The Lesser Ones Remember

When the World Blinked

The road hummed like a tuning fork beneath the tyres — constant, familiar, deceptively ordinary. He'd always hated that feeling: ordinariness. A trap. He used to say that if you listen closely, silence isn't empty — it's hiding something.

Before the blink, he spent his nights with tomes no sane man should translate. Dreaming tongues. Glyphs carved into flesh instead of stone. There were rules, once — elegant ones. And he had known them. He had mapped the labyrinth beneath awareness. He had believed there were boundaries.

The lie, of course, was that names were enough to contain the nameless.

They'd just left a tea shop. Or a ritual supply store. Maybe both — memory was already bleeding. His wife sat beside him, fingers grazing his wrist on the gearshift. She hadn't spoken since the parking lot. She didn't like it when he talked about the ones who watched from beneath thought.

The radio was playing something. A string arrangement, maybe. Haunting and melodic but the notes stuttered, bent backward, and became something else — a chant?

"Nafl'ghan... ei'ya shagg-hrii... Zhar lies dreaming..."

He blinked.

No — the world blinked.

Just for a moment, everything pulled inward like a collapsing lung. A flicker. A smear of motion across the mirror. The reflection blinked before he did.

Then the light — red?

No, green. Then red again. And the truck.

And her scream.

He reached out; for her; for the brake, it didn't matter.

And then, silence.

But not the silence of sleep. Not the gentle slipping away of thought. This was the kind of silence felt before creation itself. The kind that waits for God to forget his lines. He felt himself suspended in it — like meat in a vacuum. No air. No breath. No body.

He tried to call a word of power — something from the rites. A ward. A name. But the only thing that came was a sound; wet, ancient and guttural:

"Ia... y'golonac... ei'ya nyh-haa.."

He didn't speak it. It spoke to him. No, it spoke through him. He felt it like deep resentment. Like an all-knowing sensation that he did not belong in this place. This nameless nowhere.

And then — nothing. A silence so dense it pressed against his skin like smoke made solid. But it was not empty. It was waiting, watching in the forever corners of this impenetrable darkness. He could feel its presence, always close by.

It had not spoken its name. It didn't need to. He would remember it, even if his mind forgot.

Hollow in the Husk

He floated. Or maybe not. There was no up, no down — no orientation at all. He existed the way dust might exist in a sealed jar: trapped, inert, observed. He became aware of the absence first. No breathing. No touch. No voice. Not numbness. Absence.

He tried to locate his mouth. His hands. His eyes. But what answered wasn't flesh — it was memory.

Fingers are ten. Left thumb was crooked. Eyes... yes, they close... don't they?

He couldn't feel his body, but he could feel the echo of it. Like he was wearing the memory of a body, stitched together from recall and regret. A pulse fluttered somewhere, but it didn't belong to him. It beats in rhythms older than mammals. Older than planets. It beats for him, not from him.

Time passed but not like it should. There were no seconds. Just intervals of screaming silence, broken occasionally by the brush of something. It would graze across his awareness like a fingertip across static. It felt like being looked at with teeth. Once it whispered:

"Y'golonac hungers in the halls beneath thought..."

He didn't know if he heard it, or if he was meant to.

He tried again to speak — not aloud, just in his mind. He wanted to scream. Call out. Even the old rites felt distant now. Their structure, gone.

"I command you, I—"

"Ia... lloigor-n'gha... ei'ya zhro... Tulzscha... Tulzscha dances in the nameless dark"

The chant interrupted him. It slithered between worlds like a parasite. Like it had been waiting to use his voice again. He tried to pray. He didn't believe, but prayer was ritual. And rituals were boundaries. But the darkness — the nameless place — laughed. It laughed the way oil laughs on fire. Not loud. Just hot, and final.

Shapes came next. Not seen — not really. But known. Felt. Drawn into the folds of his thinking like bruises forming in the soul. He thought of his wife. Her voice. Her touch. But her face wouldn't form. Every time he tried, the memory wore someone else's grin. And in the dark behind her smile, a third eye blinked. Voices stirred, heard but not heard.

He drifted for an eternity that refused to end. At one point, he tried to remember his name. He nearly had it — a letter, a syllable — when the void shushed him. Not angrily. Not cruelly. Just like a parent guiding a child back to bed.

He began to weep. Not with tears, but with thoughts. He wept the idea of tears. The ghost of sobs. And something wept back,

"Zhar lies dreaming... Zhar lies dreaming on his bed of stone in the nameless dark... in the void where even light forgets its name..."

The Mouth of the Spiral

Time no longer has meaning. It just is. There was no shape to the dark anymore. It had teeth once — maybe — or breath, or presence. Now it was everything. Everywhere. It was him. Or he was it. There was no longer a difference. Words lost order. Ideas unhinged.

"Flesh is just a cage. Just a cage. Just a—CAGE. Bones are lies. Names are a dream. I am teeth I am teeth I am teeth I am—"

His thoughts looped. Collapsed. Folded inward like paper crumpling underwater. He saw colors he could not describe in words. He felt numbers as tastes. Something behind his ribs began to itch, but not from inside his ethereal body — it was history itself trying to crawl out.

