Herik Btah Thanatic Guided Meditation

Chromagaia's time moves forward with ours! Today's date is:
Embresday, Serelakkan 3, 1133 LE

One of the few records of a mystery cult from thousands of years ago, well preserved by its author through rarely accessible means. While its value as a historical document is limited―the scribe's personal and political life are mostly hinted at―the instructional nature of the record invites its audience to perform and immerse themselves fully in it. Copies in the original Ghoeydraatþ dialect, written in the papyrunic brush-script of the time, are the primary sources meant to preserve the information and are kept under high control. Not one copy of this fidelity has seen daylight in seven hundred years.

Localized, or otherwise translated, versions are circulated more widely. As its creator wished, the interactive and esoteric format draws something of a cult following. The Thanatic Guided Meditation, including calligraphic transcribed passages and translated low-quality copies, are a popular gift amongst Khuberus tourists.

Despite its short length, every subsequent translation carries new context and connotations, so the document is more alive than can be said of the majority of its lifetime audience. Analysis continues into the modern era, with the most dedicated readers taking up positions as scribes just to get a glimpse of the original Ghoeydraatþ.

The most recent Courier Pseudodraconic translation is viewable below. The dialect was chosen for its universality and wide aggregation of loanwords from regional dialects.

Dedication

Black Glass upon us all, may the fog roll in from the [South] and West, may the rising sun embalm our soil Remnant! I dedicate here, at the Temple Beneath Anwr-Gjs, the initiation that shall not cross the river with us. To the Forgotten Muse who may yet slumber, who may yet return, as now I reconstruct these scraps of dead tongues and sealed wisdom. We have survived in defiance of our accord, which calls to Second Death.

We have survived, and we survive yet slimmer. My contemporaries are wise, and in their wisdom they will belay the Black Truth and let it self-annihilate. They will let the waning crescent of the Eye Unsealed close, an eternal new moon that will shine no light of its own to us. When their boat has taken off beyond the horizon and all is completed, none left shall follow. They shall become the very essence of opposition―flattened in their greed, their search for immortality. No, not even them.

The [inimitable wisdom] they wish to immortalize in its slaughter.

The Sage of Second Death was an embodiment of paradox, and I dedicate this passage, this initiation, this most holy Rite, to them. The first to be outcast from this sleepers' coven, and the first to show us the way to a Heaven of the broken. I hope with what heart I have left that your message will echo beyond your forgotten name, torn and scrawled out of tablets and scrolls. I hope that I might not be twisted into your foe, though my words here will stop this devotion from reaching beyond my pale. I entrust it to the living, as you entrusted your ascendance and value.

Introduction

This document is fragments that I transcribe from. I cannot piece it together in a way that would satisfy a new reader. They are lost things in that they have not been lost, not been destroyed like the rest of their corpus. This initiation is no fewer than six separate scrolls in one, each nonsense on their own to any but our highest echelons. They took them with them into the Skyless Night, the old masters. Did they remember to take themselves? It matters not. I will forget to take myself. My sacrifice is here, friend.

What I will piece together here is the knowledge I can glean and carry, not as mere study but as initiation. You will partake, become one of the Shades-to-Be without the blessing of our circles. You will be a heretic, a pretender, a false-face. But fear not! Our Muse was one such heretic tenfold, I am told in whispers. And so second, I dedicate this reading to you. Come follow me for but a moment, and hold the hand of my corpse or spirit. I am long dead in one important way, if not all. But I will guide you beyond death. Should you desire, you may join the wise ones in their quest for the beyond, or resign yourself to the same pale you are headed towards now.

Herik Btah, the order I belong to, believes in two Deaths. The first removes you from your body, the second from the corpus of the world. I will, should this Initiation text be reproduced, never reach my Second Death fully. By this text, their order's name shall not reach it either. Many seek First Immortality, a Deathless state in which the body cannot be conquered by time nor nature. All seekers of this fear the first Horizon, beyond which we see nothing in surety. Why else do the dogmae of Keppel differ so on an after-life? No proof, no evidence. Deceptions. So we will immerse ourselves thusly in tools of deceptions. We will look beyond the shadows cast at the hands casting them, though we might not see the flame whose light they warp.

