WRITINGS

I have travelled to the Bedabin camp to examine the giant insect brought down by Al Shabim and his fighters. The nomads say they have sometimes sighted these creatures roaming the desert to the north, but this is the first in living memory to cross into Bedabin territory. Even dead, it is a fascinating specimen--comparable in size to a Kharidian scorpion but closer in appearance to a scarab, with six segmented legs and a chitinous exoskeleton. The Bedabins have named it "kalphite," after a creature Menaphite religious lore tells was created during the fall of Scabaras, when the god’s blood dripped upon a swarm of scarabs and caused monstrous mutations of body and mind.

I have devised the scientific name kalphiscarabeinae for this unique species. I suspect the kalphiscarabeinae has gained its mythical reputation for being so rare, and hope my research trip into the northern desert will shed light on its natural origin. This could well be the defining discovery of my bug-hunting career!

In several days of exploration I have not encountered more kalphites, live or dead, but their snaking trails criss-cross the sands everywhere I look. Scattered along these tracks lie the dry husks of shed exoskeletons, many larger than the Bedabin specimen.

Initial evidence indicates kalphites may live in subterranean hives, as ants or termites do. I have located a sandstone structure some days north of the nomad's camp which conceals the entrance to an underground tunnel. It would take a good length of rope to overcome the initial drop, and attempting the descent by moonlight would risk injury, so I will camp for the night and venture down at dawn.

Strange. The desert is quiet tonight, yet a humming vibration plays on the edges of my awareness, somewhere between heard and felt. Long days in the heat must be wearing on my senses.

This morning I breached the kalphite lair. Following the drop down is a vast, airy tunnel, well-lit by the sun filtering down through the rocks above. Narrower passages branch away to each side, trailing off to depths and darknesses unknown. All around, insects click and scuttle in the walls, and always there is the humming, the incessant droning, enough to make your ears ache all the way down to your teeth.

Tumeken's light, it torments me! Sometimes, when my focus drifts, I swear I hear language in the noise, but when I try to pick out words, they slip my grasp.

I have managed to avoid a direct encounter with the creatures, though increasingly I worry this is only because I am too small to draw their notice. I am presently hidden in a small alcove for safety as I write. Ahead, the tunnel opens on a larger atrium. Two of the largest kalphites I have yet seen guard a pit at its centre. Beyond that, I do not know. Dare I wonder?

Icthlarin spare my soul, but I dared.

Somehow I won through to the pit unscathed by its guardians. Stifling, stinking waves of heat radiated up from the depths. I lashed a rope in place and shimmied down halfway for an overhead view of the space below.

And I saw her.

Oh, the sight of her stole my breath! I knew her for a Queen at once. She patrolled her throne chamber in pitted chitin armour, hulking and six-legged, a nightmare of twitching antennae and scissoring mandibles.

She sensed me; her eyeless head swivelled in my direction. Then she reared back on four legs and let out a terrible screech, interspersed with a series of mandible clicks so precise they could only be purposeful speech. Sandstone cracked and crumbled as the walls disgorged dozens of smaller kalphites, a shifting, swarming mass that flooded into the chamber like a river of blood.

Sheer panic kept me clinging to the rope. The insectile clicks and groans of the kalphites took on the rhythm of a chant, smothering every sense, drowning out every thought. A new presence pressed on my awareness--a terrible, divine, eternal presence. With a faraway sense of alarm I realized that the Queen and her children were praying, and something, some god, answered the call.

Shimmering with divine protection, the Queen went silent and still. Then a spasm ran through her. Her thorax and abdomen pulsed grotesquely. With a sound like rending metal, the chitin plating split along her back and she burst forth, born anew, wings whirring to motion, legs grasping through the air towards me--

There is a gap in my memory here. I cannot say how I made it back up the rope to safety. Even now, I struggle to hold my thoughts.

The kalphites have a language and a Queen and a god. This is not an anthill, not a termite colony, no mere swarm of insects, no! A cult! A cult of Scarabas secreted away beneath our very feet!

Am I to deliver this knowledge back to the Bedabins? To Al Kharid, or Menaphos? No, no, it is blasphemy to speak of Scabaras in Menaphos. But then, Menaphos seems far away, unreal, a city of short-lived humans with mortal concerns. Nothing to a god--a god of insects, a god of nightmares, a god of isolation.

Why, why, why did I come down here? My head is full with the whirring of insect wings.

The Kalphite Queen holds court beneath the sands. She leads her children in prayer. Her children, larvae glutted on the rotting flesh of a fallen god. Her workers, her soldiers, her guardians. Scabaras' cult, Scabaras' army. Scabaras' sacred blood, flowing in a hundred tangled veins under the desert.

The blood of Scabaras prays for his return! The blood of Scabaras awaits his return! Oh kalphiscarabeinae pasha, oh kalphiscarabeinae sacer!

[The remaining pages of the journal are filled with frantic scratchings that do not correspond to any known language.]