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The Cord was an ancient thing.
Aye, 'twas of Mergo, millennia having died since his stillbirth. Shriveled, to be held in two hands, and carefully, for to clasp would be to break. The heady scent was long gone from it; now, but a husk of flesh it was, though a husk lined with little black sunken eyes, radiating with the aura of ancients.
* * * * * * *
In choosing Edgar for the infiltration, the Choir did not choose wrongly. As a subtle intelligencer he was nimble as a cat, and with the quickest eye of the ordinarily blindfolded.
Wrapped in a shapeless shawl, the Choirman strode forth and into the dark light. Then, true dark, though shimmering indigo, like the scales of a deep thing. Then, light. Grey, spanning, a dreary sky over black peaks, domes and spires. Shawl lowered on his shoulders, a student uniform fluttered behind him, limp collar about his throat, withered lapels drooping along his breast. To appear too presentable would be to differentiate himself from the babbling throng of Mensis.
And then, Edgar was among them. They of the hidden school, who had turned and cloaked themselves from the gaze of the Choir, who had been their distant kin. Blink, blink, flickering eyes alive with the brightness unfamiliar to them, to eyes oft concealed. Here, eyes were aplenty, especially outside of skulls.
The halls swooped o'er their heads as feet shuffled and bodies swarmed. Young bodies, young men and women with minds enrapt. A terrible shame, the dull would say. Dubious, too dubious were the workings of Mensis. Their ambiguity only formerly had been acceptable, and yet first had come the thunder of Ludwig, whose hunters were whisked away beneath his nose, and then pulled away from inspecting light in chains. Now, a Choirman dwelled in absentia, and the lips of the pale scholar at Mensis' hull were sealed tight, and doors had been slammed.
And Micolash, he was mad.
"Yes, mine, O, glory be! The stem of the ancient womb!"
His voice, raucous from behind the locked door. Edgar in leaning close was quickly startled by the turning of a key opposite, and it opened inward, and the madman towered and goggled down at him with dark-ringed eyes full of hideous hilarity.
"Come, scholar, come, come!"
Large hands, white and ashen, pulled Edgar by the lapels as he scuttled backwards into the room. A fantastic cage was upon his head, resting on his shoulders and reaching up ever so high, near a meter tall. The wan face peering out, moist with perspiration and oil, and miscellaneous serums, doubtless, was leaden and lymphatic, wild black hair sticking to his skin, deep brow shading his eye sockets and creased in the middle, a sorrowful expression were it not for the enormous grin warping his features. His cheeks were by now frozen in that dread rictus.
Turning, he stooped before a case near a desk, and produced an object, vaguely cylindrical but wilted, from an opened, cushioned case. He span around again with it gingerly laid across his palms, horrid wet fingers coiling tentatively around it and trembling.
The thing was an ancient Cord, rotted with age and yet preserved too in it, colourless and crusted over, and lined with black ulcers which, when observed truly, revealed themselves as eyes of old. Delicate and yet firm was the Cord in its fossilised spiral. It seemed that to grasp it too tightly would turn it to dust. Micolash trod that tightrope with heavy boots, handling the thing like a child in possession of a delightful toy.
"Mergo!" he whispered in ecstasy, voice ashiver and motions erratic. Edgar, though chosen for his particular composition, discovered that he had frozen in place with the sight of the wretched wonder, and could not move even as Micolash drew far too close to him. The cage's bars pressed, chill, against Edgar's own skin, dug into his forehead, and the eyes beneath that deep brow bored into his own, shallow breaths washing nastily over his face, misting his spectacles.
"His very own birth-stem, here for our usage, here to bid us audience!"
And audience was bidden unto them, they of Mensis and their pallid lord.
A room of caged heads, glimmering darkly. Men, women, youths, gathered to partake in communication via the ancient Cord of the Eye, to have audience with the infant Great One long since passed, in whichever manner a Great One can pass.
The mind, stifled in the usual way, cannot function around what is too profound to be held within it; thus, how much greater must be the obliteration of the mind liberated? Hands spread upon the base of Truth's mighty bulk, nails poised to dig ravenously into the flesh, the Mensis scholars, in their great number and foolish knowledge, were slain by revelation, wrenched into the sucking Nightmare, cast adrift in the void and left to simmer and moan and drag themselves across the floor, reduced to phantasmal smears of wretchedness. But slugs were they! God, to witness their gaping mouths and dripping features. All hellish brightness which had shone in those dark-ringed eyes was gone in place of oozing swabs of pus and flab and slime. Boneless, brainless globs of almost-consciousness, accursed and left to dribble in their unlit halls, corridors, offices, malicious in the suddenness and fury of their fall.
And Edgar, Choir intelligencer, trapped in the Nightmare which the fools and their mad lord had brought upon themselves while he had been among them. At least his shape was kept; the full revelation of their knowledge and their audience had not the room to reach him in full. Perhaps, simply he was of stronger will than those drooling hounds with their pretension of the things which they could not possibly withstand.
Regardless, no matter the reason, Micolash was the same.
His howls echoed in the unshattered night. Mad he'd been even before audience, before the knowledge, and here he entirely succumbed. In the split second before the great vacuum consumed them, as Yahar'gul burst into grotesque death outside the room of the ritual, Edgar had seen the life exit those eyes full of hideous hilarity, had seen his head loll forward, entirely limp. Now his consciousness ran raving in the Nightmare, yelping like a whelp and murmuring to greater beings than ever he could hope to be, the creature in the mirror on the other side of which slumped his corpse, a gloomy portal.
Seething, lost, and silent, Edgar had spat, and hoped that the kidnappings had been worth it, that the deceit and the villainy had given Micolash, host of this forsaken curse, and his horde of manic pillocks the satisfaction they had so sought, the jotting of a conclusive note, the nod and smile, and the sharing of a sip of sweet blood.
"The bastards," he'd said, and sunk to his front on the cold bridge.