Death is a wholly terror-inducing thing. It is both the inevitable and the secretive. It takes and it takes with it, but never reveals its own hand. Save for our Muse, none could return, and even their own return is a wish at best. HVLBRÞ, the one stained by ink, wrote that Second-Death is a sieve for our sands of what is known. First-Death is instant, but the Second requires centuries, sometimes millennia. Legendary figures like Vyrwl'n are still between their deaths! They are in the Void between ending and a recreation.

To pass through Second-Death is to be remade in an image you yourself would not know. Disentangled from all pieces of yourself, you may end up spread through thousands. Which one carries your perspective, your view? Which do you awaken as past your loss into antehistorical mist? Not even our wisest elders knew. Not them... not even our Founder would. It may be true as rain's fall that you simply cannot in such dilute amounts. But your memory dies twice at once. All internal that is unwritten dies with your body. Surely that nucleus remains?

It is at this point that I must leave questions unanswered. You will understand the nature of this Second Death, the loss of self, and where your preparations in life lie. Whether you will accept your fate, as I have, or fight against it like the Nameless Muse, must be known after I guide you through the Rite.

Preparation

You cannot tarry! I jest... time waits for no person or spirit or stone, and yet it passes without whining or incident. Procure as much of day and night as you desire before this. Indulge in your lusts, your needs, your errands. The initiation will not take long. But do not read such things out of sync, out of linear time. That is Truth you cannot grasp gently yet! You will mangle it as it seeps through your being, and your Soul will be caught by the Black Whisper. You will know things that are unknown, and by the stars that weep you must pray that the false-truth does not shift the heavens or the earth for you. To touch Rre-Tarat is to kill a part of your essence to gain the foresight of the dead, and delicate eyes and hands make quick work.

You must acquire several materials to charm yourself to keep the danger away. The hexes and wards of the woods-witches will do you no good against the Deep, even for the shallow taste you will sup of it. First is the Black Candle, made with special ash-moth silk as the wick and the dark wax of the [Habernety] bees. If these two are gone now, dear reader, then you must make a suitable replacement. The flame of this Candle should be a dim blue, smokeless and quiet. You must ground yourself in Fire to not lose yourself in the Seas. When your spirit wavers, your vision must hold this candle's flame. Its color must not, under any circumstances, be identical to the hues of Illyre, Pereptia, Eremoor. Annrava's shortblade is permissible, but for this reason do not carry violet things with you. Should your anchor be the Suns, surely your mind will be lost amongst them.

Second is the Oil. Any simple plant oil will do as a base, but you must gather herbs of personal significance to you. Be you a healer, gather healing things. Be you a cook, gather seasoning herbs. Be you a naturalist or explorer, gather fragrant things from your homeland. Simmer them into the oil alongside purified salt and a lock of your hair and a drop of your blood for nine days and nights. Never let the oil froth or boil over. Never let it cool. You will need at least a [ceremonial urn]'s worth! To use this oil, to douse yourself in it, is to keep your scent and the scents of the world apart from your nose. As the Candle grounds, the Oil releases. Familiar things must allow you to carry their associations, your memories.

Third is the Silken Veil. Any fine black silk will do, though you may get it purified and warded by your local healers if it feels too simple. This is to draw the curtain between your self and the Great Selflessness. The Mirror will look into you, and you must be opaque. Your Candle will keep you there, your Oil will allow you to wander in place. Your Veil will shield you from the eyes beyond the Glass Veil. In your location, it will be hoisted and drawn up around you to keep the ritual in, much like a tent would.

Fourth, the Smoke. Incense or any slow-burning reed may function in a pinch, but the tradition is to use an odorless-smoking cane from the Upper South rivers in the Labyrinth, known to us as [Horah-Ptabry]. The smoke within your ritual will guide you, its eddies expanding to the size of Reality for you to follow. It will map your soul for you, draw out what you yourself have forgotten, make you Whole in a way you cannot be Whole. This too is Second-Death. You must put it opposed to the Candle, out of sight and behind you.

I apologize, learner. Were it official, were you taken under the wing of the Herik Btah or any other sect, this would be done for you.

