An unofficial fan-made continuation of the story told on Edge of Sanity’s Crimson (1996) and Crimson II (2003). Not affiliated with or endorsed by Dan Swanö or Edge of Sanity.
"The Queen was never the hand. She was the eye." — from the margin of the forsaken book, in a writing no one in the Cloister could identify
Editor’s note: This is an alternate rendering of Crimson III: The Harvest, written as a deliberate homage to the prose style of H.P. Lovecraft — archaic diction, formal syntax, cosmic-horror register. The story is identical; only the voice has changed. The original version is available at its own page.
Prelude: The Story So Far
Crimson. In a distant future, humanity is dying, not by war or plague but because no child has been born in living memory. The species is simply ageing toward extinction. To preserve their wisdom, the oldest and wisest people, the elders, have been placed in vessels of a crimson fluid that keeps them alive. Then a miracle: the King and Queen of the barren Earth have a daughter, the first birth in generations. The Queen dies in childbirth, the King later dies, and a usurper seizes the throne. Rebels persuade the young princess to lead a revolt to reclaim her birthright, hoping the true heir will restore the gift of birth. Alone in the dark, she is visited by an unholy master and accepts a pact that grants her terrible power. She destroys the usurper and becomes the Crimson Queen, but instead of saving humanity she slays the elders in their vessels and turns her gaze, and her power, on her people. At last the rebels discover her weakness: her sight. They blind her and seal her inside one of the crimson vessels in a hidden hall, where she must never wake.
Crimson II. Generations later, in a convent, a nun (called here Sister Melisande) reads from a forsaken book of incantations and unknowingly lets the imprisoned Queen’s spirit reach her. She conceives, and the Crimson Queen is reborn as her child. The people fall under the child’s subtle control; the convent’s Mother Superior, who suspects the truth, dies when she meets the child’s gaze. The mother returns to the forsaken book and learns the Queen’s one weakness: blindness. In a field of crimson petals, she blinds her daughter and reads a binding incantation that seems to be spoken in the Queen’s own voice. Mother and child dissolve into nothing. The hall is sealed again beneath its warning: she must never wake.
The stakes. At the start of Crimson III, the world believes the story ended there, with evil defeated twice. Humanity is still barren and down to its last few, elderly survivors. A small order of sisters, the Cloister, guards the sealed hall. No one has ever asked who the Queen’s unholy master was, why the Earth fell barren in the first place, or what the crimson really is.
Crimson and Crimson II are summarised from the albums’ storylines; everything that follows is invented for this story.
I. The Last Archivist
It is with the gravest reluctance, and only because I am now persuaded that no other living soul remains to bear witness, that I set down this account of the events which befell the Cloister in the final season of the world. I am aware that what I have to relate will be accounted the raving of an aged and solitary mind, unhinged by grief and isolation; and I confess there have been hours, in the long red twilight that has since descended, when I have half wished to believe so myself. But the evidence of my senses is too terribly coherent to be dismissed, and the thing that now sits behind my eyes has no need of my belief.
We numbered eleven when the matter began, the youngest of us in her sixty-fourth year. I held the office of archivist, a title which had come by then to signify little more than that I alone still descended into the lower stacks, where the accumulated chronicles of our order mouldered in the damp. My sisters had long since ceased to concern themselves with books. They sat through the grey afternoons in the refectory with folded hands and eyes fixed upon the windows, beyond which the fields lay sterile and colourless beneath a sky that had not cleared in living memory. No child had been born upon the earth within the recollection of any person then alive, save only the one, of whom we did not speak, and her mother, whose name was graven above the chapel door. Sister Melisande, who had blinded the Crimson Queen a second time and passed with her into dissolution amid a field of scarlet petals. The deliverer of mankind. Such, at least, was the tradition I had accepted without question for half a century.
The hall in which the Queen lay immured stood a mile from our walls, across what had once been an orchard. No member of the order went near it. The inscription above its portal had been recut so many times that the characters had sunk into the stone like the scars of some ancient wound: she must never wake from her crimson sleep; let none breach this gate. For three generations our order had kept that warning, and it had become the last office remaining to us, which we discharged as the dying discharge the final observances of a faith whose consolations they have ceased to feel.
