Introduction by Nameless Therein

Literary fiction within the Order of Nine Angles is one of its most overlooked disciplines. Although esoteric “Easter eggs” are strewn throughout works like the Deofel Quintet and discerned with furrowed brow by the dogged initiate, many mistake the fictive world of the text for the actual world of the reader. In this desperate search for answers, every sign becomes an omen, yielding nothing but spiritual confetti despite hiding in plain sight. Every stone left unturned becomes a celebration, every clue “discovered” a further delusion on the trail to truth.

And yet, such treasures are indeed hidden in plain sight, threatening to be discovered and deciphered. To find the key, one must first know how rather than where to look, recognizing that the confrontation of reality between the text and the actual world can be resolved. It is resolved through mimesis as a special kind of imitation. There is a sense in which the narrative of the text resembles the narrativity of our lives, where we become its object of imitation. Through what Aristotle called mimēsis praxeōs, the boundary between mythos and narrative emplotment thus finds locution in the life of the reader. As one learns how to interpret the text in this manner, one walks away transformed by it, and in this way the world itself is changed.

Transformation is thus not the unstitched lining between dream and reality or myth and grave. It is not a tombstone to be read as dead text on a dead page. It occurs as an active interpretation across a moving constellation of meaning. Within works like the Deofel Quintet, that constellation contains many clues between reality and subterfuge, be they autobiographical, geographical, or some other species of mystery. The following work by Mr. Thorn is no exception. With that said, I am pleased to introduce “Lachlan’s Tale,” which begins anew what the Deofel Quintet started. Rather than beginning where it left off, however, Mr. Thorn hopes to renew the art of sinister fiction as magickal practice – one with the voice and eyes of a new generation as a return to form.

Lachlan’s Tale:

Scrow and Ruin

Sometimes in the drear birthing of a new autumn, an early cold tide abruptly roars into the mixing, bringing with it strange, dripping days, and perhaps weeks that threaten to curtail the expectations held by mortal men. In these times, when the days of brisk sunshine and fresh air peer through the curtains of darkness, many curious things tend to occur. Such was this irregular tiding that occurred in her strange and breathtaking Ashdown Forest. There, in that old English kingdom, in ancestral Sussex, still imbued with the essence of the Dark Goddess.

Thus, Lachlan placed his deep-green MPV into parking gear somewhere just outside the boundary of Wych Cross and rolled up the windows in anticipation of the coming tempest. Him, a weathered and hallowed gentleman of approaching-fifty with an oddly strong and lean frame, purposefully moved from within the vehicle to the wide earthen trail and closed the door. Securing his rucksack produced from the hatchback boot, and locking the car with his electronic key, he set off on the stretch of rolling shrubland and into the abyss of her magnificent Ashdown Forest agwain with a mind of single-pointedness: wrath.

Somewhere far beyond, there were the chatterings of the human sentries and their human ways. Human things and human thoughts in a complex and convoluted mess of measured error. Yet within the mighty citadel of her earthly and inter-dimensional dwelling place, Ashdown Forest, there was no such rookery. It was as if the perimeter of the wildern beheld some astral element that warded its boarders, as well as the life contained within possessed as they were with their clear and primal beliefs.

Breathing in full lungs of the autumnal gusts, Lachlan approached the well-hidden stone edifice which had been consigned to the area. There, three roughly untumbled blocks of sediment had been placed over an area where a crystal tetrahedron of the right size had been buried. He produced from his bag the appropriate tools: a mirror with an inverted pentagram drawn upon it with planetary elixirs, his athame, and a small cast-iron cauldron.

The words were spoken, the motions performed, the incenses smoldered, the sigil drawn and burnt and sent off into the world of confusion, as sometimes may have occurred if needed. However, he knew in his heart of hearts that all of this was indeed unnecessary. Sometimes, and only in the very few instances in which something direct was to be done with concentration, did he need them: the words, the motions, the incenses, the elixirs, the sigil and its burning.

There was an elusive-other-element; an empassioning, hard-earned through decades of questing along the Seven Fold Way, that was the key to the gate. In this secret way, there in her Ashdown heath, her children as writers and poets did also dwell to be near her, as did Lachlan in his youth, to stake and sharpen his emotions through her gifted dreams of darkness deep and still deeper wondering. Yet on this particular day, the journey to these lands he had come to know so well, was for a much different reason.

In some segregation unit, which held the assailant whom through his excessive personal behavior had stolen the innocences of many such empassioned and empassioning folk in ancestral Sussex, her blue and ruinous presence was growing to restore the balance that had been upset. In Ashdown Forest, Lachlan’s hand dripped blood from an open wound onto the mirror, which now had an additional image drawn upon its reversed-side also with planetary elixirs, as he repeatedly intoned the formula that was sure to call her into his -our- continuum: “Agios O Nemicu….” In the segregation unit, the prison officers flocked to the cell of the serial rapist, to be confronted with sights of eldritch horror. As he, reduced to his knees in the center of the room which was now bathed in a ghostly woad of incandescence, held his head in agony, and with bulging eyes of pure insanity screamed with his last breath a single word which the jailers had never before heard nor would they ever hear again. A name so ancient and forgotten that it sounded as if nothing more than a garbled psychic fracture to their artless and mammalian “minds.” The officers chattered on and on with their dilapidated and insolent tongues, redolent as they were of the stinking embarrassment that carbon-based life most often is, and surely ill-equipped to deal with the onset crisis of the prisoner who was now in cardiac arrest. Particularly so, ill-equipped that is, as the Governor on this strange autumnal day had annexed his paid annual leave to spend time in his favourite historic location that lies in an old English kingdom, in ancestral Sussex.

Thorn
Fenrir Journal
Order of Nine Angles
2022 Era Horrificus