Where a king weaves its Golden Tapestry.

Alternative title :

Castaigne's Workshop.

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§1 : Revival

Before you, suddenly appears a bridge, old in appearance, but that shines with youth, guarding it was a set of two immense metallic gates, deeply rusty and battered by Time's hooves. Above this arch, there was the face of a person, a face utterly distorted by cries, and on this person's cheeks, the tears had formed grooves letting them fall one by one onto the gates like a slow salty river. There was a deeply weird atmosphere, similar to a school that had just been deserted, where you could almost hear the people that inhabited this space echoing through the void. As you advanced on the bridge, you saw that it came upon a wall, pierced of a simple wooden door, curiously sculpted and lightly stained of Azure and Gold. When you opened the door, it sounded like the creaking of old bones that hadn't moved for decades, and the room you entered felt as if it somehow stayed out of time.

On the walls, under the glazed ceilings, among the flakes and the stars, where the ghost of the Past used to knock with it's heeled arm, quaking the vials and the canvases, dislodging the stone bricks, and crumbling the mortar, there are many sheets of paper, some yellowed by time, some with remnants of moss, some that seem to have been nibbled at by a(1)rabbit, some with beautiful calligraphy, some with dense squares of text as if slapped onto the paper haphazardly(3), at weird angles, some with intricate shapes formed by intertwined vines of color, some(2)where the ink still shines like it was just laid onto the page, others fully blank, except for snippets, incomplet verses in an unknown writing.
1: Haloed, 2: Very rarely now, 3: Each holds a life
On the dark oaken floorboards stained by ink, paint, sweat and blood , between the scrapings of a quickly moved chair, and the dents made by the tip of a blade, more text can be uncovered, in a runic script that matches no known language, often stretching onto the legs of the many tables.

On one of the tables, right under the only still working candle, a leather-bound book adorned with many strange symbols, in Yellow, Black, Green, Red, White and Azure, rested. On its cover, central to the piece, a single sign was visible(4), of an eye surrounded by three tendrils that seemed to stretch out of the white leather and into the air itself, as if poisoning it of its gold by its mere presence under the magnificently written title, that blended classic Gothic script with writhing vine-like curves sprouting out of the letters .
6: May his soul rest in peace,4: Zoth, the Vile Spy !,5: That's a game-changer, ain't it ?,7: art,8: Balcony or terrace, i don't remember (*12), 9: Zoth's eye stares directly into yours,11: Snakes
The Title reads :

The Hydras are (7) Dancing

Upon the Still-Dead lands of

HASTUR

(9)

Sous les étoiles noires du crépuscule, (Underneath the dark stars of the hazy dusk,)

Doré, flottant et brillant comme une bulle, (Gold, floating, glinting, a bubble like a tusk,)

Blanc, à l’abri des eaux brumeuses du lac, (White, safe up on cloudy waters of the lake,)

Montagne de marbre s’isolant d’un bac, (A marble mountain, remote under gold flakes,)

Lieu de galeries démentes de chansons, (Mad place of maddening galleries, and songs,)

De couloirs tordus, de murs couverts de masques, (Of twisted corridors, walls ridden of masks,)

Lieu d’un bal, de faces figées en un masque (The place of a ball, faces struck in a mask,)

Mortuaire et macabre, un rire de démons (Mortuary and grim, laughs of many demons)

Emplis le Palais. (Fill in the Castle)

Assit en son grand trône, ou à son balcon(8), (Sat at His great throne, or up on His deacon's(8))

le Roi rit devant ces faces de démons : (The mad King laughs at these faces of demons :)

Les artistes déments déversent leur trac, (The mad artists madly disgorge their stage fright,)

Leurs chansons entre les murs comme une traque. (At their mad songs, walled in, stalked in the moonlight.)

Le Signe, sur les tours, dans le vent, ondule, (The Sign, atop towers, in the wind, ripples,)

Son tissu, une flamme aux étoiles, brûle, (Its mad flame, starlit mane, at the stars sizzles)

Et un œil brille au centre, celui de Zoth, (Centered, shines an eye, the unsung eye of Zoth,)

Œil damné d’un jaune malsain, creux et pâle, (Damned eye of a sickly yellow, pale and vain,)

Œil sacré d’un or divin, œil capital, (Blessed eye, of heavenly glow, crucial Vision)

Qui, tout regarde, même le maudit Uoht (Which beholds all, even the accursed Uoth)

Depuis le Palais. (Out from the Castle.)

