The Penguins of the North Pole (PDF)

The Penguins of the North Pole

1. When existence was raw,
Older forces foresaw,
There would pass, though uncountably brief,
A phenomenon, life,
With some planets quite rife,
But too minor to cause them much grief.
Through infinite expanse,
By unknown circumstance,
One such entity crossed to our plane,
Trapped in physical shape,
Buried in the landscape,
Of the planet's most hostile terrain.
And thusly it came in,
This derelict daemon,
Through a portal or fissure or rift.
Its first ancient stirring,
And what's now occurring,
Did both coincide with polar shifts.
2. However K'hlas arrived,
Its freedom was contrived,
By a singular iconoclast.
Someone did once alight,
On these truths recondite,
Some sixteen hundred years in the past.
He who'd be called “Saint Nick”,
Kept consort demonic,
His doctrine was foul and anarchic.
The church took not his head,
Wiped his records instead,
And banished him to the Antarctic.
Woe betide those clerics!
For, vast and barbaric,
Slept a great primal fiend 'neath the cold,
And Nick's path had been traced,
Through those bare, forelorn wastes,
Precisely as the stars had foretold.

With his god obsolete,
And his kin so much meat,
The old Myrian saw but one course:
To awaken the beast,
As he hoped, when released,
He might rule in the name of this force.
His grimoires held the truth,
But on rising, forsooth!
The old monster would honour no pact.
As it tore through our veil,
Saint Nick, human and frail,
Was an unsatisfactory snack.
To exist at both Poles,
Was the simplest of goals,
To K'Hlas' ancient and alien race,
And as time and tide bent,
Several penguins were sent,
To exactly the opposite place.
3. We can't know, It's opined,
How an alien mind,
Chose to become a jolly old bloke.
But the tale that I tell,
Is of when that mask fell,
And the Christmas reality broke.
Why such an entity,
Bothered with chim-in-eys,
Forcing matter and space to distort,
We're as lost to explain,
As why it chose to reign,
Over not-quite-hygenic food courts.
Had the ages in ice,
Maybe somehow sufficed,
To affect it with memory loss?
Had a rival god's curse,
Swindled, forced or coerced,
It to service of Earth's meager dross?
Though it gives one brief pause,
That the beast known as K'hlas,
Was restored in our world by a saint...
Nick's kind reputation's
A later creation,
Spread in effort to ablate his taint.

4. There was in retrospect,
Much we chose to neglect,
For its visage and manner were sanguine.
But the stink of the Wyrd,
Oozed from whom we revered...
“Santa” lived at the North Pole...with penguins!
Every known law of science,
“Claus” held in defiance,
From sheer void he'd create and destroy.
The only Planck constant,
His concern to warrant,
Was the quality of pirate toys.
But puny human minds,
Could not fathom K'hlas' kind,
And so rather than all die of fear,
We imagined a gnome,
Dreamed a name and a home,
And swore he only came once a year.
When the cosmos aligned,
Such that forces malign,
Awakened the abomination,
No tale we could invent,
Could mask - much less prevent Every galaxy's final purgation.
5. Though belied by its awning;
The grandparents fawning;
Its bright, festive two-by-four frame...
On that throne at the mall,
Had once spilled blood for Baal,
And for other gods rather less tame.
No mere plywood and glue,
This vile relic, it's true,
Dated back to the first age of man.
Here the thing came to rest,
From its long journey West,
Unknown whether by chance or by plan.
Earth's polar reversal,
And that throne's traversal,
Set a horrible stage that Noel,
“Santa”, still unaware,
Just by taking that chair,
Unleashed fear unimagined in Hell.

For when cushion met cheek,

Its reality leaked,
Into ours and rent it asunder.
Universes unstoppered,
And for nearby shoppers,
Psychosis replaced Christmas wonder.
6. But K'hlas thought, out of reach,
One might still, mind unbreached,
(Though with odds astronomically few...)
Know that it could be smote
By the sweepstakes prize boat,
As ignobly as Cthulhu.
Although like unto germs,
“Santa” had come to terms,
Serving what should at most be its thralls.
With an uncanny ken,
Of those meager beasts, men,
It could still sense a threat in those walls.
Before “naughty” and “nice”,
Trapped beneath stone and ice,
K'hlas had spent eons broken and bound.
Though now nearly intact,
It could not face attack,
In this shrine on their most sacred ground.
Its ancestral recall,
Had not quite erased all,
Of the human condition once known...
So it excused itself,
The right classy old elf,
To “go sit upon the other throne”.
7. But this “yule log” excuse,
Was a humanoid ruse,
Concealing destructive intentions.
For so greatly it pained,
With its presence constrained,
To our tiny, crude four dimensions.
K'hlas could never be purged,
Once the planes had been merged,
But the meantime still caused it distress.
How it gibbered and squalled,
As it sought out a stall,
With a speed its shape could not possess.

Now concealed out of sight,
(For our kind's too polite,
To disturb “Santa Claus” on the can),
Its one weak moment passed,
Now immeasurably vast,
K'hlas took Earth as nick's pledge of corban.
With a rushing of void,
Earthly life was destroyed,
As K'hlas burst free of flesh, fur and felt.
Horrific mutations,
Inverse conflagration,
And the luckier ones would just melt.
Thanks to August Derleth,
Some might to their last breath,
As they've heard in his stories and odes...
Hope some equal, good force,
Intervenes in the course...
But they're wrong, the u-ni-verse explodes.
'Midst the chaos and doom,
Wakened elder gods loomed,
And existence to darkness re-wrote.
In the blackness of space,
There remained not a trace,
Of reality...save for that boat!

HO HO PRONG!