|
This is an English version of Ludvig Prynn's De Vermiis Mysteriis, translated by Charles Leggett and printed in London in 1821. Fotheringay-Phipp's copy is number 6 of an unspecified "very Limited Edition". Reading the Leggett translation costs 1D6/2D6 points of Sanity and adds +10% Cthulhu Mythos. The spell multiplier is x2. Spells included are Create Zombie, Command Ghost, Summon/Bind Byakhee, Contact Yig, Voorish Sign, Prinn's Crux Ansata, Create Scrying Window, Create Liao Drug, Summon/Bind Star Vampire, Summon/Bind Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, and Spirit Transfer. Selected Passages "...And so it was that Emendib Kejir, who by turns had been my captor, tutor, and host, now introduced me to this most wonderful and powerful elixir. Its use, he said, sent the mind back down the streams of time, through the previous lives of the user. Kejir himself claimed to have used the drug many times, journeying farther back each time. He had learned the secrets of the past, and had shuddered when he spoke of his vision of a time before even the earth was formed. He would not describe what form he wore in that dreadful incarnation, but claimed that it was not the worst of the many horrific entities he saw cavorting in the empty space which owuld later be occupied by the Earth. Thus, before I was to use the Liao, named after the Chinese alchemist who created it long before the birth of the fictitious Christ, Kejir warned me to take every precaution. There were creatures, he said, which moved and hunted through the angular streams of time, hungry skeletal things that pursued the Liao's user even after his mind had been freed of the visions of the past. "...O the visions of history that I beheld in the throes of the Liao. Into the minds of my ancestors I was swept. Sorcerers, kings, madmen, laborers, warriors, beggars, and still more madmen -- these were my forebears. And beyond that, shambling things scarcely able to walk erect, yet still vaguely human. Beyond even that, as all traces of humanity fled from the countenances of my earlier selves -- beasts, devils, sibilant scientists... Would there were time I should write volumes on the secret wonders I have seen through eyes dead and dust these millions of years. But the High Inquisitor is impatient to carry out my fair trial and execution, and thus I must discuss other things." "...Having seen my friend and teacher Emendib Kejir carried off by the black-winged twisting wyrm-shape, I foreswore to find a method of protecting myself from such an attack. The despicable Chinese, with his bulging-eyed and flabby-lipped acolytes, would not steal my sorceries or my life, as he had done to Kejir. Djinn, devil, demon, faerie -- call them what you will, but all recognize the power of the True Cross, the Crux Ansata. I would find the enchantment which would make the daemons quake with fear before the ancient ankh, and that which it symbolizes." |