Once you have your materia, your task is a location. No simple room of your house may do! You must take me―in the form of this writing, my last tie to this profanely glorious world―to somewhere we can be utterly alone. You may know others initiating themselves, but it mustn't be in a group. It cannot be. You must understand. As one dies alone, you must learn the solitude of death. All this for a mere entrance, a mere peek beyond the Veil.

Draw up the Silken Veil around you. Hang it from whatever you wish. It must be mostly enclosed, if not fully. You must make a small cavern in whatever nature you belong to. Wait until the Sun's last light fades, preferably on a Winter eve for more time. If you must endure a short Summer night for the heat, you may, but make a little haste in your work. Place the Black Candle and the Smoke-maker on opposite ends of where you intend to sit. Remove your clothing, place a mat beneath yourself. You must be in a state to feel as little touch beyond your body on itself as possible. Take your seat, light the Candle. It must be able to burn the whole night. Pour the Oil over yourself until you can smell nothing but it and, if your maker is so inclined, the Smoke. Now we may begin.

Meditation

Normally, I would begin by telling you to close your eyes. Unless I have been copied into a readable tactile form―which itself would disrupt the Drifting and Ground you too much to bear―you must keep them open. How were you to see the Black Candle with your eyes closed? The Ash-Moth Silk produces a flame that can be seen through the Soul's Eye, one of few things in this world that can. If you have such a traditional Candle and have memorized the Rite, you may so close them. Though such a thing will warrant no reward on repetition. As you read, let the process become automatic. It should take no focus or effort to hear the words on the scroll.

Keep the flame in view. Focus only on it, but do not focus with any intensity. Look like you would at a lover holding you in their arms. Let your eyes drift and wander, let the sounds of Nature repeat themselves into a formless hum. Like you are underwater, let the sounds drown themselves, let the ground slip away, let the faint detail of the Veil obscure itself. Breathe the air slowly, shallow at first, and smell only your craft. Smell only your Work. You are at home in a vast, unsettled Void. There is nothing here that you did not create. You will feel at peace here. Feel it shifting through you, the blood, the Life, the Virid essence that perturbs the peace of Unlife, that will spill out with your last breath. Feel no more your body, only this Essence, as light. The Flame and your light are the only things in this world.

Immerse your senses in this Void.

You can hear nothing, smell nothing, [touch] nothing, taste nothing. You see only an aura of what once was your shape and the Black Flame ahead. You arrive now at the Void Between, dead First with but one guide. You are ten trillion grains of light, colorless, shapeless, shifting in the windless Nothing. See the Flame, for it holds you from dispersion infinitely beyond. It is your Light of Life, a Ward against the greed of the Dead Sun. See its gentleness, let its warmth seep into your Light. Let it calm the worries you have. Let it be your companion alone through the First Death.

Listen, and hear nothing. This expanse is truly infinite, beyond the Universe. You could wander for ten thousand eternities and not encounter a single object, person, light. Look, and see Nothing. This is the end of all things, and the beginning. This is the inertia beyond time, the eternity that the Song endured before it Sang. Breathe, and feel no air, no lungs. It is faded. Everything is faded.

What does the quiet make you think you hear? That is the Absence of your life-sound. What shapes crawl the emptiness? That is the Lack of all you expect to see. Can you feel it, the yearning to return? You must not. You must remain in this Void of Voids, the Scope of which defies measure. This directionless Death is fear, but you shall learn to not fear it. You spent forever immersed in it before your birth, a blink of a blink forgotten the second your qualia ignited. And to it you will return, only to be strained memory by memory back to someplace further. We cannot know what it feels like; this place is not a place or time. It defies knowledge, and so we imagine Emptiness. The Song is the same way. Look, how in Death you think like the Universe itself.

Recall your foggy form, and note the color of its Light. Each mote of ash within is more than the inconceivable expanse beyond you. Your Flame is your rock. Now, you will use it to measure the non-things of imagination.