At one point, he tried to scream. It came out as:

"Tulzscha... Tulzscha dances... I AM THE EYE INSIDE THE VEIL... Ia! Ghroth is singing again, do you hear it?! LET ME OUT THROUGH THE MIRROR WHERE THE SUN GOES TO BLEED!"

There was a noise — a wet, slapping laugh somewhere deep beneath existence. And something clapped. Mock applause. Then came the voices. Not whispering anymore. Chanting. Louder. Layered. Hundreds of them. All him, all others.

"Ia! Ei'ya nog shagg-hrii! Y'golonac waits where memory drowns..."

"Zhar lies dreaming... Zhar lies forever dreaming in the black abyss upon a bed of stone... forever watching, forever waiting..."

He could feel what he assumed was his mouth, open wider than it should. His jaw cracked, but he did not feel pain — only release. A thousand eyes blinked from his skin. None were his.

He laughed.

He cried.

He chanted:

"Nafl'ghan... I am the hollow. I am the vessel. Feed me names I can forget and in return I give to you the nameless for they are those who wait, and who watch. Never revealing, though always felt in the darkness"

Time shattered. It fell around him like wet glass. Each shard screamed a different version of his name. He forgot them all. He floated. Then fell. Then rose. Then bled — not from veins, but from meaning. He was no longer human. Just a vessel for an echo. A speaker for that which never speaks. He tried to pray. But the words were eaten as he thought them. And then — Light.

Not warmth. Not salvation. Just... difference. A blink. A crack in the dark. Reality tore — and something reached in. It wore her face. And it said his name.

Residuals

Light. Again. Not the sterile shimmer of hospital fluorescents. Not yet. This light had no temperature, no origin. It was a suggestion of brightness. Then the pain came. Soft at first — like nerves rebooting. Then sharper. Heavy. Flesh piecing itself back together. Gravity forcing reality upon him. He strained through squinted eyes. A ceiling. White. Cracked at the corners. Water stain shaped like a broken circle.

A voice. A hand in his. "Dad?", He blinked. Or tried to. His eyelids felt stitched shut. "I—" he rasped. The voice broke into laughter. Tears. "It's okay. You're okay. Oh god, you're really here..." The blur resolved into a face. Young. Familiar. Too familiar. Her hair curled like her mother's. Her eyes... identical. Even her smile. But her voice — that was new. Weathered by years he hadn't seen. Years that had passed without him.

"You've been asleep", she said. "Ten years. After the crash... the doctors didn't think—". Crash. Wife. Truck. Red light. Screaming. He felt it all at once, like fire under his skin. "I thought... you both...", "You were all I had", she whispered. "After Mum died. I didn't know what to do."

He tried to sit up, but the room lurched. "I went through your study. I needed... to feel close to you. I found your books. The weird ones". She laughed nervously, "The Necronomicon? Remember that thing?"

His blood froze.

"I used to read from it. I memorised the chants. I even started doing this ritual — the one about 'returning lost souls'. Me and some friends... we did it every week by your bedside for years".

She was smiling. Proud. Like she'd brought home a rescued pet. "I kept seeing names in dreams. Zhar. Y'golonac. Tulzscha. They felt... important. I thought they were part of it".

They are. Oh god... they are.

He turned sharply, heart pounding like ritual drums. There, on the table beside his bed — the book. Bound in human skin. The corners frayed. Its spine cracked open to a page that vibrated. He grabbed it.

The Rite of Return

His eyes scanned the page. The ancient text translated itself in his mind. Not words — truths. Symbols squirming into comprehension. And then, at the bottom:

The soul returned is not whole. The flesh returned is not sovereign. Where the gate is opened, the gatekeeper follows. The rite completes not the man... but the god within.

His hands trembled. He flipped back. Page after page of madness, invocation, summoning. Diagrams of bodies split apart and rebuilt around a central seed. One image showed a man dissolving — his bones bending inward, his veins becoming roots. In his chest: a sleeping eye.

Zhar lies dreaming...

He looked up. The room was wrong. Too still. His daughter was staring at him. But her pupils... were glowing green. From the corners of the room, flames erupted. Not fire — light that rejected understanding. Shapes crawled through it. Tall, spindled, grinning wide with mouths that opened sideways.

Reality peeled off. The hospital dissolved like ash on the wind. Beneath it: a mouth. And the mouth was the world. He screamed. Zhar awoke. Tulzscha danced across the ceiling, green fire painting time with melancholy. Ghroth sang low overhead — a sound that made the air bleed. Y'golonac stepped through the wall with hands made of mouths, laughing in static.

His daughter floated lifeless now — her face pale, her eyes wide but vacant, her mouth whispering syllables that turned the walls inside-out.

"It was always meant to be you, Dad. You knew the words."

The Earth cracked like an egg. Sky melted into stars that pulsed like tumors. Everything remembered what it meant to be forgotten. Sanity died screaming, and where it ended, Zhar began — his laughter still echoing in the forgotten corners of the infinite dark.

A scribble in a page corner of the Necronomicon:

"They were not the greatest. They were not the first. But they are here. And it is not the sleeping titans who undo us — it is the ones who crawl through memory, rot in corners, and dance in flame behind our eyes. Remember the lesser Old Ones."

"Because they remember you".

—Written by TechHermit—

Remembering the Lesser Ones.