From a Letter by Robert Howard

Listen, I’ll tell you; we are sparks of star dust, atoms of unknown power, powerless in ourselves but making up the whole of some great power that uses us as ruthlessly as fire uses fuel. We are parts of an entity, futile in ourselves. We are merely phases of electricity; electrons endlessly vibrating between the magnetic poles of birth and death. We cannot escape these trails in which our paths lie. We do not, as individual entities, really exist, we do not live. There is no life, there is no existence; there is simply vibration. What is life but an uncompleted gesture, beginning in oblivion and ending in oblivion? What man of history ever really accomplished what he desired to accomplish? No, what men name life is simply the sparkle of an electron as it flashes from the pole of birth to the pole of death. There is no beginning, nor will there ever be an end to the thing.

Artephius, followed by blogger's own work

Artephius: “Isn’t it only too well known that ours is a cabalistic Art? That is, to be revealed only orally and overflowing with mysteries? Poor fool. How can you be so naïve as to believe that we would teach you openly and clearly the greatest and most important of our secrets? I assure you that whoever tries to explain in the ordinary and literal sense of the words what the hermetic philosophers have written will find himself caught in the meanderings of a labyrinth from which he can never escape, because he lacks Ariadne’s thread as guide.”

It will never be quite as it appears. The man in the white robes with the dark hair whispers as you come near words that never quite reach your ear. Until, just then, as the sun’s lower rim touches the top of the pine trees on the horizon, and a single word emerges from his insect buzz: Janus. For it was on your mother’s birthday that you were born and that was also the day she died.

It was January and the doctor said that there were remains of fetal bones in your mother’s womb and they all thought, though none of them said it, “there was another one in there with her and She must have eaten it.” The nurse thought a quick death in the Janus winds would be the most humane thing to do but the winds took pity on you and instead of chilling your flesh into unbearable blue pain leading to a peaceful sleep as they had with a hundred other babes that winter, they picked you up and nestled you into a cloud where all shone pink and gold with strands of cloud like cotton candy creating bright fathomless caves. You flew on the winds through those caves three days and then were dropped onto the roof of a widowed basket weaver.