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one of them has become quite busy. I can hear the strange
sounds of its dark enterprise, occasionally.’
“When I asked about the demonic wolves, he said only,
‘The industrious one that I mentioned is lean and voracious,
and the wolves are its voice. It speaks stolen breaths into
hungry sentences made from packs of frothing wolves,
wherein each ravening word can hunt and kill. It is speaking
now, but to whom, I cannot say.’
“My host would say no more, and I was relieved to
move past the topic at the time, as the deep sounds nearly
startled me awake. However, after I departed the Kingdom
of Cellars and its charming ruler, I resolved to learn more
about this creature, the thing with a voice filled with wolves.
Eventually, this entity became a point of some fascination
for me, and so I dreamed as deeply as I was able, trying to
find some trace of this pit of which the Cellar King made
mention.
“After many dreams of unsuccessful questing, I finally
located an ancient nightmare drifting alone in a sea of muted
screams, replaying its bloody history over and over again.
The apparent dreamers of this nightmare had been many
and monstrous, but long dead. Strangely, as I explored the
contents of the abandoned vision, it seemed that the dreamers
had not only shared the same dream, but had actually killed
one another within it, their battles still echoing in blood
and memory. I returned to the dream often, and every time
I sank beyond its cold membrane of shiftless sleep, setting
foot upon the shores of its old death, I would feel eyes upon
me, amused it seemed at my revulsion for the many evils it
once contained. The sum of my many stolen glimpses would
suggest that the dream is not the property of what I first took
to be its dreamers, but rather a creation of another being
entirely, likely the Unbegotten entity the Cellar King and I
had overheard, so many dreams prior.
“It seems to me to be a construct, forged from powers
that partake from no earthly source, functioning much like
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