It’s just a book. Nothing more.
A combination of translated words,
written upon tan paper
and bound in black leather.
It’s just a book, and yet somehow
it infects the minds of the readers,
twisting them until
there is nothing left inside their skulls,
nothing but its insidious whisperings.

“The Book of Dead Names”
is the title’s translation, as if to say
those whose times are recorded within
are among us no more.
Or perhaps the author,
so distraught by what he had learned,
sealed their existence away
in the shrine of forgetfulness
so that no others would suffer like him.

Just a book.
Just words.
Harmless, comforting letters, arranged
into patterns.

Yet, using only these written words,
the mad Arab has conveyed
our smallness in the immensity
of this our universe,
our insignificance alongside
the insatiable hunger of the stars.
He paid dearly for his prehension,
crumbling away like an ancient ruin
before the endless, shifting desert
that is the merciless chaos.

He is gone.
But his lexicon remains.
Just a book.

But such knowledge is not meant
for the fragile, breakable forms
of our species. To understand
our place in the universe,
and the immeasurable horrors
from which aegis of Ignorance
shields us, is to let go
of the handholds of sanity and drift
silently off into the void of enlightenment.

Yet still the book is read. Still humanity
turns its gaze to the stars,
and deep beneath the earth, searching
for confirmation of what we already know,
though our psyche may forbid
us to conceive of it.
Knowledge is not power. It is not freeing.
It is death. Death and ruin to all
who grasp the truth of this dark world.

It’s just a book.
A book penned by a man insane.
Rows of indecipherable words upon
innumerable pages, worn away by time.