Deep within THE Infinite Carcosa, a temple rose out of a sea of golden mist.
It was built of white stone in tiers upon tiers, each tier wide enough to hold a city, and across its endless steps and colonnades, True Lifeforms moved about in the plain robes of priests! Hundreds of them!
Beings whose presense would have flattened Observable Existences walked in silent lines carrying censers and sealed urns, tending rows of caged radiances that pulsed behind lattice screens, and every one of them moved with bowed heads, because the master of this temple had been old before their Ages had names.
At the very top of the temple, on a wide platform open to the golden mist, a humanoid Primeval One sat on a plain stone seat.
He wore the shape of a broad old man with skin the color of river clay, hairless, heavy-shouldered, dressed in a single white cloth, and his eyes held the slow patience of something that had watched harvests of entire Ages come and go.
