Soulless in Wermspittle

You who will read this when I am dead -- if indeed I allow this record to survive, -- you who have opened the box and have seen what lies there, if you could understand what lies hidden in that opal!

The Inmost Light, by Arthur Machen

---

So Many Secrets...
There are secrets too dangerous to eliminate, too potentially destructive to not hold on to in case they are needed on some dread and distant day. These are indeed dreadful days, by no means distant enough any longer...

Like all such things, it began as a calculated risk. A discrete policy that proved effective. The practice grew over time into something of an unspoken tradition. It became the way things such as these were to be handled.

Some potentially embarrassing or incriminating things cannot be ignored, nor easily destroyed. Other things are best left in obscurity, lest they reveal far more than just their mere existence. In some cases that alone would be enough to ignite scandals, inquisitions, depositions and worse. Such things can always get worse. All things made have makers, and it is sometimes best for those in power to not have their involvement in sordid undertakings or failed experiments known. Reputations are such delicate things. Often in need of repair. Setting aside the detritus of failures most foul and things best not discussed is but one step in this process. Sending such things into the care of mute monks, prisoner-librarians, scribes and archivists locked away in obscurity, out of sight, out of mind, could work wonders.

There are occasions when it is necessary and prudent to retain such unfortunate records and dubious remains, if not for posterity's sake, then for some possible use or advantage in the great game of innuendo and blackmail that goes on underneath the cloaks and the daggers of more conventional forms of espionage and subterfuge. Banned books and the unpleasant evidence and remains of illicit medical experiments, as well as the unexpurgated diaries and journals of the once intrepid experimental investigators who delved into things forbidden, unwholesome, dangerous -- these sorts of things were sent -- discretely and secretly -- to Wermspittle. Things best not discussed, let alone left lying about, have often been secreted away in the depths of various private archives, locked behind the triple-gates of nondescript book depositories, buried in the stacks of obscure libraries open only to a very peculiar elite. Where better to hide such damnable things than in the midst of the damned themselves? Stricken from the record, removed from circulation, all sorts of crates, boxes and bundles of things concealed behind such bland and banal labels as 'books,' 'records,' 'files,' and the like were shipped off to this vague and mysterious place not marked on any of the usual maps. They sent these things away in order to forget. To put some healthy distance between themselves and the unfortunate events, the questionable excesses, the blasphemous digressions best not brought to light any time soon. They sent these things to Wermspittle and left them to fester, rot and ferment in the dark. And good riddance. Or so they thought.

I am no dealer in unproved theories; what I say I have proved for myself, and at a terrible cost. There is a region of knowledge which you will never know, which wise men seeing from afar off shun like the plague, as well they may, but into that region I have gone. If you knew, if you could even dream of what may be done, of what one or two men have done in this quiet world of ours, your very soul would shudder and faint within you. What you have heard from me has been but the merest husk and outer covering of true science -- that science which means death, and that which is more awful than death, to those who gain it. No, when men say that there are strange things in the world, they little know the awe and the terror that dwell always with them and about them...

The Inmost Light, by Arthur Machen

Duplicity and Revelations...
Amid the crowds of curious heretics, unscrupulous skeptics, the condemned exiles, insane geniuses and those who feel themselves beyond the reach of the scathing rebukes of the established faiths, the reach of the so-called Great Powers, or even conventional morals and propriety for that matter, there are those who seek out the deliciously bizarre, the outre, the savory secrets of others. Some do it for personal reasons, others for personal gain. Secrets are a form of currency in this dismal, dreadful place. Secrets are valuable. Some secrets are worth their weight in fresh meat in Winter. Other secrets have a use, a utility; they grant those who know them power. So secrets are much sought after in Wermspittle. Unearthed by desperate spades, lifted out of their sarcophagi-like cases and vaults like the dead plundered from their tombs. You work with what you have at hand.

One such suppressed secret was the formulation of the Opal of the Inmost Light. The so-called 'Gem of Souls.' For many years the secret remained safely ensconced in the storage cellar of a bankrupted private repository that had sat boarded-up and abandoned for decades. The roof had been damaged during the night bombings of the Great War. Red Weeds, specifically a rather unhealthy species of Red Creeper had infiltrated the stones of the back wall and dragged them down into a jumbled pile that blocked the alley behind the place. Hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts were lost to the ravages of wind, rain, illiterate harpies and the cooking-fires of squatters. Foragers and Scavenger-Scholars picked their way through the mess in a determined competition that was mostly hidden behind muffled knife-fights, though sometimes things escalated, as when a particularly good trove of undamaged books or unopened boxes was uncovered and spells and gonnes took the place of knives and stealth.

A box was discovered. Changed hands five times. Each time through bloodshed and violence. Until it reached the desk of a disreputable scholar, a defrocked professor of galvanic chemistry kicked out of the Academy for his retrograde theories regarding the Violet Ray. An obsessive and a drunkard, the scholar was known to piss away his funds for obscure bits of arcane bric-a-brac no one else knew what to do with. So he ended-up with the box. It sat for several years. Neglected. Ignored. Lost beneath the untidy mound of rat-gnawed scrolls, broken-spined ledgers, oddly stained journals and other esoteric impedimenta accumulated over the wayward course of the scholar's last few years.

