Professor Heilin, I heard you. I will never forget your words. Til Gran Kythera Dow. They are the words that haunt me. So much do I fear that their meaning will be revealed to me. They are, no doubt, a revelation that would fracture my mind. My certainty of this lies in the sound of your cry. You spoke those words not in pain, or in fright, but in madness. It was the cry of a man who had discovered something so terrible that sanity could not survive.
I feel compelled to write of this place. It is the only subject my mind seems willing to consider. My memory of it is so vivid, and in the weeks since I left there, I have analysed each image in my mind with such clarity I never knew my thoughts possessed. The world beyond that place, beyond Kythera, has ceased to exist for me. Reality seems as if viewed through the filter of a dream. Only Kythera is real to me. Perhaps I died there and am now a spirit unable to rest, haunting an infirm world, viewing it through the veil of death. If I am not dead, it is no matter. My life ended the moment those words were spoken.
At his cry the ruins responded. The tall spires that stretched above the sunken ruins were not stone but clusters of cogs and levers, these nested together in a way that made a joke of geometry. Each part bore inscription in lettering unknown to us. Each spire reached high on one end and on the other, disappeared into the inky waters of the bayou where the metal was decayed by the caustic waters of the swamp. The spires numbered seven and stood in a circle around a dark pool.
At Doctor Heilin’s cry, the water began to churn. Mechanisms long submerged spun to life. The spires themselves, constructed of gears with teeth long broken, were suddenly animate, moving in spite of the condition of their parts. The pillars pushed away from the pool and opened to the sky, their movements accompanied by the grinding scream of gears that protested their motions.
Doctor Heilin, I pray that his death was quick. Perched as he was atop one of those great spires, he fell into the churning water and was pulled beneath the surface. The machine, for that is what this ruin is, a machine of great scale and great complexity, was sated by Doctor Heilin’s death. His body consumed by the water, the machine stilled. Only the cries of my fellows sounded in the swamp.
The description I give here cannot explain the terror or wonder of that sight. The madness that gripped my fellows in the moments after are much more telling. They wept and tore at their hair. In their horror they beat at their chests and ripped their clothes and flesh. Few could recall what had happened, their minds unwilling to contemplate the memory of that event. Why my mind refuses to leave that moment, petrified forever in that frozen moment of terror, I do not know. We must all deal with horror in our own way. I am jealous of the mercy visited upon my fellows.
If this journal survives beyond my death, survives where my sanity fails, I warn all to be clear of that place. I know what exists beneath that pool. It is death.