An important tip: whatever danger you find yourself in, and however tired you feel, you shouldn’t miss any chance to admire the horrors of the mountain, since that is why you are there. Even in your last moments you might see and experience things that add to your knowledge and enrich your life. Don’t worry about death; it’s just an unavoidable nuisance.

In time the pensioners’ efforts bore fruit, and a High Servant of the Nameless Lords began to approach from within the cave. The air became thicker around us, worms crawled out of the ground beneath our feet. We heard distant screams coming from the woods as even the cannibal tribes hailed the coming of the Servant from afar.

Eventually, the High Servant stepped out of the cave. My skull nearly exploded with a sudden stab of pain. No matter how hard I tried I was incapable of focusing my vision on the Servant’s material body; it always seemed slightly out of focus. This might be a means of self-preservation; the brain refuses to admit what the eyes see, in order to preserve the semblance of the normality of the world.

Nevertheless, let’s not forget even now that we had come because we wanted to see. Well, let us see, or at least let us try our best, because the moment we crossed the border into this country we had already paid the ultimate price. We had already lost everything, so there was nothing left to lose.

The Servant had many antlers jutting out from his body, like so many branches of a tree. Its dozen eyes gazed at the pensioners. Its long, muscular tentacles traced signs in the air. In the wake of its footsteps the smell of decay filled the air. As it approached it blocked out the sky.

A boy and a girl hung naked by their ankles from its horns like ripe fruits. They were in their late teens, beautiful and healthy. They wriggled, trying to free themselves from the Servant, but of course it was all useless. The boy howled in fear, while the girl alternately begged and cursed the Servant in a Slavic language I assumed to be Serbian.

The Servant took a rather practical approach to the task at hand. He grabbed the two pensioners and pushed his tentacles down their throats. The woman’s dentures flew out of her mouth, the man’s remained broken inside his. The Servant was searching for something within the old people’s bodies, and when he found it, he ripped it out of them. It was their soul, their essence, a black mess of slimy matter wriggling in the Servant’s grip.

The useless carcasses fell to the ground; the worms threw themselves at the meat hungrily.