The Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies Of Mu - Lyrics - Bal-sagoth

Words gleaned from the Crystal of Memory: Upon uttering the key Word of Transcendence, X'atham-ry'aa, and the Word of Transferrence, Tha'zai-tonn, the sinistrous Hound of Z'xulth, dread Zurra, invokes four of the Guardians of the Astral Gate, the mighty Ka-Kur-Ra, the ineffable Azor Vol-Thoth, the titanic Zul-Tekh and the pitiless Xuk'ul. The sidereal portal to the Outer Darkness opens, and Zurra finds himself standing before the baleful scrutiny of the sentinels beyond the threshold... Ka-Kur-Ra: Zurra... impetuous whelp! Halfbreed of Z'xulth... ambitious and foolhardy stripling! Your quest for the shards of the great Lexicon is not unknown to those of us who observe the intricate weft and warp of the limitless cosmic tapestry from afar. Zurra: Then know this! I seek to breach these ageless walls and throw open the gate to the Black Galaxy once and for all! My brethren the Z'xulth shall be free! Do not stand in my way, o' Guardians! The fulfilment of my destiny shall not be thwarted! Azor Vol-Thoth: Destiny? What know you of destiny? You who are but a mote of dust in the eye of the universe! The birth cries of worlds and the death throes of galaxies are the dramas which unfold eternally before our gaze... what concern have we for the petty desires which rage and roil within your black heart? Zurra: The shards of the Lexicon shall be mine! Zul-Tekh: Uttering the forbidden words with an impudent tongue does not qualify you for the elucidatory blessing which you so fervently scrabble for... the true magnitude of that which hides within the Lexicon's crystalline recesses would render even your twisted mind naught but a sundered and ravaged pulp! Zurra: Feh! I am ready for the knowledge. I have gazed long into the mirror of eternity and I forsee that I shall soon bear witness to all the glories of the Codex! And with the titans of Z'xulth by my side, I shall rule this universe which has too long suffered the flaccid and arbitrary administration of your masters! The Ersatz Ones unjustly imprisoned my brethren! Balance shall be restored! They must be free! Ka-Kur-Ra: Many are they ranged against thee, renegade. We have seen your destiny, and it lies upon a shattered shore, lapped by waves of oblivion from the ocean of night. The legend you shall leave written in the eternal reaches of the macrocosm shall be no more tangible than the vagaries of a solar wind. You are but a pawn in this timeless game, Zurra... a plaything of beings infinitely more powerful than you could ever hope to comprehend. Zurra: No! It shall not be so! The universe shall quake with my every footfall... countless worlds shall deify me in obeisance and offer up solemn prayers to my sovereign divinity! I know this to be true! Do not seek to thwart me, for even your power may one day pale before mine! Xuk'ul: Silence, whelp! Just as you were spawned in the genetic vaults of the ersatz Mera, a servitor to a higher form, know that there are forces abroad in this macrocosm to whom even the elder races of creation are naught but transient and random atoms! You are nothing, and will ever remain so! The fact that you stand before us is testimony to your mettle, but your ambitions shall yet outreach your abilities. Azor Vol-Thoth: We have long watched your struggles with amusement, Zurra, spawn of Zuranthus... but this audience is now at an end. The Astral Gate shall not be opened! They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo shall not be free! Now, begone! And heed these words, Zurra... do not again seek to transcend these palisades... do not again seek to invoke the majesty of that which even now you stand trembling before... lest you discover to your eternal cost that our magnanimity is far from limitless... Zurra: Feh! Were Kur'oc and Guul-Kor here in your stead, they would surely hearken to me! At any rate, I do not require the blessing of the Guardians to wrest open the Gate To That Which Lies Beyond! The annals of eternity shall soon be illumined by the glorious radiance of my deeds, and the searing fire of my long denied vengeance! Woe unto my dogged nemesis and all those who dare aspire to thwart me... for my final ascendence is nigh! Testimony of Praxeum agent Altarus on Temporal Flow breach #77689902: When Zurra returned from his confrontation with the Guardians, we witnessed him utilize the power of the Darklight Portal to