Star-Maps of the Ancient Cosmographers

From the journal of Professor Caleb Blackthorne III, continued...

12 October: 1893

I must commit this to the pages of my journal, while it is still vivid in my recollection... not that such a macabre vision could possibly soon be blissfully forgotten. Just before dawn, I awoke from a fantastic and somewhat horrifying dream in which I traversed a great black cyclopean cityscape, its towering stygian walls inscribed with some form of outlandish glyphs which seemed to writhe squamously and alter their shape even as I gazed at them. A sibilant whispering which seemed at once familiar and yet intrusively alien compelled me to walk to the edge of a particularly sinister looking edifice and peer out over its precipitous perimeter. When I did so, I beheld this world of ours, recognizing vaguely the apparent shapes of the five continents, yet the entire vista seemed so distant that the whole appeared in its entirety no larger than a sphere which I could fit snugly into the palm of my hand. When I turned again to behold the looming obelisks, I found I could then easily read the previously untranslatable ciphers in the black stone. They were the words of a great thaumaturgist who had seemingly discovered a repository of aeons-old lore detailing the sidereal web of the cosmos, with arcane diagrams pinpointing certain astral portals and places of empyreal potency, a sort of pangalactic ley-line chart, if you will. Indeed, these Star-Maps Of The Ancient Cosmographersseemed to take a not insignificant toll on the author's sanity, as evidenced by the tone of his inscriptions, which seem to suggest that in discovering this Pandora's Box of dark elucidation, his fate was to be inexorably dogged by some nameless and implacable gloom;

The Thaumaturgist: