Podcast Episode: Ancient Sleepers And Abyssal Doom

This episode explores some of my bleakest and most doom-laden work, drawing heavily from my enduring love of cosmic horror. These selected pieces are both a homage and a love letter to the late, great H.P. Lovecraft, whose imagination helped shape my understanding of world-building and creative expansion.

Lovecraftian horror has always been a strange comfort to me. It taught me that an idea need not remain a single thing, it can grow, evolve, and become something far larger and more unsettling than its beginnings.

So venture forth if you dare. Beyond this point lies a landscape of ancient terrors, creeping dread, and no small amount of doom and gloom.

References:

The Approaching Dark

Look toward the stars,
And behold what approaches.

The world is falling,

Swallowed by rising tides,
Crushed beneath an unknown power.

Illusion gives way to reality.
The truth can no longer be hidden.

Devoured by that ancient darkness
Awakening once more?

That which slumbers now awakens

The coal-stained silver lined clouds rumble,
Restlessly churning above a black range,
A symphony accompanied by the caw of crows,
Cemetery stones jut through mist like broken teeth,
Marking the empty husks of men and kin cowering within graves,
Screaming tree hollows drum with the sound of steady rain,
As the dried lungs of empty creek-beds breathe once more,
An intense feeling of static electricity fills the air,
As bright cobwebs of lightning flicker across the sky,
A heavy hum vibrates deep within the bowels of the land,
Something that once slumbered has awakened,
Stirring, timeless and immense with insatiable hunger,
A leviathan no longer content to remain darkly dreaming,
Once secreted away within the ocean realm of sleep,
This ancient is of the stars, of the land and sea,
A shapeless colourless world devouring entity.

Lost in the secrets of sleep

Stirring from sleep with a jolt,
The heart beating furiously,
The pulse pumping,
A gaze wide and confused,
Covered in cold sweat,
Things unseen move in shadow,
Inner depths cause silent screams,
No way out, there’s no way out,
Lost in dreams of death and black seas,
What secrets do closed eyes see,
More, than woken minds conceive.

Starfall

Falling from the distant stars through time itself,

Into the deep cool waters of an ancient land,

Lost to all memory, a forgotten numen beneath the waves,

As eons pass the subsiding waters form a vast wasteland,

Miles of desolate emptiness, and beneath these ancient sands of time,

The star fallen sleeps, imprisoned within the dark restraints of dreams.

Beneath the Black Seas of Time

Deep within yourself
Break the waves of a vast black ocean.

It stretches beyond time and space,
Beneath a sky strewn with distant stars.

In its fathomless depths
Slumbers the end of mankind.

Doom lies waiting there,
Tentacled and terrible,
Silent beneath the waves
Since the day it fell from the heavens.

Yet something stirs within the darkness.

An ancient awakening.

The waters are ice-cold,
And countless are their secrets.

Nothing remains lost forever.

The titan dreams no longer.

Soon it will rise from the depths,
And the world will remember its name.

For you are no longer
Its keeper.

What Slumbers Beneath the Waves

Beneath knotted storm clouds
And black, night-soaked seas,
Ancient stone columns descend
Countless fathoms into the abyss.

There, beneath a coral-crusted chancel
Of a long-forgotten holy place,
A great white eye
Stares blindly toward the distant surface.

Forgotten by time,
The Sleeper beneath the waves
Has awaited the call.

The somnolent god of the old world
Stirs within the inky darkness,
Impatient after ages of silence.

When summoned,
Its answer will be final.

In its throat awaits a single reply:

Death.
Doom.
Utter devastation.

Upon a lonely shore,
Incantations rise between crashing waves.

The stars are right tonight.

Death-cult followers gather,
Calling to their leviathan god.

And from the depths,
The Sleeper answers.

The sea rises.

Coastlines vanish beneath the flood.
Cities are swallowed whole.
Volcanoes awaken,
Casting ash across the heavens
Until the sun itself is blotted out.

The world freezes.

No soul remains
To witness the creature’s departure
Into the cold reaches of the cosmos.

All is lost in its wake.

And a dead planet
Turns slowly through the darkness,
Revolving forever
Beneath the black seas of time.

Fall of the Old World

The world lurches sideways,
Bringing with it
Chaos
And ruin.

Oceans shift.
Ancient shorelines disappear
Beneath walls of rising water.

Mountains erupt from the earth.
Great valleys split open.
The land is remade
In moments.

The retreating seas
Reveal forgotten terrain,
An alien world
Hidden beneath the old.

Where life once flourished,
The dead drift silently
Across poisoned waters.
Metropolises vanish
Beneath relentless waves.

Ancient creatures,
Long imprisoned
Within the deepest trenches,
Rise into a broken world.

Day becomes twilight.
Storms consume the sky.
Rain falls without end.
The old world dies.

The whispers were true.
An age has ended.
Another begins.
Whether by judgement,
Or consequence,

Humanity has reached
The end of its story.

Sleeper Beneath the Mountain

Asleep, yet never truly sleeping,
She lies within the Black Range.

Her breath is a distant rumble,
Felt deep within the bones of the earth.

For six thousand years she has waited,
Coiled beneath stone and darkness,
Her fury subdued by the mountain
That serves as both prison and tomb.

Every crack of thunder
Is a cry from the heavens,
The voice of a distant prince
Longing for the one denied to him.

Beneath forests ancient and deep,
Beneath peaks crowned in shadow,
The Serpent Princess slumbers.

Above her,
Lightning bridges earth and sky,
A fleeting touch between lovers
Separated by the ages.

She is worshipped by the Cult of the Serpent,
Whose rites and offerings
Keep the ancient sleeper bound.
For they fear the prophecy.
They fear what will happen
Should she awaken.

Far beyond the stars,
Her leviathan prince waits.
His heart is forged from stardust,
Shadow,
And grief.

With every passing century,
His sorrow grows.

Two mighty serpents,
Fire-eyed and scale-clad,
Kept apart by those
Who fear their union.

But no prison lasts forever.
A day will come
When the mountain cracks,
And the ancient princess rises.

Then her prince shall descend from the heavens,
And together they will unleash
Doom upon the world that divided them.

Oceans will boil.
Mountains will fall.
Cities will vanish beneath fire and flood.
All life shall perish
In the wake of their reunion.

And when the prophecy is fulfilled,
The Serpents will depart.

Beyond the stars they shall return,
To the realm of the Ancient Ones,
Where time has no dominion
And darkness stretches without end.

There,
Far from the lifeless husk of Earth,
The lovers will coil together once more,
Never to be parted again.

Beyond the Screaming Arch

Just one slip into unconsciousness.
Beyond a screaming archway drowned in ocean water,
Razor-sharp thorns pierce the skin and draw the blood.

Black blood drifts from the wounds like storm clouds in salt water.
Serpentine tentacles grip, tug, and constrict,
Dragging the world down into the darkest shadows of sleep,
Ito the realm of desolation and despair,
Doom absolute, engulfed by the blue-green deep.

Here we sleep,
Floating,
Lifeless,
Motionless.
Struggle is over.
Everything here is silent,
Cold,
And still.

Yet the stars above continue to shine
Upon that false calm surface.