During the countless millennia of my exile I have been able to ruminate extravagantly, though not without exasperation, upon the more esoteric laws of my fellow Deities. Perhaps, in the spirit of accuracy, I should say my former fellow Deities, as I have no doubt that they would take exception to any presumption of mine to claim equality with them now. As an exile I am not entitled to the status I once enjoyed, though in reality I remain as I was. A god is a god is a god. I simply live apart.

It is an unwritten but embarrassing fact that certain things cannot be destroyed. Certain powers are eternal and remain so, resisting all other powers. I am one such power, but what I have begun here is not my story. No, my personal history would make dull reading and would scandalise no one. I make no secret of the fact that my reputed avarice for knowledge earned me the insular existence that I now endure. The pain of loneliness, like all other pain, atrophies and decays eventually. But no one wants to be ignored. And it has been a long time since anyone did so much as acknowledge my presence, even with a curse.

I feel it is time I caused a stir of embarrassment again. In case I really have been forgotten.

So then how do the gods put an end to the aforementioned eternal powers when they consider it in their best interests to do so? Since we are talking about immortality, death is not an option. Imprisonment? As a temporary measure, but all prison walls crumble as the eons slide by. One could suggest the application of unending pain, but I have already commented on the deterioration of pain. Constant pain dulls and earns the victim's contempt, though I would not wish the theory put to the test in my own case. There is always the bestowing of madness, but madness is relative, and being largely unpredictable, is never easy to control. Besides, madness is something I would only recognise in someone else.

Since my exile so frustrates me, you will understand that few things give me as much pleasure as those which frustrate my tormentors. Thus my history, this partial revelation of secrets, this presentation of indiscretions. I refer to a repressed power: the gods have decreed it a sin even to contemplate this ejaculation of darkness. Ironically I was exiled for less than the injudicious study of this particular entity.

I refer to the enigma known as the Voidal.

Few will know the name, but for those who do, it is synonymous with nightmare and deep unease, which is why it is so beguiling. This dark entity could not be destroyed, though the gods had set their corporate powers to reducing it to nothing, motivated, if you have not already guessed as much, by their fear of it. They took from the Voidal his memory, and with it his understanding of his powers, his soul, his identity, and the greater part of his sanity, as you shall discover in the history that follows. There was little of his own will left to him, but they could no more wrest it from him than they could his life. He could go nowhere unless he was summoned, and yet the gods placed upon him such a mantle of terror that only fools dared call him, as you shall also learn. And they set him adrift in the fathomless deeps of his own nightmares, believing he would be lost forever in their paradoxical inconsistencies and could never rise.

Why? Why did they do this? What did they fear? The question haunts him throughout his bleak quest. As it has me. It is a fragmented history and much of it remains dark and obfuscated, for I have woven it from whispers, myths, hints and rumours. And my work has been hampered by the shadows that ever seek to close in over the grim traveller himself. They may yet be your companions.

-- Salecco the Esteemed, of Escaloc, Author of The Extrapolation of Exactitudes, Towards the Cognizance of Random Creation, Nascent Darkness: Our Responsibilities and various other Works currently invalidated under the Divine Sedition Acts.

Copyright © 2001 by Adrian Cole