The Price of Knowledge

To truly understand what drove the design behind that feckless abomination, I dove headlong into most ancient and forbidden tomes. Within the books, covers wrought with withered flesh and sinister insanities scribed in bileous blood, I stumbled upon the means to divine the location of a ritual site that would illuminate the hideous, shadowy truths brooding away in places best forgotten by the release of death.

I threw what finances I could into an expedition and promised more of what I couldn't to a guide. He was a gaudy fellow, an intellect such as I - yet tinged with the indelible stench of mania. Our journey took us to the heart of a ruined fortress-church in Romania, long forgotten by God but not lost to War's indiscriminate touch. Within the pits of that archaic place, we found ourselves standing at the base of a titanic, moss-covered gate. A door made of an impossible stone barred further forays, for there were no jambs or cracks to pry it open, not even the explosives we procured did so much as blemish the surface. 

It was at that moment that the Guide realised his true purpose for bringing me to the Gate. Though his reliquary of occult knowledge was vast, it was scattered to the winds of his inbred whimsy. Otherwise he would have known his fate and fled. My knowledge, however dark and insidious as it was, was as fresh as winter snow. Fresher still was the blood that hissed from the jagged rent in his throat as my blade found both purchase and calling. The Gate drank it all in, much akin to a near-perished desert wanderer suckling desperately from a freshwater skein. And, with a tremendous, shuddering effort, cyclopean stone yawned and before me laid a void darker than any sin on Earth. And from that dark, dark, dark void, did the thousand eyes of They Who Came Before snap open.

WHAT IS IT YOU SEEK

The question thrust deep into my mind, driving me to my knees and wretched bile to course up my throat. It was a terrible sound. It was not a chorus of the living nor the dead, but a dreadful harmony of twisted sounds that should not exist in our world. 

"I wish to know why! Why?"

The silence grew as the void did, spiriting away any vestige of residual light and sound until all that was left in that gargantuan chamber was myself and They. A form shifted in that inky tenebrae, of that I was certain. A form larger than it's holdings yet occupying it all the same.

YOU CANNOT COMPREHEND THE ANSWER.

A rather peculiar phenomenon occurs when the senses are truly deprived, in that something else begins to compensate. A sense lost to antiquity, burgled by the brilliance of modernity. A true understanding of the natural order. With that hideous epiphany, the answer to my life's question fusing forevermore with my soul, I began to scream. And They took my voice as payment.