I should never have presumed to look further, had the book not returned.
I discovered it upon a Tuesday in the lowest chamber of the archive, resting upon a lectern where, I am certain, no lectern had stood the week before. I knew it at once, as one knows the countenance of an enemy. It was the forsaken book, the selfsame volume from which Sister Melisande had read in her convent; bound in black leather grown soft and faintly yielding to the touch, as though it were not leather at all, and fastened with a clasp of some dark, reddish metal which I could not identify, and which was perceptibly warm. Yet I had myself read, in the clear and careful hand of a former archivist, the account of its destruction: how it had been consigned to the fire before the whole of the order, and its ashes scattered upon running water.
It lay open upon the lectern. Its pages were dry. Its clasp was warm.
I ought to have summoned my sisters. I ought to have borne it to the furnace with my own hands. That I did neither, but instead seated myself upon the cold flags and kindled a second candle and began to read those pages which Sister Melisande had never reached, I can attribute only to a compulsion whose origin I did not then comprehend, and which I now comprehend all too well.
II. The Unread Pages
The first thing I apprehended was that the book was written in no language known to man; and the second, more dreadful by far, was that I could read it nevertheless. The words did not pass through any faculty of understanding I could govern, but assembled themselves behind my eyes as an odour assembles a memory, unbidden and entire.
It began with a field.
Not such fields as lay grey beyond our windows, but a field that was the whole round earth, beheld from a remove so vast that the oceans were no more than a moist lustre upon the husk of a seed. And over that seed something leaned. I shall not attempt to describe it, for I cannot; each time I essay the recollection, the outline shifts and runs like a figure seen through flawed and ancient glass, and I am left with nothing but a sense of patience, and of an immensity before which the very notion of size grows meaningless, and of a terrible familiarity with the task in hand, as of a labour performed innumerable times before, in innumerable places, under suns that have long since guttered out.
It had sown us.
Not as a deity sows a garden out of love, nor, as the old scriptures held, in any image of itself. It had sown us as a husbandman sows a crop he means neither to cherish nor to eat himself, but to store, or to barter, or to feed to things more monstrous still. What it desired of mankind was neither our flesh nor our souls, as the priests employed that word. It desired that peculiar and exquisite thing which ripens only in a mind that knows itself mortal: the dread, the yearning, the unbearable friction of a small and transient creature made aware of an infinite and indifferent dark. That was the harvest. We had been bearing it, generation upon generation, for aeons before there were words to number them.
And a field, the book informed me, is not sown again until it has been reaped.
Here at last was the secret of the barrenness. It had been no pestilence, no curse, no judgement of a wrathful God, as the bishops had thundered in those early years when bishops yet remained. The closing of the wombs of the world was but the field being left to ripen. Every soul that would ever be had already been sown. They were merely being counted now, and the count was nearly done.
I turned the page, and read of the Queen.
She had never been the evil. That was the first and foundational lie, upon which every subsequent lie had been raised like masonry upon a rotten footing. She had been a child, the only child, and a child is a door. The thing beyond the sky had required a means of regarding us closely, as a farmer stoops to examine an ear of grain, and it had chosen her. The compact she sealed in darkness, alone, in that hour when the rebels left her to contrive their rising, had been no bargain for power. It had been the opening of her eyes upon two orders of being at once; and whatsoever she looked upon, it saw. Thus had perished the elders. Thus had the multitude fallen beneath her sway, and thus had the Mother Superior died when she gazed too long. They had not been slain by the Queen. They had been seen, by something that ought never to see anything, and what it saw, it took.
And this was why blindness had undone her: not because it broke her sorcery, but because it shuttered the window. The thing upon the other side had merely waited for another to open.
By now my candle was a guttering stub, and I perceived for the first time that the latest pages were inscribed in a hand I knew. It was my own. Lines I had never penned, in my small and careful archivist’s script, described an aged woman seated upon the cold flags of the lowest chamber, reading by the light of two candles. I watched a fresh line form as I read it. It stated that I should next go to the elders.
I had no wish to go. I went.