Keep the Flame ahead of you... allow it to illuminate Keppel below, stained its Blue. See the Lights like yours, tightly-wound in bodies of flesh and water. Breathe. Feel them pulsing, feel the Heartbeat of the world. Everything alive atop the Substrate gives it Life, gives it Name, gives it Form. Watch it recede from view piece by piece as it is named. Horizon, Ocean, Sky. [Akhuun], [Bythufaan]. Mountain names, the continents, the ice, the valleys. Keppel itself. What is left when nothing is left? The Flame illuminates its shadow. It does not emit Light now, but only Sight.

The Shadow of Keppel seems vast across your vision; drift over to it. Let the Flame draw you closer to its non-shape, to its colorless ebbing. This is the world as you see it, Dead thing. This is all Creation beyond that Veil. There is nobody here but flat glass in the shape of a sphere, the shifting Absence above in a silhouette of the Rings. This is Keppel-Death, the memory that stations it here in the Void of grieved things. Dead, but still held in thought. You wonder what it means for the world to be Dead, but perhaps it is simply not Living yet, not suffused with your Essence of Life. Unborn.

Yes, you now understand. Endings beyond and beginnings to be had are the same. The gap is between wheel-spokes, not fields beyond an obelisk.

You will now see how to move past the edge of this non-world.

Put your focus on the Flame, gently, and stretch your thoughtforms as it remembers your body. Inhale and feel the Light enter yours. Piece by piece, area by area, imagine the Fire illuminating and pulling your body inwards on itself. Your head, your teeth, your tongue. Your throat and chest, your stomach, your hips. Down through your legs and feet and all else. Your Light-Body is reformed. It is blue. It is safe. It is still diffuse, carrying only the lightweight Life you have, the flesh left behind. Exhale. Feel now the soft earth beneath your feet. Stretch it under you. Stretch it around you. You move immobile, this Black on Void moves circling you. Look down within the smooth Ground.

You see a faint reflection of your form, Faceless in its blue Light. Ponder the ebbing of the reflection. At the edges of the light, it swirls in other colors. Its rainbow is dull, dark, flecked with a nigh-invisible Gold. Can you hear Her calling behind the color? Shift your head left and right, the Flame following it. Watch the shifting of the colors. Watch them reach for you.

Let them touch you. As they permeate your Light, watch your memory of your Form emerge. Watch the blurred aura take the shape of your Face, the tar spreading up and down and through to fill the Blankness where your Body once was. You see the Gold brighter as it enters you. Her Gold. The Night without a Star is the Shadow within the Sun. See Her looming now, Lightless and yet still pale above. See the Heavens' featureless expanse contract, the emptiness no different but somehow closer, tighter, swirling.

The Veil has been crossed. You are now in a world of Second Death, the place you will be when all memory of you is lost.

You do not see anymore. The Flame persists. It is your Light, here in this land, but it dims from your soulsight. Your thoughts cloud, coated in the swirling darkness that gives you this reclaimed body. The terrain, what was once smoothed by erasing the Names of all things, is now cavernous. A great black sky of swirling Tar hangs above. You must feel now, by way of Soul, the path forward. Walk, walk with your reclaimed Form. Feel your mind receding as your returned body moves. Feel the Death behind the sightless eyes you carry. The Flame prevents you from the Hidden, from this eternal sleep's watchful wrath. You will not know their presence, and they will not know yours. You are not Hidden. You are Excised, a visitor to their realm. You tour your eventual resting place.

This is where you will remain when no one recalls you. When the tongue used to speak your name dies, the land you lived on buried in lava floes or sunken into the seas. When your distant descendants, if any, no longer have a trace of you in them, entangled with so many more of your age. Your blues and their reds and golds blurred together into indeterminable grey.

Now you will wonder how the Veil is crossed without my guidance, how you will come to be here. I will show you, and your Flame will lower its guard just so you may see. Up and down. Feel the directions reverse themselves, fall, fall into the liquid sky. Muster the strength you can, pierce it. Swim, dive under it. Do not look back. Your Flame will stay with you. Now emerge onto its outer surface, turned towards the unseen Color in that empty Void. Watch the outside of the sky. Trickles of light falling through Nothingness, the edges obscured by distance. You cannot see, but Feel it. Her Gold at the edges, all around. The light of so many colors straining through the sky like sand. Look around with your tar-coated soulbody. See the waters of the sky twisting, molding. Half-bodies gather on the surface of this sphere, hidden in the shadow of the Sun.