Terrible dans les chairs de la Terre, profond, (Dreadful in the Earth's flesh, deep underground,)

Sous-sol, s’active l’esprit d’un Roi, fécond, (Fertile, a man's astir spirit is gold-crowned,)

Ses doigts tressent, tortillent les brins, fibules, (His fingers weave, twirling the strands, fibulae,)

Accrochent de-ci, et de-là, forficules. (Hang rags, here and there, using forficulae.)

La plus haute tour, telle une flèche, pointe (The mightiest tower, arrow-sharp, pointed)

Vers le ciel et les Hyades de sa cime, (To the sky, and Hyades with a peak lithe,)

D’où on voit Yhtill, ployant sous le décime. (Where we see Yhtill, bending beneath the tithe)

Et la pâle, maigre, lune, à terre, disjointe, (And the pale, meager moon, landed, disjointed,)

Accointe le Palais. (Acquaints the castle.)

---

By The Visitor Castaigne.

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Ces tours, sur les eaux brumeuses du lac de Hali (These spires, on the cloudy waters of Hali's lake)

Se reflétent, les lances d’une armée en conquête. (Reflect upwards, lances of an army in conquest.)

Dans les miroirs des grands vitraux, on voit les tempêtes (Beneath the great glasses' mirrors, we see the tempests)

Qui font rage, tout là-bas, au plus loin du Palais. (That are raging, all-away, farthest of the Castle.)

Run your hands on the cover,

and reveal a ballad, written in French, engraved in the leather itself.

*12 : translator's note : This passage is unclear, but it is conjectured that "deacon's" is short for "a deacon's bench" which is a style of benches specific to one version of the Earth.

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§2 : Greetings

Below the surface of the everyday world, well-known by those who inhabit or visit it, is another, more full, but emptier still than the desert plains above. Full of rocky formations, that overlapped to create an intricate tapestry of greys(13)and browns, pierced by streaks of empty lives, of meaningless agitation. Despite the ubiquity of the dead, it was the home of two beings of immense power, two kings; reflections of each other, as if through the plane of the soil upon which one's tendrils crawled for damned eternities.

The first had no humanity, neither did He have a face, nor any lasting body, His name was His entire definition, He was (And still very much is and will be for as long as your measly life will last) The King In Yellow.

The second, more secretive, had all that He lacked, a face, a body, but his were plural, he had armies of faces, upon armies of bodies, united under a single mind, and a single name : Zam The Emperor of the Dead.

While the Emperor Zam had been birthed, and lived and schemed underground for all of recorded history¹, The King lived through most of his days above the rotten soil, above even most of the city over which he ruled.
As you should know, being that it is the mightiest, the greatest, and the most ancient city, Carcosa is built around a lake, the Lake of Hali, of which the cloudy clouded waters are used to fly up to the Palace, the King's white and golden castle, that shines over the plains like the light of the only bright sun this world has ever been under. And this castle's towers rise up to the upwards sky like spears, trying to invade the only visible place not under The King's influence.
In Carcosa itself, it was a nightmare of winding streets, of labyrinthine passages and hidden paths, all either paved with crackling marble or covered under the yellow tendrils of The King's tattered robes. Under the broken pavement, you could distinguish black soil, the only one not dried and cracked by the twin suns, instead infected and teeming with lice, mice corpses, ants, sandy spiders, and other vermin that ensured no food could be kept within the city's walls. The buildings were high, mightier than the mere huts of Yhtill, made of polished stone, assembled perfectly with wet mortar into the place where eons upon eons of war could rage, and the houses still be standing, having lived lives most gods would deem too long to bear.

the whistling of the wind picking up in volume in this desert seems to tell a story

Beneath the shadows of the twin suns, under the dim light of the black stars and the moons that are dancing in the dusk's sky, Alar… Beneath the pale shadows of the far-away cypress, which is lengthy and straight as the cathedral of marble and gold adorned of the grey wool, along the calm curve of Hemlhe's shore, at the foot of the village lit by the evening's stare, Alar. The salty river of his tears shines under the thousands of fires lit by the stars' gaze. And the rare waves pushed ashore by the warm wind sways his long, remorse-scented wailing.
He is the reflection of the Philosopher, of whom the waters rustle, splash and ripple beneath the astral mane, and under the piercing gazes of the Hyades, those who observe and of whom the notes stack.
Mirror in which Hastur's Palace, adorned of the grey wool, reflects into the Castle, the mount up on which few are those who can climb projects its darkening shadow on the bridge upon few are those who can walk.