III. What the Elders Saw
The vaults of preservation lay beneath the ruins of the old palace, half a day’s walk to the eastward. I had seen them figured in the archive: long galleries of glass vessels, each brimming with the crimson fluid, each enclosing one of the elders of the race, kept alive in order that their wisdom might not perish with the last generation. The Queen had slain them all in the days of her dominion. That was the crime which first turned the people against her, and every novice of the Cloister learned it by rote: she murdered our memory.
I took a lantern and the book. The book would not consent to be left behind; when I attempted it, my fingers closed about it of their own accord.
The vaults were not in ruin, and that was the first circumstance to fill me with a vague and creeping disquiet. The palace above had long since fallen into a chaos of rubble and weed, yet the stair beneath was clean, as though swept that very morning, and the air which rose from it was warm, and carried a faint, unwholesome savour of iron. At its foot the long galleries stretched away beyond the reach of my lantern, rank upon rank of tall vessels of glass.
They were full.
Not with the elders, for the elders were gone, as the chronicles affirmed. But every vessel brimmed with the crimson, and the crimson moved: slowly, with a sluggish and rhythmic heaving, like the respiration of some great beast asleep. And it was rising. Beside the first vessel, scored into the stone, were the tally-marks of generations of vanished keepers, and the fluid had mounted past every one.
At the far end of the gallery, upon a slab of stone, I found the testament of the elders themselves, inscribed upon vellum in many hands before they entered the vessels. I read it by lantern-light; and as I read, the book in my other hand grew warmer, as though it too were reading.
The fluid, they wrote, had welled up out of the earth in the first year the wombs were closed: springs of it, in the deep places. They had studied it, and found that a body immersed therein neither aged nor died, and that the mind within did not sleep. They had deemed it a gift: a means of preserving the wisdom of humanity until the curse should lift. The oldest and wisest had offered themselves in a great and solemn ceremony, and passed into the crimson one by one.
The concluding leaves were in another hand, wild and tremulous, the record of the vault-keeper after the vessels were sealed.
The elders, he wrote, could still be heard; not by the ear, but within the mind, if one stood near the glass. And their burden never varied. They said that they could see it now. They said the fluid was neither water nor blood but its attention, seeping upward through the world as sap mounts through a stem in the season before the reaping. They said it watched them through the red, all of them, unceasingly, and that they could not close their eyes, having no longer any eyes to close. They said that it was relishing them.
They had begged to be released, the keeper wrote; begged for the mercy of death. But the vessels could not be opened from within, and the keeper was afraid, and the council forbade it, the elders being the last treasure of mankind.
The final line was in a third hand, younger, and quite steady. I required no book to tell me whose it was.
I have ended them. Forgive me. They were screaming.
She had been a girl of perhaps sixteen years. For that mercy the people had named her murderess, turned upon her, blinded her, and sealed her in one of these selfsame vessels, in the same crimson regard which had tormented the elders; and our order had watched over her for three generations to ensure that she should suffer there eternally.
It was then that I understood, with a horror more profound than any I had yet known, that every tale ever told of the Crimson Queen had been told by the thing which wanted her in the red.
IV. The Hall Unsealed
I persuaded myself that I went to set her free.
Let whosoever finds these pages understand that much at least: I believed that I was doing good. I crossed the dead orchard again in the grey of evening with the book warm against my breast, and I told myself that a child of sixteen had performed the only act of mercy anyone had performed in a hundred years, and that we had requited her with an eternity in the red. I told myself that I would open the hall, and shatter the vessel, and grant her the death she had granted the elders. I told myself that this was justice.
The book raised no objection. It never did. It merely set down, in my own hand, each thing that I was about to do, a moment before I did it.
The seal upon the portal was three generations old, and I broke it with a stone, while the graven warning watched. Within, the hall was smaller than I had imagined; and its walls were wrong. I can find no better phrase. Its angles did not meet as angles ought to meet in any sane geometry, and the light of my lantern passed into its corners and did not return. In the centre rose a single vessel of glass, taller than a man and brimming with crimson, and in the crimson floated the Queen.
She was sixteen still. Her hair drifted about her like weed in some slow and sunless river. Where her eyes had been were two pale and smooth cicatrices.
