V. The Ossuary of Living Tides

I must now discuss a book, and I find myself reluctant to do so. The Ossuary of Living Tides has surfaced throughout history at moments when reality grows thin. It appeared in the libraries of Leng before that plateau shifted outside normal space-time. The priests of drowned R’lyeh consulted it before their city’s geometries folded in on themselves. The thing that was once human and built the Dreamlands’ first black libraries transcribed portions of it onto surfaces that exist only when unobserved. It is not, strictly speaking, a book. It is a countdown.

The Ossuary claims, and I use the word “claims” advisedly, because taking the assertions of a semi-sentient extradimensional text at face value seems methodologically unsound even by my standards, that what the ignorant call Osoyo’s “defeat” was nothing of the sort. The entity allowed itself to be bound. What lies beneath the ice is not imprisoned. It is gestating. The combined might of elven void-sciences and divine intervention succeeded only in fixing a portion of Osoyo within three-dimensional space. The rest, the Ossuary insists, remains free to grow, to spread, to feed from angles our reality cannot perceive.

The tome does not corrupt through temptation. It corrupts through truth. Each passage accurately describes reality as seen from angles human consciousness was never meant to achieve. Readers understand, with terrible clarity, that what we call “self” is merely a temporary crystallization of possibilities, no more permanent than a whirlpool in water.

Most disturbingly, the Ossuary claims that Dr. Ritalsin did not discover it by chance, that his birth, his education, his every decision leading to that moment of discovery were ripples spreading backward through time from the first contact. The tome does not seek readers. It generates them.

I have not read the Ossuary myself, though fragments have been described to me. I include its claims here because ignoring them would be dishonest, and because certain of its predictions have proven accurate in ways that make dismissal increasingly difficult to justify.

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Each dream it devours from its icy throne, each consciousness it absorbs through the cracks in its cage, all add mass to its presence in our dimension. The ice above does not melt from heat but from the slow dissolution of the physical laws that allow “solid” and “liquid” to have meaning. What emerges will not be Osoyo freed. It will be our entire reality transformed into a state where the distinction between the Dream Eater and everything else ceases to have meaning.

— from the Ossuary of Living Tides

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I find that I have nothing to add to this passage. It speaks for itself, which is precisely what makes it so terrible.