"Walk !" used to shout the guardian when it took us too long for every step, but, now wailing, he does not shout anymore. And upon the bridge, and up on the mount, fewer and fewer are those who can walk, and fewer and fewer still are those who can climb.
And the doors, which were before oiled and smooth, now are rusty, rotten and creak under the salty cries of the guardian of the bridge upon few are those who can walk.

Your mind wanders off as you ponder what you read…

You cannot help but think, as you are standing in the pale sand of the Blank Page, holding your life, your past and all the futures you will live between your dried hands, if there was any way for Carcosa, Yhtill, The King, Hali, Harthur's or any place, people, book, song, or memory to not suffer the same fate that suffered all the countless worlds before you. The bicolor void around seems now to tremble, resonate and echo with the eternities passed, each grain the only remnants of an empire once deemed immortal, each of your steps in the cold sand disrupting the tombs and mausoleums of unknowable pasts. And you smile bitterly as you walk back to your god, beautiful in the darkness, with his back arched over his already disappearing words, his eyes mad of time and isolation, his hands fidgeting with the sand as he ponders each word, and yet, despite the care, attention and love he pours, as if he held all the love that could be ever felt in a world devoid of life, his rotting hands draw in the sand with the speed of a racing horse, his mind, body and soul all entirely to his task, to his hands, to his sand.

You sit next to him, your hand posed softly on his bare back, feeling the bones under his tight skin, you pat him on the shoulder, to warn of the return of his only worshipper, and he seems to slow down, to calm down, his writing becomes more orderly, his story starts to depict calmer, wiser and gentler people, his landscapes start to flatten, his seas, oceans, ponds and rivers start rippling with less agitation, the surface only broken by the remnants of the tempests, the wars die down, the people flourish, the deserts bloom to life again, and the civilisations enter a new age of discovery, of exploring the broken world which he made in his fury. Then, the winds stars to pick up again, not a harsh, cold and dry wind, but a soft, gentle one, that seems to invite you to trot alongside it, to follow it into this new age, and the pace picks up again, now a run, bending the trees, pushing the towers upward, and pushing the people away to explore, find, and inhabit. You pat again, and the winds calms down, He remembers that if He wants this world to survive, He must remain calm, not give in to the wind's echoes, to the call of glory, stay down-to-earth, or what remains of it, after unspeakable eons.

here is what the wind told

Imagine a field, with a man walking with a determined, an assured step.

He walked, staining the supple leather of his black boots, and staining the black cloth of his grand mantle with the silver of the moonslight. He walked, bobbing his head, and swaying his feet in the sea of white and gold, following, staggering, the red river that cut his vision. He held his hand, whining and breathing under the pain, and he held his palm, in the center of which, piercing the flesh, a rose was blooming, and its petals were whiter than snow, and its heart was of pure gold. He walked, staggering, and trampled with a screech the flowers with petals whiter than snow, and of which the heart was of pure gold.
The blood fell droplet by droplet, slowly, from his hand, to join to red river under his feet, the river that stained the supple leather of his black boots, and the silver of the moonslight stained the black cloth of his grand mantle. And lit by a moonsbeam, shining of a dark glint, embroided in his shirt of black linen, Zoth stared at the horizon of his yellow eye, and his arms trembled in the soft fairness of the pale and meager moon.
And from the depths of the elder curves of this moon, forlorn of age and fast, a new moon appeared, puffing out its chest, and glinting of youth, lighting of its protective gaze the black mantle stained of chalk, and lighting the face of the one who walked.

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§3 : The Trail

"So that's what death feels like… My hands are bound, my feet, immovable, my head doesn't hurt, and I can breath again. I can see what's around me, but I can't look at anything, as if my eyes refuse to cooperate. I try to blink to get rid of the blur, but it yields no result(17). I'm left to guess my surroundings, I appear to be outside, at night, though I feel no cold or wind, there are no stars, the ground is a dark yellow, or a very light brown, with streaks of pure black. In the distance, it seems as if the ground is covered in snow, or white paint, with some golden accents, very weird. Leading from me and towards this strange expanse, a few azure drops are sprinkled, forming a beautiful path. There may be trees around; if that's what they are, they must have died a very long time ago, they hold no flowers, no leaves, their bark is a brownish grey, and they are hunched like the old witches my grandma always made me think about.. I bet they don't make soup like her though…"
13: The Grey wools of Yhtill come from here, 14: accursed,15: Those of the old times, when mighty creatures roamed the lands ,16: ,17: try to weep instead, 18: The one you know.

