We came ultimately to that sheer-falling gulf in which the spirit of Aforgomon is said to dwell. Lights, feeble and far-scattered, shone around it like stars on the rim of cosmic vastness, shedding no ray into the depths. There, in a seat of hewn stone overhanging the frightful verge, I was placed by the executioners; and a ponderous chain of black unrusted metal, stapled to the solid rock, was wound about and about me, circling my naked body and separate limbs, from head to foot.
To this doom, others had been condemned for heresy or impiety… though never for a sin such as mine. After the chaining of the victim, he was left for a stated interim, to ponder his crime — and haply to confront the dark divinity of Aforgomon. At length, from the abyss into which his position forced him to peer, a light would dawn, and a bolt of strange flame would leap upward, striking the many coiled chain about him and heating it instantly to the whiteness of candescent iron. The source and nature of the flame were mysterious, and many ascribed it to the god himself rather than to mortal agency….
Even thus they have left me, and have gone away. Long since the burden of the massy links, cutting deeper and deeper into my flesh, has become an agony. I am dizzy from gazing downward into the abyss — and yet I cannot fall. Beneath, immeasurably beneath, at recurrent intervals, I hear a hollow and solemn sound. Perhaps it is the sigh of sunken waters … of cavern-straying winds … or the respiration of One that abides in the darkness, meting with his breath the slow minutes, the hours, the days, the ages…. My terror has become heavier than the chain, my vertigo is born of a two-fold gulf….
Eons have passed by and all the worlds have ebbed into nothingness, like wreckage borne on a chasm-falling stream, taking with them the lost face of Belthoris. I am poised above the gaping maw of the Shadow…. Somehow, in another world, an exile phantom has written these words… a phantom who must fade utterly from time and place, even as I, the doomed priest Calaspa. I cannot remember the name of the phantom.
Beneath me, in the black depths, there is an awful brightening…