Nibben's nightmare

It wasn’t that Nibben didn’t care that his human companions were facing perhaps the greatest threat that they had ever encountered. No, he was just terribly curious about what lay beyond the shrine. Besides, he told himself, he was on a Very Important Mission, and it was possible that what he sought had been taken there.

So, while the humans battled for their lives, he had slipped through the passageway. He crept stealthily along the wall, wary of traps or an ambush. But there was nothing; he was all alone in that place.

The passage led downward at a rather steep angle. Though gnomes were descended from dwarves, he did not feel at all at home in the subterranean darkness. His discomfort steadily grew as he plunged deeper, approaching claustrophobia. Every instinct in his body compelled him to turn back, yet he willed himself onward, fueled by the passion of discovery universal to his people.

He had traveled hundreds of yards, perhaps even a thousand yards, before he arrived at a precipice overlooking a vista so dreadful that his nightmares would never let him forget the sight.

In a cavern stretching for miles, he beheld there a city under the ground, a panorama of “vast angles and stone surfaces, too great to belong to anything right and proper for this world, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs.”

In the dim light of a thousand braziers, he could see countless serpentine shapes slithering, swarming, convulsing; glistening wetly in the throes of some loathsome, orgiastic rite. It was impossible to say if they were copulating with or cannibalizing one another, or some unfathomable combination of the two.

They came in a variety of unctuous forms; any combination of man and snake the most degenerate imagination could conjure was represented a hundredfold. Some, like the creature he encountered earlier, resembled monstrous snakes with humanlike torsos and arms. Others looked like gargantuan serpents with multiple heads. Still others appeared mostly human except for the presence of scales where skin should have been, or two writhing snakes in place of arms. Perhaps most disturbingly, many of them appeared indistinguishable from normal humans at all!

And then, with one sibilant voice, the city erupted in song as the ritual reached its climax:

Arissen ælmihtig nædre, langung fore ofssniðan!
Cuman forð, lætan sse firass ondrædan!
Anforlætan mildheortness,
Anforlætan forgifeness!
Arissen, ond lætan sse engeln bifian!
Cuman forð, ond macian eall burgssteden gedreossan!
Brengan adl! Brengan hungor!
Brengan orlege! Brengan forðencan!
Brengan fyrhtu! Brengan hell!

Nibben’s heart pounded, his head throbbed. His breath came in shallow, pained gasps. Overcome with horror and disgust and despair, he collapsed to his knees and vomited uncontrollably.