Quote from the occult bard Dikla-Bat Kari IV, noted on the 12th of march 1746 of The Old Father's calendar (18)

This is the first ever recording of the(14)lands in which you are now, later, the medium Bayrolles will communicate with this spirit, named Hoseib Alar Robardin, often shortened as Alar. What this man saw as he woke up from the dead, is a plain of dry, cracked dirt, with long-dead trees, and a vast expanse of flowers whiter than snow and with a heart of pure gold. What Alar, in his slumber, failed to notice are : The myriad of tombstones scattered across the land, sometimes ornate with multiple dates in different colors, never more than six, and the long, yellow tendrils of cloth creeping from the city, 'the King's arms' they are often called.²

A crow lands on the windowsill, turns a blank eye in your direction, and jumps onto the floorboards…

the creaking of the boards under its weight tell a story

A person is sitting at the foot of a cypress, wearing a black cloak, and a black hat, a red cane is leaning on the trunk. He is writing in a leatherbound book, using a quill which is occasionally dipped in a deep cut in her elbow. She is currently looking in the distance, letting the blood dry on the quill, the stars in the sky spell out the words "Wheat Prince". The poetess strokes their bearded chin, sighs, and writes a new verse on the page. You step forward to look at the writing over his shoulder, and he stop, he looks up at you with a knowing gaze, holds their hand out for a fist bump, shoots a longing glare at the stars, then at the page, sighs, and declares :
"The crow brought you here to show what you were never meant to see. I lived much longer than you, despite my appearance, the crow helped me in the regard, and yet, I would wish to be you, not for what you will live, or what you have lived in your eternal existence, but for what you will not, you will not know heartbreak, you will not know romance, you will have no longing for intimacy, you will not know the hurt of mourning, you will not know grief, I made sure of that. Now, you can leave, this poem is not for you."
Beneath his hand, on the page, you see the title of her poem : "To my Prince of the Wheat and Snowy Plains." His name, at the bottoms of the page is "The King of Poppies. She closes the book, waves their hand at you and repeat :
"You can leave now."
The crow lands on your shoulder, and you wake up to the sound of wings flapping.

You turn a page in the book on the table, its first paragraph reads :

This land, much akin to many others, has known many kings, emperors, queens, empresses, and other leaders which believed their power came from a hight power. Among these, a notable outlier is the only who was all of these at once, they called himself King, yet was no different from a queen, had only a loose idea of what power should be, and ran the kingdom like a gentle trainer with rabbits. Their riegn is known to have been the longest, most chaotic, and yet greatest in the arts, sports and everything not related to politics. Another notable outlier was the first, only and thus last Pharaoh of these lands, long before they were known ad Hastur's, they were part of a much greater nation, ruled by the God of the King, of whose work made the mightiest despair. However, this king was tyrannical, he did not believe his power came from a higher power, but ratehr that he was the higher power. Which, of course, was true, but not very encouraging for the peoples over which he ruled. Then, Hastur, the God of sheperds came, united all the sheperds of the great lands into one city, and broke this city off from the continent, creating his own lands. What he did not know what that if these lands were so easy to break off, it was because of the other kings plaguing is, the King in Yellow, and The Emperor Zam, one was the King of the dying, the other King of the dead, who had been fighting for eons over the title of King of Death, making the land almost uninhabitable.

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§4 : An Unheard Conversation.

As you turn a page, a thin sheet flies off from in-between the pages. You try to chase it, but it seems some wind started blowing just to prevent you from accessing this paper, and it flies out of the window with a slight sigh. You close the window as to not lose the text again, and turn to the next page.
There, another thin sheet rests, however, it is calm as there is no more wind, and you can read a record of a conversation labelled :

Interaction between The King and His Self, accompanied by The Pallid Mask.

"What do I think of this yellow, could it be too pale ?"

"I like that it is too pale, it fits with the Mask."

"Indeed it would, if it were more Pallid than Death, that is…"

"For what he has done, he deserves to be on this piece, but not Hali ?"

"I have done many things for Us ! the Theater is very prosperous…"

"I know what I think of Hali; he does only serves MUse because he's weak."

"I ought'nt've underestimated him, one day he will have striucke."

"But on this day, there will be no estimation left…"

"…"

"…What about some red under the eyes of Harthur ? He seems too alive."

"He is quite alive, at least more than most of Carcosa."

"…"

"…This green is disgusting, I hate him."

"One day, he will be buried once again…"

"This day ought to come feast"

= = = = == = ===== = == = = "I ought'nt forget I will be feasted upon as well, the albino flower has almost finished his slumber" = = = = == = ===== = == =

Footnotes

1. Not very long sadly, not many are the things that can resist The King's influence.

2. Do not touch these arms, they are the reason for the desolation and sorrow here. You are not more resistant than a planet