I had finally arrived. My journey had been long and arduous and oppressive—but I had finally arrived. The Black Gates. They had described them to me in horrifying, detestable detail. For Their cruel pleasure, They took pains to imprint in me an ineffaceable image of grotesquerie that would rout all pride and vanity from my self. But what stood before me now—what bore down on me now like an Olympian slighted—was utterly ineffable.
These gates were unlike anything I had ever seen—surely unlike anything any mortal person had or should ever dare glance upon; all that I had come across until now was bucolic and plain in comparison to this hell-inspiring portal. For I beheld: at either end, beside the main metalwork, their hands acting as the gates’ hinges, were what I then and there unhappily denominated the Repellent Guardians.
The pair were undeniably statues, massive statues, sculpted from some indeterminate material that resembled obsidian. Obsidian because—oh!—how deeply black they were: as black as the infinite void between the stars up above! Even so, what truly frayed the sinews of my very soul were their forms.
On the left—there: a severely lacerated, hunched over, decrepit man (or what barely could be called a man), with wrists and ankles manacled. His tortured countenance exuded the utmost hideousness; I could muster no strength of will to look away from the dread billowing forth from it. Most strangely, in him I saw for a moment something of myself, something that terrified me more than the physical sight of this flogged wretch. What it was precisely I could not discern: the fear was overwhelming.
And on the right—there: the likeness of a woman whose mouth and eyes were savagely stitched forever shut, and whose ears were nothing more than callously cauterised, deformed stubs. She would never again utter another word, never see the world, never hear sounds! She was just as abhorrent as her fellow languishing beside her, perhaps more so; and the difficulty of averting my eyes was just as strong. And again there was some queer thing about her—this eternally silenced, eternally blinded, eternally deafened mass—a sense of familiarity of which any thought of a possible confirmation sickened me to my core.
These colossi—erected by the nameless things, the secret things—: I, after a bout of irrepressible aversion and stark reflection, realised what their purpose was, the design behind their nascence. They were stationed there, had been stationed there since the first machinations of maleficence arose, to bar entry to those of “unsuitable” constitution. I say unsuitable because during my wracking communing with Them They hinted ever so slyly to Their reason for choosing me as the audience for Their presentation (as They put it), an event of mythical rarity: They had been searching worlds between worlds and worlds beyond worlds—searching the cosmos and the planes of reality and irreality over—searching for suitable beings who had the potential to overcome Their Crucible.
Thus these Repellent Guardians screen out those who have not the will to transcend the limits of fear, in all its unsightly forms, and dare enter through the Black Gates.
This revelation solidified something within me, buttressed my ever-augmenting cathedral. I had come so far that I was determined not to let these foul demon-wrought opera deter me from the Prize that reposed beyond. Without further hesitation I entered; this first trial, I had overcome.
November MMIX; Februarius-Aprilis, September MMX
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