Judd switched on the lamp on the desk. The headache tormented him, but he must finish as soon as possible. This time, he thought, the Fraternity will have a magnificent idol for the altar.

He moved the lamp to light his last work, his masterpiece. He brushed the thick and disharmonious surface of the aquarium—as he called the bell-glass full of physiological saline—feeling the might of that block of rock crystal and raven metal, abnormal and unadorned. He had forged it himself so that it would command a sacred reverence as the work inside it did.

A low grating permeated the haze of incense fumes as a mantra. Like the breath of a beast that never rested, it ebbed and flowed through a steel door behind Judd's desk. He could perceive the harsh crying through the hideous cacophony, the cursing of hundreds of parched throats swearing their hatred in agony. He knew what those mouths meant, but he laughed at them. The Fraternity was more powerful than the forces in the underworld and could mold their species into the energy that his instruments needed.

His lips drew a long breath and then started to chant the sacred syllables of the liturgical litany.

He needed a sharp soul to hold his hands firm.

Judd replaced the blade of his electrostatic scalpel another of his inventions then took a pair of sterilized pliers on the desk and immersed them into the liquid. My feelers, he thought. The delicate fingers of a surgeon and a goldsmith at the same time, not those of a mere sculptor.

With his hands, he had created every single accessory of the Cult, with a morbid and steady care, and finally the High Priest, his grandfather, had charged him with the Great Work, the very image of his faith. What he had been creating with the cerebral matter of the sacrificed ones was the flesh of the Word, the Body itself of the Creed. With meticulous care, he had forged the shape of the Dream-God Bahamut, which was both the key and the lock.

The pliers got hold of a temporal gyrus. Judd turned on the electroscalpel and plunged it in. The liquid started immediately to hiss as sparks along the blade lit up the oxygen in the fluid. Judd's hands served him well. A few accurate touches and the Work of his Days was completed.

The headache did not want to stop though. Judd stood up to take a drink. The crimson velvets of the room engulfed him like a tide. Judd let the physical sensation of red flow and ebb on his skin--it was like diving into the victims' blood. I live immersed in the lust of my own genius, he thought, approaching the green stone altar in the center of the room. His Work would be laid on it, overlooking the words of the prophet Rhbeen-Al-Tariq engraved on the lithic surface:

A dream, dreaming,

dreamt a dream

dreaming it.

The statues and the sacred objects, adorned with morbid and obscene marine hieroglyphs, watched over him. Judd turned towards the dressing table and looked at his own reflection in the mirror: in his ascetic and neat face burnt two eyes full of devotion. He raised the goblet; the water brought relief to his throat, parched by prayers, but did not to his mind. The pain burst straight from the round scar in the middle of his forehead. The hole was proof of the Initiation Ordeal to the Cult. He was proud of having made it with the spring-piercing punch he had forged himself. From then on his genius had grown every day a little more. Judd felt his head throbbing, but he did not mind the pain. The pain it's the proof that my mind is expanding.

He returned to his desk, passing by the green velvet throne. On the seat, the inner blade of his Sacrificial Tiara gleamed graspingly. Green and silver figures of amphibian monsters and human-fish crossbreeds decorated the dark metal headdress. Its blade was meant to pierce the dura mater and remove the skullcap of the sacrificed ones. The brain was drawn out to be offered to the god: it was the matter of the Dream, Its nourishment.

Judd sat down and gazed at the Tiara a little longer. Then he addressed himself to completion of the Work. He took the top of the aquarium and fixed it to the black metal locks, then inspected every detail and fixed every flaw. He raised his eyes from the case. I've finished, he rejoiced, everything is in its place. The Work is completed. He searched inside, catching a glimpse of the god's Shape diving in the luminescent and greenish fluid. Bahamut's fish-head, translucent and colorless, floated motionless, identical to that of the deep ocean monstrous dwellers that toss and turn, blind and hungry for flesh, in lightless abysses; yet its features still showed something human: an inexplicable symmetry in those dark and sodden eyes, in those wrinkles, on the forehead. Awe filled every pore of Judd's being as he stared at the loathsome deformities that mated one on another between Bahamut's head and its caudal extremity: a mass of absurd unnamable matter. Through the miasmas of the green fluid emerged the signs of an heinous insanity. He had carved on the trunk of that body --or they had perhaps grown like death spilling cancers-- beings that never existed contorted in the shape of occult alphabets letters, and hundreds of eyes scattered in bunches, and mouths besides them howling a bloodcurdling agony, and into those mouths shadows so deep, deeper and vaster than the nightmares of the fathomless deep. Had it been a creature of this world, that being should have had a tail, but instead of that appendage, dangled the spineless limbs of a loathsome misshapen angel.

A damned, back from hell, could have carved only a part of that flesh pillar, because that appendage sank into eclipsed eons, into places of pre-human dread. That's my Zahir, thought Judd, the obsession of my days. Zahir, in the prophets' idiom, was one of the ninety names of God. It was a being endowed with the terrible virtue of being unforgettable, whose image drove people mad. He who saw the Zahir would soon see the Rose, because the Zahir was the shadow of the Rose and the breach of the Veil.

Judd stood up, but a flash of pain in his head made him bow before his Work. A trickle of sweat run down his temple. The Work is accomplished, he thought. Now I can rest. He stretched himself on his bare pallet, then shut his eyes.