Eventually the money ran out. As it always does. One apprentice, his favorite, sold the scholar's blind-drunk body to the Butcher Boys one Winter. The rest of the traitorous apprentices divvied-up the remains of their former master's vast repertoire of scripts, tomes and such. They each carried off as much as they could carry before word got out and looters, scavengers and foragers showed up looking for an easy score.

One apprentice, Dubrezk is the only name they've since allowed to be recorded, wound up with the box that contained the notes, diagrams and details regarding the alchemical formulation of the Opal, and the ways and means of using it to capture and hold the Inmost Light. He, or she, (it is not recorded and indeed it is suspected that they were Eloi, and thus capable of switching genders as they wished), wasted no time in attempting the replicate the process outlined in the papers they had so fortuitously liberated from obscurity. The technique worked. All too well. It was the third subject that turned the tables and extracted Dubrezk's soul. Or so the story goes.

In that work, from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber)--in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death...

The Inmost Light, by Arthur Machen

Something too awful, too terrible to be allowed to remain...
Acting quickly, with a confidence and surety that the young apprentice had never demonstrated previously, Dubrezk gathered-up a bare minimum of personal belongings and disappeared. Some say that they were taken by agents of the Comprachicos, or that they fell afoul of the Corruption Trade. It is uncertain, unknown. None who might know about this will speak about it. The matter of the Soulless in Wermspittle is one that is best not discussed openly, especially in public.

Dubrezk may or may not still...live...if one can call the state of being rendered soulless 'living.' What is known, or at least believed by those who have attempted to make a study of the matter, is that Dubrezk had tampered with the original process after their initial success. Emboldened by the results of the first extraction, the former apprentice set about modifying the process. The second extraction had to be destroyed. No records survived that attempt. However the third extraction did succeed, only not in the planned and expected manner. Dubrezk was subjected to the extraction process personally. And they survived. After a fashion. In any case, someone, or something, calling itself Dubrezk is credited with having founded the Soulless.

They may have begun as a small cabal of apprentices, a circle of those who'd undergone the extraction process under Dubrezk's personal oversight. That is one theory. They might have built-up their power-base as a secretive cult operating on the fringes of the Academic community. No one is likely to ever be really certain. But one thing is very clear; the Soulless have become a force unto themselves, a faction that has seized upon a dark and awful power and made themselves the masters of a terrible science that they make available to those they deem worthy...at a horrific cost.

For one night my wife consented to what I asked of her, consented with the tears running down her beautiful face, and hot shame flushing red over her neck and breast, consented to undergo this for me. I threw open the window, and we looked together at the sky and the dark earth for the last time; it was a fine star-light night, and there was a pleasant breeze blowing, and I kissed her on the lips, and her tears ran down upon my face. That night she came down to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within it flashed and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept that promise...

The Inmost Light, by Arthur Machen

A Shining Path into the Unnameable...
Opals. Gleaming and glittering with internal flame. There is no mistaking the Opals of the Inmost Light. They are unlike any other gem or stone known to lapidary, alchemist or sorcerer.

The elders and leaders of the Soulless collect the Opals of their subordinates. In effect they hold their follower's souls hostage, mounting the Opals in increasingly ornate jewelry, usually circlets, tiaras and elaborate crowns. The Soulless consider themselves to be Lord of the World. And they act accordingly.

Calculating and cruel, the Soulless have forsaken their humanity, sacrificed their own souls to the pursuit of personal power. Worldly power. They reject the afterlife, spurn the doctrines of transmigration and the like. Instead the Soulless have seized upon a process that others leave to blind chance, capricious gods or hungry ghosts and they have made it their own. They have subverted their own souls, uprooted and transplanted their vital essences into the synthetic Opals produced as part of their dark arts, and entered onto paths through darkness and mystery no others can apprehend, let alone ever hope to understand. The Soulless are not like anyone else. Their motivations are inscrutable, unknowable.

They are cunning, these secretive sorcerers. Heedless of bloodshed, immune to the pain they cause, unburdened by the pangs of conscience or morality. They have gazed deeply into the abyss underlying all life and allowed something foul and primordial to enter into the vacated shells of their flesh, to take up residence in the house of life itself. Their brains are remade along devilish lines. Their hearts are hardened, pitiless and inhuman. They despise humanity even as they build their own empire in the very midst of their most hated hosts.

To look into the eyes of the Soulless is to look upon something dreadful and indescribable. They harbor a nameless horror deep within. Something timeless, shapeless, ambiguous and amorphous. A black seething corruption that claims their bodies in time, leaving only the glimmering, gleaming Opals to go on, enduring beacons of wickedness eager to lead the unwary astray, to work their wills upon the lesser intelligences, fiercely unwilling to go quietly into the great good night.

His face was white with terror as he turned away, and for a moment he stood sick and trembling, and then with a start he leapt across the room and steadied himself against the door. There was an angry hiss, as of steam escaping under great pressure, and as he gazed, motionless, a volume of heavy yellow smoke was slowly issuing from the very center of the jewel, and wreathing itself in snakelike coils above it. And then a thin white flame burst forth from the smoke, and shot up into the air and vanished; and on the ground there lay a thing like a cinder, black and crumbling to the touch...

The Inmost Light, by Arthur Machen