Prized the hammer from his mummified hand and let it you speak! The tower needs must riveting, stulting, grows to pierce the heavens. Yours is the task to climb the walls to seek the loose ramparts. What do you mean accident? Shiny, well sure yes, I have been told that the black embossing upon my head and handle, with silver inlay of course, is quite beautiful, attractive even, to the eye and hand. Well I doubt your love is quite as intense as you say, I mean, here you are with a strange hammer, working even as you and I think through your little dalliance with departure I mean you have a task here.

            Well, the final tower of Aldzhv, haven’t you wondered up at the literal animal figures that skit across the nightsky? You’re here at the end of an immense Eldritch history and you’ve never even cracked the library door have you? Illiterate shepherds you say? Record the universe as an endless series of cycles, growth and collapse, life and death, feeding and feeding, you say?

            No, no, no, I’m afraid this will not serve. For one, I don’t understand how you thought that would be an appropriate weld – I’ve seen men turned to goop by just the glance of an aliengel who looked more composed. Yes, I’m sure Charlise and her apples made good cider, but you need to task in, really we want the Prince of Infinite Void comfortable when he finds his new throne. No, no, no, he’s quite generous, actually. Just, particular.

            And you, once the tower is complete, will find his rule one of complete peace, total divinity pressed upon yourself at all moments. If you find the jagged buttresses we’re constructing as pleasing to the eye as you found me, well, you’ll find yourself in good company. You really have to get off the idea of Itholde, she’ll have her place too, whatever it is.

            My symbol? The silver sigil placed at my head’s center which, if you had the lenses to look you could see every detail of filigree, every perfect minutia of the story of Aldzhv – his horror as an imp, watching siblings devoured by their mother, who bore ever after a cloak of their skins wherever she chose to haunt – and in many corners, of nurseries and children’s soft-colored rooms, she waited to claim more – yet again his success in returning to overcome her, in a great war across all the lands and seas of dreamy darkness, with his rallying the bone spears and dagger teeth and mending the feuds of the dread clans and dead clans and the precise design of their heraldry in the engraving, which you could do me the respect of trying to look at, but who, after the battle and incapable of realizing the beauty of his vision, betrayed Aldzhv, and in a counsel of their leaders, for they had no courage to act alone, cast the true lord into a pocket of night from which only the barest sharp edge of his thumbnail found a crack. And in creation, if only you could follow the abyss to its depths truly, me! And upon my miniature the sigil redrawn and so again and again until, had you true eyes, you would find the infernal engravers at the edge of infinity.

            Can I ask why the tower is tilting? This is not as I designed – my tower was ramrod straight and the crenellations did not fall off like scourged flesh. Oh look, you’ve let it tumble over, when we land you’re gonna have so much shit to clean up. Ah all this dark, brick into cavern. Wait, not you—