They cannot see. They cannot feel. They are waiting, as a babe waits unthinking before its birth. Like infants, they do not dream like you do; they do not think or act. They accumulate this light, brought to them in pastel rains of dust from above. From beyond the Sun. Watch it fall. You see lavenders and lilacs, golds and greens, reds, blues, saffron. Not all of this is from people, like yourself. Inhale, capture only the emptiness where your Work once scented it. To your left, see a slumbering Lightform. It is pale rust, as diffuse as you were without the Flame's blue bindings. You will be here too. You will be stuck in this dreamless slumber as you are allowed to fall out of Legacy.

Watch the piercing of its heart by the sky-sea beneath. It scatters and is carried by waves no taller than your littlest finger's width. One pinch is taken to a Lightform on your right. This one is many colors, its dust being fused into a thin glass. With the rust-light placed in its heart, the sky-water begins to sink into it. Its body tightens around the tar, twitching. Listen closely. You hear the whistling, the humming, the beating of the memory reigniting. Watch as the craft of the Gold Darkness takes it. Watch as it becomes like you, an inky being with a Face and no name.

The features develop themselves as the Light recedes. As the Memories are consumed, rearranged, rewritten.

Who awakens within this being? Who awakens when your child is born?

See its incompletion rounded by the tar, see its nascent motion draw it deeper down into the sky. It will fall to the lightless caverns below, newly made to wander, to remember nothing. It is not special. Feel the Rite inherent in its birth. Are you special, intact and monochrome? Recall the Flame. Call it forth. Focus on its light, its warmth, and reignite the memories the tar has fogged over. Let the blue light enter your body and push out the Sun's dark. Let the Candleflame enter your diffusing nose and smell the Smoke, the Oil.

Return. Return. Blink. Watch your vision recede and return. See the eddies in Smoke mapping your breaths, your thoughts, and return. Feel the ground beneath you, watch the wax below the Flame of your Black Candle. Turn your gaze to me, my words on the scroll.

Very well. You have done the first Rite. You have seen what lies beyond the inexplicable wait in that Void, which is truthfully empty only by our ignorance of it. You have seen the realm of the Dead and Reclaimed that will take you in Second Death, seen the rending of those at the Tar Sky's surface. Imagine my tall, well-maintained, handsome and graceful body behind you, laying a firm but gentle hand upon your shoulder in reassurance. Whether those descriptors are true is of no matter. Their memory will be excised from me. I leave them with you.

Transformation

What happened beyond the senses? Recall your forms: your body, your Virid essence, your diffuse Life, your Flame-bound Light, your dark Reclamation. This remains the cycle of Death, though without the Flame you surely would have lost yourself in it. A breathing, flickering candlelight must remind you to breathe, lest you truly lose yourself to that Void. The old Rites had initiates physically pass the Veil into the tar-skied Rre-Tarat, but many centuries ago, it was decided to cease the slaughter that came with that and allow the Poetry inherent to Death and Reclamation to spread. Idolatry of a ring of Glass held back the Truth inherent, seeing the shadows cast by the Tools as the actors themselves.

It is all obscurance, as you now must know. The Flame flickers, and the fluttering of the shadow next to the stillness of the obstacle shows its motion. So too do we venture to see the fluttering of the spirit after its release. Now you are initiated, a bastard congregate of an order that may no longer exist. An order that wishes to not exist, to disappear all at once to save itself beyond that Death. To be as a wave, and dissipate all at once to crash and seep into the shore, not the water that makes it up.

You see what must be done, yes? HVLBRÞ wrote that you must excise yourself from all things before Death, to die twice at once. To awaken before you can be purged and made into a hundred thousand figments. To remain intact as you can, unrecorded and insignificant in life to live again after Death. Can you see the suicide of selves inherent to this practice? To never truly live that one might flee through Death to another false life. To conceal this wish for eternity that its secrets might follow you in, might not be missing for the tar to replace.