transcend the boundaries of the Temporal Flow, travelling back in time many millennia to the ancient land of Mu. One of the shards of the Lexicon had been hidden there shortly before Zurra's incarceration upon the penal asteroid Victis IV, hence his interest in the antediluvian realm. The Prime Voyager was alerted to these activities, and promptly followed Zurra through the temporal vortex to a long fated rendezvous upon Mu's ziggurat and monad studded shores... Zurra: And now, I gaze once more upon the orb azure! A crystalline fragment of the Lexicon awaits me here in this primitive land... this realm of Mu. The High Priest of Mu: He is here! The one spoken of in prophecy! The death of all there is! The Children of the Telluric Nexus shall safeguard the shard of illumination. They shall transport the shard to a plane of existence where it shall outspan even the Z'xulth Hound's lengthy reach! Hearken Zurra! You shall not have the shard, o' acolyte of ruin! Begone! There is naught for thee here in Mu! Zurra: How dare you aspire to thwart me! I am the god Zurra! I have given proud Atlantis to the sea, shattered ancient Lemuria beneath my fist, and razed the arrogant spires of Ys to gleaming rubble! This is the end of your world! I shall remake all creation in my image! The Chief Cultist of Zurra: You have come, master, as it was foretold in the Thirteen Prophecies! We, your loyal servitors have waited a thousand years for you to bless us with your divinity! What is thy bidding, o' mighty and omniscient Zurra? Zurra: You dare address me? You humans are but perverse experiments cobbled together in the laboratories of the Ersatz Ones from fragments of proselyte cells and the DNA of primates! I was ancient when your ancestors were naught but protoplasmic slime! You wish to serve me? Then you may die in my name! The Chief Cultist of Zurra: In the sweltering swathe of Zurra's sword! Kill, kill, kill! 'Fore the matchless might of Zurra's wrath! Die! The High Priest of Mu: The storm comes. On the katabatic winds rides ravening doom. Yasa-mega... Yasa-giga... Yasa-tera! May Klatrymadon preserve us! The Keeper of The Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies Of Mu: And be it known to the Children of the Telluric Nexus, that the day of the Great Purification is at hand... as it was written long ago, in the Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies. Become one with the shard, progeny of the Nexus... embrace its power... embrace the glory of immolation! Zurra: The shard denied me! O' but my vengeance here shall be legendary even in the bloodied and pitiless annals of untrammelled carnage! Mankind, how ignorant thou art. Yes, death glides silently on gossamer soft wings, but her touch is harsh! Mu is forfeit! I shall return it to the elements from which it came! The Prime Voyager: Your folly ends here, Zurra! The Empyreal Lexicon's power is lost to you forever! The Ersatz Ones have placed the remaining shards beyond your reach forever, but your treachery must not go unpunished! Submit to our judgement or face eternity in the confines of the Black Galaxy, the eternal limbo of your cursed kind, the vile Z'xulth! Zurra: Rather an eternity in torment thatn incline my proud head to your baseless authority! You and your sublimely arrogant ilk, who strode the primordial surface of Pangaea and watched with disdain as life evolved in the boiling oceans... You have won nothing! My power is born of the Z'xulth... it sustains me and courses blackly through my ersatz veins! Now face the true potency of the power you seek to destroy, and behold in awe the true nature of the universe! The High Priest of Mu: Ascent to ecliptic! Mu and Poseidonis! The Chief Cultist of Zurra: The Emperor commands... Uroboros to rise! The High Priest of Mu: Ascent to ecliptic! Mu and Poseidonis! The Chief Cultist of Zurra: The Emperor commands... Uroboros to rise! The Chief Cultist of Zurra: In the sweltering swathe of Zurra's sword... kill, kill, kill! 'Fore the matchless might of Zurra's wrath... die! In the sweltering swathe of Zurra's sword... die, die, die! 'Fore the matchless might of Zurra's wrath... (Bless us with your withering touch, o' great one... may the earth tremble at your tread and may your ireful gaze bring purifying cataclysm to the debauched hives of mankind's iniquities!) Zurra: Ah, the Alpha and the Omega. As all life was created from Chaos... so shall it be DESTROYED!!!!! Testimony of Praxeum agent Altarus on the destruction of Mu and the aftermath of Zurra's battle with the Prime Voyager: I have not witnessed such reckless and untrammelled destruction since the annihilation of splendoured Atlantis. The dark powers wielded by Zurra during his final confrontation with the Prime Voyager were the most fearful corruption of the natural sorceries of the cosmos and the hyper-technology of the elder races as I have ever beheld. The realm of Mu was consumed by a tremendous firestorm, which ravenously devoured all life on the island, and rendered all the ziggurats and monads, minarets and spires of the civilization naught but dust and rubble. A colossal cloud erupted over the realm, perversely similar in shape to the natural fungi which grow within the verdant forests of the world. I know not where Zurra came by such ruinous power, but its potency was truly terrifying to behold. At length, Zurra and the Prime Voyager battled their way back through the Darklight Portal, and the struggle entered its final phase. Enraged beyond comprehension, dread Zurra was only subdued by the combined might of the Prime Voyager's Kl'aa cohorts and a Judgement Tetragon sent by the Mera to intercede in the battle, a truly unprecedented act of intervention on their part and testimony to the magnitude of the threat posed by the Hound of Z'xulth. The Empyreal Lexicon itself was again fragmented, its myriad shards scattered once more across the multiverse. If that cosmic codex were to ever fall into the hands of the lackeys of Chaos... the consequences for the universe would be utterly unthinkable. I only hope that the safeguards which fortify the boundaries of the Black Galaxy are potent enough to withstand any subsequent attempts at escape, and that the numerous prophecies which foretell the ultimate liberation of its malign denizens are devoid of veracity. Reflections at the Praxeum following the annihilation of Mu: Xerxes: Such devastation, master... A mighty civilization destroyed in the blinking of an eye... decimated by the madness of a rogue demi-god... Altarus: Demi-god? Some may call him so, but the truth is far less poetic, I fear. Zurra was created deep beneath the Pre-Cambrian sea in the spawning vats of the Ersatz Ones, an experiment gone hideously awry. He was engineered from the genetic template of the mighty Zuranthus, but a fiend of the Z'xulth contained within the gene-vaults somehow escaped and tainted the cloning matrix, resulting in a hybrid possessing the power of Zuranthus coupled with the malign and pitiless nature of the Outer Darkness. Little wonder then that Zurra chose the path he did. After being consigned to the Well of Black Flame for many centuries, Zurra escaped the incarceration of that infernal place and set forth to spread terror and destruction across the cosmos. Destruction such as that which enveloped Mu. Indeed, my young apprentice. Ancient Mu was annihilated utterly... cast to the same shark-haunted grave as would one day embrace Atlantis, Lemuria... and even proud and noble Hyperborea. Xerxes: And what became of the treacherous one... the Chaos-dog Zurra? Altarus: He was consumed by his own darksome power, young Xerxes. His own ability to transcend linear time damned him, in an ironic twist of fate. A splinter of his consciousness was returned to the prison beneath the Mare Imbrium, while another echo of his being was dispersed along the filaments of the space-time matrix to a period before the first battle in the War of the Lexicon was even fought. The primary facet of the black-hearted Zurra was condemned to a blighted corner of the Black Galaxy, a limbo of such unimaginable tortuous magnitude that it made the horrors endured by dread Angsaar himself seem like naught but a lover's caress in comparison. There he yet seethes and plots with his diabolical ilk, the infernal Z'xulth. Xerxes: Such power as was wielded by Zurra corrupted his heart, master. His quest for the Lexicon was not a desire born of the eternal search for cosmic enlightenment, but rather of a vain hope that such elucidation would allow him to understand the horrors which blighted his own nigh on immortal soul... Altarus: You may yet one day understand the intricacies of the sidereal web, young apprentice. Come... the mists once again cloud the great cosmic eye, and the vista darkens for today. But rest assured, my youthful neophyte... there are many more stories in this vast, eternal saga yet to be told...