From the vaults of memory Eons and eons ago, in an era whose marvelous worlds have disappeared, and whose powerful soles are now less than a shadow, I lived in a star whose course, dropping from the high heavens, no return of the past, hanging right on the edge of the abyss in which they claimed the Astronomers find immemorial cycle a dark and disastrous end.
Ah, the strange star was forgotten in the depths, stranger than any dream he has assaulted the dreamers of the spheres of this, or any vision that has floated on the visionaries in the past to look back to astronomical! There, through cycles of history, whose crowded annals inscribed bronze were beyond tabulation possible, the dead had come to vastly exceed in number the living. And built on a stone that was indestructible except for the fury of suns, cities were built next to the living and the prodigious metropolis of the Titans, with walls that overshadowed all the surrounding land. And over all hung the black funeral vault of the heavens cryptic: a dome of infinite shades, where dark sun, suspended like a huge and solitary lamp, illuminating little and, averting her face fire of unbreakable ether, projected only tenuous and desperate rays on the vague and remote shrouded the unlimited horizons and landscapes of these lands visionary. We were a people
dark, secret and afflicted us who Morabad under that sky of eternal sunset silhouetted against which the silhouettes of towering obelisks and tombs of the past. In our blood ran cold at night old time, and our pulse languished with foreknowledge of the slow creeping of Lethe. On our yards and fields, and invisible vampires
indolent arising from mausoleums, rose and ranged the dark hours, with wings that distilled product of an evil dark weakness pain and despair of dead centuries. The heavens themselves were heavy burdens, and breathed on them like a tomb, sealed for life with all its corruption and stagnation of slow decline, and impenetrable darkness except for the busy worms.
lived in shadows, and loved as in a dream, as in the vague and mystical dreams that hover over the last limits of unfathomable sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead perhaps the ghostly feel for lilies of the fields of Hades. We spent our days wandering through the ruins of solitary and ancient cities, palaces whose timing copper, like streets open between long rows of sculpted golden obelisks, were dark and the light morbid dead or forever lay submerged in seas of still shadow cities whose vast iron temples still preserved its primordial darkness of mystery and horror, and from where sculptures of gods forgotten centuries ago looked unaffected eyes empty of hope heaven and saw the subsequent night, the final oblivion. Languidly took care of our gardens, which concealed a necromantic gray lily perfume that had the power to evoke the dead and ghostly dreams of the past. Or, wander over fields of perennial autumn color of ashes, we sought the rare and mystical immortality, dark leaves, pale petals, that flourished under willow-like foliage bloodless veils, or wept under a gentle spray nepenthe, along with the silence of water flowing Acheron.
And we were dying one after another, and we got lost in the dust accumulated time. And the years we saw only a slow succession of shadows, and death as the yield of the sunset at night.
Clark Ashton Smith