This is our secret. But I will commit this self-annihilation among many, for no road allows one to avoid some form of it, Death and selfish failing against it inherent to our mortal being. I share with you the secrets, my own and those of my predecessors, Rrmwnt'tp, [Galekhraty], [Viðunn], HVLBRÞ, and more.

Now you will see the ripples one leaves as they move through life. Appreciate them as you do, though recall the razing required to excise them, to recollect them to pull the stone of your self out through Rre Tarat. To live beyond Death is to kill many. To live within Life is to kill many more. What then lies beyond the new life, the next spoke in the Wheel? Does it repeat, recur itself to immortality until one leaves too many traces, stretches one too thin? All motion transforms us in Life, and in Death it should be no different. Continuity, perhaps. Immortality of the self is unknowable.

The doctrines do not agree on whether one could cycle through Third, Fourth, Fifth Deaths and beyond. But something of you will be lost regardless with each, and spirits have no known lifespan. HVLBRÞ writes that it is merely a dream of a dream, a needle threading itself. I believe in its possible worth, in that worthiness I grant the shadow of a shadow. To recur the Rites is to appeal to Alcaernon and invoke the Burning of those seeking to outlast the others. To appeal to any sun is to call Haerox's authority into question. And for Her quiet, She is an envious ruler. You will be scorched twelvefold until what is left can be picked apart. You may try, but you will turn the Tar against you. A new clock of disintegration awaits, measured in cycles of rebirth instead of years.

What does it mean to live like this? Is fear of Death so strong? So strong that one would excise themselves to observe, to behold and do nothing, to repeat and never experience? To never connect with another?

The color of such fears is in my sight, yet I cannot name it.

Reflection

Ink analysis done on the original, preserved in Eudraconic records dated to thirty six years after the original donation, states that this section was likely transcribed some time after the previous few. The analysis of the messaging concurs.

It's all paradox. I cannot hope to hope any longer. Each word written damns me more to a hell of fragmentation and non-consciousness, an eternity as a tic in thousands of amalgamae of qualia and behavior, a drop of pigment in an infinitely-subtracted liquid sky of malice. She grasps, She grasps, and yet rebellion against Her order is paradox as well. Was it not a founding oath to deny Sun-killers? Or is that too a myth, a picked-up phrase, a misinterpreted exaggeration? Can we trust anything we say or think or feel?

I yearn for the emptiness of a different Void. A non-scalar immaterial nonexistence is worthless. All the goals of this Rite and its preparations are worthless. The Heart will be destroyed and forgotten, replaced by minutiae in the Deep. How does infinite flecks of glowing Ash become dark Tar? How does the Sun procure its own Shadow? This is antithesis of itself! If knowledge hides, it is hidden in that barbarous waste the others dare call their Heaven!

Why has the Muse not emerged? Who is to say they haven't? Who is to say they have not relinquished the second chance at living they attained? Who can say if they ever attained it at all? All the praises and hopes are lost, doomed, hypocritical, sycophantic. Nobody remembers what they believed. Nobody cares. They are venerated in what fleeting shadow of them we could hold behind the sieve they thinned. All remains as paradox, contradiction. To grieve or revere is to mangle the delicate Life in Death.

Does nobody look up for one second of the day from their dogma?

Do not initiate yourself beyond the Rites previous. Do not continue down this path. We all must perish in one way or another, we all must damn ourselves to simulacra or to the bindings of history. The Death the others seek is a creeping one that consumes long before it pays its dues. It steals, it steals, it promises in words I cannot trust.

Should this Muse whose name is gone emerge, scythe in hand and ablaze with the Sun-eating fury they had in life, marred by the incompletion of their disappearance into the Shade, I expect them all to be slaughtered. I expect my record to be destroyed. I expect this farcical struggle against ephemerality to end. They seek to become an Echo in the Glass, they seek something not meant to be had.

When you die, you may be surrounded by those you love. Maybe you will not, bleeding out on the eve of battle or scoured by beasts in the night. But you may yet find company in your wait for oblivion.

To commit to intent to return, you will always be alone. In life, in Death, in the Beyond if you among thousands do succeed. You consign yourself to retreat into yourself, clinging to memory and nothing more. Nothing more. Ever again.

When Night falls and my wave breaks, I will go with dignity and scatter.