I approached the glass, as the vault-keeper had written that one must, and I heard her.
She did not beg. It is this, above all, to which my thoughts return now, at the last. The elders had pleaded for death. She did not. She uttered but a single word, over and over, with a terrible and weary patience, as though she had been repeating it for three generations to anyone who drew near: Don’t.
And then, because I did not withdraw, she told me the rest.
She told me that she had written the incantation herself. Those words which Sister Melisande had read amid the field of petals, which had seemed to issue in the Queen’s own voice: they were her voice. Long ago, alone in the dark, in the moment after she accepted the master and felt it open her eyes upon everything, she had grasped what she had become; and she had concealed within the forsaken book, written in her own blood, a spell that would blind and bind her in the red should anyone ever find and speak it. She had built her own prison. She had graven the warning above the door. A blinded eye in the crimson, she said, is a shuttered window. So long as she remained there, sightless and sealed, it could not see us. It could only wait.
She had chosen all of it. For three generations of wakeful, sightless, crimson eternity, she had held the window shut.
It requires a new eye, she said. That is why it brought you the book. It cannot open mine. But it can open yours. I beg you. Go back. Burn it. Don’t.
I looked down at the book. The newest line was already written, in my careful hand. It stated that I should lay my palm against the glass.
I laid my palm against the glass.
V. The Gardener
The glass was warm. And then it was not glass.
My hand passed into the crimson as into a bath, and the crimson passed into me. I felt it ascend my arm as the fluid had ascended the tally-marks in the vaults: patient, unhurried, utterly assured. I felt it reach my throat. I felt it reach my eyes.
And I saw.
I have laboured, in the interval since, to find some form of words by which I might convey what I beheld without overthrowing the reason of whoever reads them, and I have concluded that there is none. I will set down only so much as I must; and the prudent reader will cease at this place.
The sky is not a vault. It never was. It is a membrane, thin as the skin upon cooling milk, stretched across an abyss that descends for ever; and in that abyss there move entities of such stupendous magnitude that our sun is but a mote caught in the lash of one of their eyes. The greater number of them know nothing of our existence, and in that ignorance lay the cold comfort of those philosophers who taught that the cosmos is indifferent: that we are too small to be remarked.
But one of them knows. One of them has always known.
It is not wrathful. That was the most hideous revelation of all. There was in it no hatred, no malice, nothing against which I might have prayed. It regarded our world as one regards the last row of a crop on a warm evening, with a mild satisfaction, and a little hunger, and no thought whatever for the stalks. It had tended us since before the first of our forebears stood erect amid the grasses of some primal plain. It had shaped our fear as a gardener shapes a vine, pruning here and nourishing there. Every war, every pestilence, every mother weeping at a grave, every child that woke shrieking from dreams of falling: all of it, it had cultivated. Not from cruelty. From patience. That was the purpose for which we had been made.
The Queen had been its eye. For three generations, blind and sealed, she had denied it any near regard of the harvest, and it had waited, for it has all of time, and it is very skilled at waiting.
Now it had my eyes. I felt it settle behind them, comfortable and proprietary, as a man settles into a chair long owned. Through the crimson I saw the Queen’s face turn toward me within the vessel, and I saw her lips frame a single word that was no longer don’t. It was sorry.
Then the vessel burst, and she was gone; not into death, but into the red, poured out upon the floor of the hall and down into the earth and away. The book in my hand turned its own page. The new line was no longer in my handwriting, nor in any handwriting at all. It said only that the field was ready.
VI. Harvest
I walked back to the Cloister because it wished to see.
The orchard was red. Every dead tree had put forth blossom in the hour I had passed within the hall: small crimson petals breathing a sweetness like honey left too long beneath the sun. I knew that odour. Every child of the Cloister knew it from the ancient account of the field where Sister Melisande had perished. I understood now that it had never been a field of victory. It had been a field of first fruits.
The sky had altered. The leaden pall which had overhung the world for as long as I could remember had grown thin, and through it, high and low and everywhere at once, I could discern the abyss beneath the membrane of the heavens, and the motion within it. My sisters could discern it too. When I gained the gate of the Cloister they stood in the courtyard, all ten of them, aged women in grey habits with faces upturned, and not one of them was screaming. By that I knew that it had begun. They had passed beyond screaming into something quieter.
