sense of relief he had not in quite some time. A smile formed across his bony face as he saw indescribable lights emanating from the rooms of his castle.

“Your highness! Finally, you’ve come to collect!” Judah Loweberg exclaimed joyfully, even though it hurt his every muscle.

A tall shadowy figure crawled across the dead space towards the ghoulish man, all sorts of strange lights cast themselves all around, coming from within the shadowy stranger’s innards.

“I have. I am here to collect my book from your hands.” It said in a pleasant voice.

“Ah, lovely!” the man exclaimed at the alien being.

Loweberg limped towards the book and then back to the strange entity that entrusted it to him in the first place.

“You look terrible, Mr. Loweberg.” The being spoke, not a hint of genuine concern in its voice.

“Yes, but that is temporary. A phoenix must first plunge itself into the flames to arise from them anew. Is it not so?” questioned the half-decayed man.

“That is correct, Mr. have you read the book as instructed?” the shadow-clad figure enquired.

“But of course,” the corpse-like Loweberg remarked, “more than once, in fact!” he quipped as he handed the book to its original owner.

“I wonder, though, your highness, why is it that this book drove this entire city insane without a single person ever even touching it?” The hollow man questioned the being in front of him.

The thing clad in shadows and strange lights took the golden book and placed it under its gloomy cloak, making it disappear within its form. The lights danced, and the shadows slithered around its form like snakes and worms. It looked deep into Judah’s soul and spoke; “This is not a personal insult, but your kind is a feeble and pathetic breed. You claim to seek the truth and yet marvel at half-truths, hearsay, lies, and fables. Humans do not want to see the truth; you do not want to cross that event horizon that leads to the inevitable black hole that is truth. That thing, that concept. This force – truth. It’s immovable, unchangeable, always static, cold, and uncaring. It is a matter of fact. Ever present, cruel and crushing with its ever-increasing weight.”

The feeble man stood and listened attentively as if attending a sermon of his divine maker.

"Humans don’t want the truth. They want something they can manipulate, reshape, and reform. Take advantage of and derive power from – that’s why they seek half-truths. Shards of the reality that fit their needs, ones they can manipulate for their own benefit. Tools to obtain power and might.

"That’s what the book does. It has a will of its own, its own life; it creates these illusions in people’s minds. This book gives them these minuscule notions of understanding. The book creates bright, radiating balls of plasma that it gives out to people who have not read it. It feeds them a false sense of security and prosperity, but this plasma… this plasma is radioactive, and we both know what radiation does to humans. It corrupts, corrodes, and destroys hearts, souls and bodies.

"The book doesn’t go this far. It merely plants a seed into the minds of fools. They then shape their own nuclear poison; their own brightly burning quasars that end up destroying everything. Demolishing the souls of anyone who comes near and consuming everything until nothing is left.

“That said, half-truths feel better than the actual thing because the truth is oppressive, you of all people know this best as you’ve used truth to tie and oppress your inhuman creation made of clay to this plane of existence, Mr. Loweberg… You’ve used truth to bring life to a fable, a lie, an artificial fabrication. What a perverted thing to do… Truly befitting a man who dabbles in the arcane arts.”