Nameless Artisan's Memo

Nameless Artisan's Memo

The deeper we dug, the stronger that indescribable, nauseating stench became. Perhaps it was due to the pervasive dampness and fungi, for those pale molds and indescribably strange mineral deposits all seemed to emit a toxic odor, but that was not the only source of unease here. To begin with, (...) felt that there was something "unlucky" about this place, but even she did not offer up any explanations even more far-fetched than that at the time. But as the work progressed, a craftsman from (...) suddenly lost his wits — screaming, laughing, crying, and all the while babbling incoherently about how he had seen an almost impossibly large, hideous, and swollen black silhouette in the watery depths; and of how it had shrieked a terrifying, profane song, commanding him to kneel down before the "Master." The supervisor took him away, but a sense of unease had already begun to spread among the workers. The surging foam and swirling of the foul water could be explained as regular elemental phenomena, but those intermittent sounds and whispers... even I could not find any reasonable explanation for those. From behind those ancient walls — or perhaps from beneath them, though I could not say for sure — I could hear a sound, unmistakably clear yet at the same time faint, furtive, and muffled, as if something was scurrying through the walls. The laborers whispered among themselves, trembling with an incoherent, almost crazed terror as they mumbled obscurely of an unimaginable, profane curse that lurked beneath the water's depths. What we had been doing, they said, had awakened "it" from countless eons of slumber. No one would leave this ruin alive, and even if they did, they could never tell anyone about it — for listeners would just dismiss such claims as the ramblings of lunatics. I could not find a rational explanation for this loathsome, frightful terror; for by all accounts, those damp, fungus-covered walls that supported the vaulted ceiling should have been built from solid rock, and the echoes they produced when tapped confirmed this. Yet those terrifying rustling sounds continued to reverberate through the dead of night, jarring me into the confusion of half-wakefulness from what was uneasy sleep to begin with. Our supervisor reassured us that she herself had not heard anything unusual, attributing our hallucinations to lack of rest. She even applied for extra grain rations for us, out of sympathy for our plight. Yet the fear that had spread among the laborers was so intense that... (The long segment that follows has been deliberately erased, and it cannot be read.)