The crimson welled up between the flagstones.
It did not rush. It never rushes. It rose between the stones as water rises in a footprint upon a wet shore, and where it touched the feet of my sisters it climbed. Sister Agathe, who had taught me my letters seventy years before, looked down at her ankles and then up at me, at my eyes; and I watched her comprehend who was looking at her through them. She did not look away. She could not. None of them could. That is its way. It compels the regard.
It did not slay them. I wish to be exact upon this point, for I believe the old prophecies erred, those in which the end comes as fire, or flood, or silence. The crimson closed above them and they did not die. They went down into it as the elders had gone down into the vessels; and I heard them from within it, as the vault-keeper had heard the elders: ten minds, wholly awake, in the red, conscious of what regarded them and powerless to close the eyes they no longer possessed.
And beyond them, through the crimson attention that now ran beneath every field and every city and every sepulchre upon the earth, I heard the others.
All of them. Not merely the living, the few thousand straggling survivors in the ruined towns. All of them. Every human creature that had ever drawn breath. The fluid had been rising beneath the world since the first year of the barrenness, filling the deep places; and it is in the deep places that we lay our dead. Every one of them had been kept. Every grief, every terror, every final breath, ripened and stored and waiting. Billions upon billions of minds, from the first of our kind who ever wondered at the stars to Sister Melisande herself, all awake, all aware, all in the red.
That was the harvest. Not our deaths. Our waking, all at once and for ever, beneath the full regard of the thing that had grown us.
I felt it taste them. Through the eyes it had borrowed I felt a vast and languid contentment, like a long breath exhaled at the close of a season’s toil.
Then it turned my eyes upon the sky, that it might behold the next field.
VII. Aftermath
I write these lines in the lowest chamber of the archive, at the lectern where I found the book. It permits me. I believe it finds the exercise diverting, as it finds all our doings faintly diverting: a stalk of grain, cut and bound, still striving to grow.
I alone remain above the red. It has need of me here, for someone must hold the eye open while it completes its survey, and it has not completed it. It never completes it. Even now it gazes outward through my eyes at the membrane of the sky, past the abyss beneath, toward a small warm light immeasurably remote: a sun for which I have no name, with the seed of a world revolving about it. Upon that world there is something which has only lately begun to wonder what the stars may be.
The field is ready, the book declares. The next is but beginning.
I have tried to burn the book. It will not burn. I have tried to put out my own eyes, as the rebels once put out the Queen’s; but my hands will not perform it. It restrains them, gently, as one restrains the hands of a child about to do herself a hurt. It has no need to be cruel to me. It requires nothing of me save that I continue to look.
And so I do the only thing that remains in my power. I set this down in my own hand, while my hand is yet my own, and I shall leave it upon the lectern beside the book, against the chance that someone may come. I cannot conceive who that someone might be. There is no one left above the red upon this world. Yet the book found its way back to me after it had been burned and its ashes cast upon running water, and perchance these pages may likewise find their way elsewhere: to that small warm world beneath the distant sun, it may be, and to some child there who has only now begun to wonder at the stars.
If such a one reads this, I charge you: do not open the book. Do not gaze too long upon the sky. Believe none of the tales that tell you there was ever a victory. There was never any victory. There was only a girl who held a door shut with her own blind eyes for as long as she was able, and an old woman who opened it because she believed that she did good.
And should you ever find, upon your own world, a hall with a warning graven above its door, and a red light beneath it that seems to breathe, and a voice behind the glass that utters only don’t:
Heed it.
The inscription above the door here has been recut a final time. I did not cut it. It is in no language, and I can read it nevertheless. It proclaims that the harvest is gathered, that the field may lie fallow, and that the Gardener is well pleased.
The crimson has reached the head of the stair. It is very warm.
It is looking at you through these words.
It has always been looking.
— The End —
Mythic Heavy and the author make no assertions of plagiarism or original claim to the Edge of Sanity storyline. This piece merely reports and extends what has been previously reported elsewhere, as a fan work.
Read the original version of Crimson III: The Harvest.
