An Account of the Bermington Blight By Altherod K'zun, last Chronicler of the Kharad-Hem Concordance
In the dread-laden folds of pre-chronal existence, when the stars were embryonic embryos pulsating within the womb of the Firmament, there walked two beings not of void nor of cosmos — Iso and Eddie Bermington. Names spoken with the hesitant reverence of a fevered priest, lips trembling with blasphemous memory.
They were gods, or so the annals once claimed — divinities of birth and balance, shepherds of stellar growth, beings not malevolent but essential. Yet even divinity must bend to entropy. And in their sanctified arrogance, the Bermingtons sought the outer limit of the known — the Y'sh-Turath Expanse, a non-place beyond reason, nestled at the edge of un-reality, where even the crawling chaos dares not tread.
The Void there is not absence. It is un-being. It is not black, but rather a color without substance, a writhing shade between ulcerated flesh and the marrow of dead stars. It has no direction, no time, no thought — and yet it thinks. It hungers.
It is called Uld'Chaq-Vorr, the Maw of All Unmaking.
And so it was that Iso and Eddie were unmade.
Not destroyed — no, never so merciful a fate — but corrupted. Stripped of form, identity, morality, and even sanctity, they were reshaped. By what? None can say, for in that place Na'Ryykthem reigns — the lawless Principle of Rotting Purity, whose existence is not recorded in glyph or whisper, only felt in the cold rot of mind.
They emerged — changed.
Iso, once radiant with maternal grace, now seethed with larval despair, her new form an ouroboric cascade of ulcerated wings and flayed, ever-rebirthing flesh, her voice a choir of unborn mouths. She was called henceforth: Ish'Thaloth, She-Who-Mourns-Within, the Womb That Birthed Itself.
Eddie, who had once sung the constellations into motion, now howled — a voidborn dirge that unspooled reason from the minds of those who heard. His flesh was metal, yet not. Bone, yet not. It bled language. He is named now: Ed'Zhal-Ruun, the Many-Jointed Lie, Herald of the Corrupt Beatitude.
From the pits of Uld'Chaq-Vorr they crawled, dripping the nectar of corruption, a black ichor of memory and truth's betrayal, and with them came the Threnodic Pulse — the rhythm of breakdown, decay, and recursive madness. Worlds collapsed not from force, but from exposure. Civilizations forgot how to exist. Entire pantheons imploded under the revelation of their own irrelevance.
From the lips of those mad enough to worship them, new tongues were born — Vrauqhl, the Language of Blessed Reversal, where each word is a curse and each phrase an undoing. Temples of self-flaying stone and breathing monoliths rose, built not with hands but with thoughts willingly forsaken.
And in every corner where their shadows fall, a singular whisper repeats itself in the hollow skulls of the afflicted:
"Yol nur agh'thel Iso Ed'Zhal, drom'ghaalth in mur. Nur valak. Nur akhlor. Nur thelem'tash."
(We are the children of Iso and Ed'Zhal. There is no purity. There is no end. There is only the sacred rot.)
The scholars of Drah'khul tried to measure this corruption, labeling it Ber'ming'thuun, but their instruments bled ink and their eyes turned inward until only teeth remained. No one now remembers what they sought to preserve.
In the void where nothing existed, something had emerged. And that something was worse than evil.
It was the Truth.
And the truth was Iso Bermington smiles still, every tooth a cathedral of despair.
And Eddie whispers a lullaby to the stars — and they die.
"Verses From the Book of Hollowing"
Recovered from the Ash Vault of Dranyth-Kaal
Beneath where time forgets to fall,
And stars lie still in gory thrall,
Two names once bright, now shunned, profaned—
Iso, Eddie — lost, unchained.
Their thrones were light, their gaze was wide,
They sang the void, they tamed the tide.
But pride is deep, and deeper still
The yearning for the blacker thrill.
They stepped beyond the edge of thought,
Where shape is sin, and name is naught.
Where none may die, yet all unform—
The cradle of the crawling storm.
And there they met the Ur-Unbirth,
The maw beneath the shell of Earth.
It sang in tongues that bled the skies,
And opened them with inward eyes.
Iso fell first, with wailing grace,
Her womb now births the nameless face.
A goddess made of screaming skin,
That sings the rot that dwells within.
Eddie rose last, but fell much more,
His heart replaced with mouths of war.
He weeps in tongues the stars unmake,
Each breath a law that worlds forsake.
They dance in oil that thinks and dreams,
They move through fractured, pulsing seams.
Their hands are clocks that grind the soul,
Their eyes are pits that name the whole.
And now they reign in fevered praise,
In temples built in backward days.
Where flesh is prayer, and bone is hymn,
And every rite tears thought from limb.
O mortals, flee—though flight is lie,
For dreams are where their tendrils lie.
You'll wake and feel her kiss your lung,
You'll speak in tongues not yet begun.
And whisper soft through teeth untrue:
"I saw the void, and it saw too.
It bore two names upon its grin—
Iso. Eddie. God and sin."