nano/lit/-1

* * *
While very ancient and almost forgotten, the Horned One is still very much alive in our unconscious minds. I have an interest in the occult as a kind of psychology and source of art, which is the only thing that has ever really interested me. A theme in Nano/lit/-1, the issue you are reading right now, is the idea that the Horned One is a magical being of unknown quantity. This is a collection of nanostories written by the denizens of /lit/, an imageboard on 4chan dedicated to literature. They are all explorations of what manner of being the Horned One might be.

We are Anon


* * *

The silver moon shone full and clear over the assembly. Half a moon it had been since the tribe had a successful hunt and for half a moon they had been marching towards starvation. It could not go on or they would perish and, as they always do in times of need, the gods had sent our children dreams of riches and abundance. The shaman had conferred and decided that, of course, they would summon the Horned One for guidance.

All were present now at the ritual. The drummers always beating in threes, the mothers ullulating monotonously, the elder shaman and his two aides dancing and prancing around the fire. Grug was already entranced and they were only beginning. Something was different about this ritual however. Maybe it was the urgency that gripped them, maybe it was a presence that shone its interest, maybe it was something else. But Grug could tell, and he was by far not the only one, that the air was pregnant with... something. A power that seemed funny? No that wasn't the right word. Erotic? Proud? Whatever it was, it gripped each soul that sat or stood at the assembly. As his thoughts came to him, Grug stared only into the fire. That mesmerizing dance, twitching here, cracking there, whispering and leaping and yet still! All in turn, all at the same time. What marvel, and to think that the halls of the gods were filled with those powers! The dancing men grew more intense. Flailing, jumping, turning and turning, chanting and mumbling those verses which only they were taught. Hitting the ground now with a phwack, now with pff, now again with a tik and a fffsss. The fires were rising and everyone felt it. The ullulating grew louder, the dances more spastic, the drummers picking up their pace. Grug could feel his heartbeat rise and fall with the symphony. And just then, as he felt a passing-out washing over him, a hunter, one of the strongest by far, stood up and grabbed the woman next to him. He heaved her up, threw her down onto the ground and then lay with her, for all the gods and men to see, right there in front of the fire. That child will be strong, they all knew and the fever kept making its rounds. The mothers were swaying ever more violently, the drummers were breaking their monotonous unity and were beating everyone into ecstasy, and the shaman flailed around even harder, dancing and prancing, chasing each other. Now him the hunter, now the hunted; now successful in having subdued the beast, now the beast changing and hunting in turn. And the fire kept climbing towards the sky where its home lay. Grug found himself now swaying somewhat rythmically, somewhat spastically with the ululululululul of the singing mothers. It will be a good hunt, a voice told him. The voice of the Horned One, it must be! No other man could make such a sound in his head. None other could speak so smoothly, like sand between one's fingers and yet so strongly, like rock hitting bone. Grug was gripped and (comment too long)


* * *

The Horned One, his sage phallus spilling from his boxes, the stink of an impure bathroom. Before his nexus he bent himself thin, conducting infernal magics.

The world would speak to him, it would speak to him in images and language, it would incense his Horn, and the ritual would begin. Spirits of light cascaded over the unwashed form of the beast as it imbibed the preciousness from as far as the fabled lands of the orient, and beyond, whispering, haunted voices forming into peerless beauty, rousing anger, inciting fires to conquer. To spread the Horned Ones will thick across this world, to seed it himself, and to see it grow, and tend to it as the Horned One would will.

Save, the Horned One shuddered, such magic resplendent within his nexus would not grant him the same power and possibility outside of its limited range.

Here, within a den of depravity he fostered might unrivaled. Creation of the foulest, fetching the most maleficient births of this world, these were minor tasks near the nexus.

And outside its grip, there is no magic capable. The Horned One rose, taking to his lavatory her bled his sage into a plaster lectern,

In the corner of his eye, he saw the sponge. The spray. The stink surrounding his nostrils concerned him. It was not a matter of others would would invade his nexus and judge him harshly for not lowering himself to lesser tasks.

But, thinking of his nexus failing to expand from its pitiful range, the Horned One hoped that, perhaps if it is only this area, it might be slightly purified. And upon this small area within this domicile of depravity there might be less foulness.

Hope gathered within, he reached for the spray. The Horned One flushed the toilet, and, spritzing upon the dirt ridden floor, though it best to fetch a mop to extend his range.

Movement in this world away from the unlimited mana provided to him by his nexus tasked him, undue exertion cursing his flesh. The Horned One thought of returning to his nexus and leaving this meager and pointless errand to be consigned to the dark histories of mankind, left forever caught between a limbo of desires to be completed and the reality of having never been completed.

Abandonment, however, did not overtake the Horned One's work. He found pleasure in the purification of the unclean, novelty in the exertion of his muscles, and his mind conjured possible futures for the expansion of his nexus.

One impossible thought after the next layered upon one mundane labor to the next. A broom swept dirt, the spray wet the dirt below, the brown within the plunger emptied, and what was once sullied became slightly less sullied.

The Horned One returned to his nexus, glad of the respite provided from his novel labors. He pushed his magics out into this world, and recovered beauty for himself. He found it all the more refreshing knowing that he himself had brought his own form of beauty just previously, and his magical indulgences that day bloomed fresher.


* * *

There it was, just waiting behind the door to the alley. One of the invaders. The alien hunger spirits. This one was little more than teeth and asymmetrical eyes and claws, almost cartoonish in the sense that its head was basically a red glowing sphere that opened up to show all its various teeth. It felt good to hunt prey again, Kerr-Nu-Sem thought. How long have I slept? The world is......different. It must have been ages. His horns turned into branching stone spears. With more elegance and stealth than a leopard, Kerr-Nu moved in on the glowing red alien, opened the door and grabbed it before moving so fast out of there he became a dark blur with faint glowing red lines.

The blur appeared on the island of Englesey in Vales then reverted to the form of a large man with shining laser green eyes and horns branching from his head, holding a luminescent red sphere.
[I will keep you and your kind here until I grow hungry enough to devour you.]
The crimson alien hunger entity tried to bite his arm off, but Kerr-Nu spun out of the way then savagely tore it open with an emerald knife that matched his eyes. A glowing red liquid stained the rocks on the shore of the island. Kerr-Nu picked up the dead entity and drank the liquid flowing from its body. A blue/green phosphorescence surrounded him, like a projected ocean of fireflies flickering from the spirit within. He tossed his head back and slowly laughed, his own sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight. There was a popping sound as he instantly returned to the strange new city of Dal-Blu to hunt more of the invaders.

A small group of the invaders were hovering over a group of crackheads who were blowing red smoke. Kernn wondered what they were waiting for but then a b0j hologram pops up, seeming to send the drug users into a panic, which then seemed to transform the red haze into a window that allowed more invader hunger beings through, which were then attacked and devoured by the small group hovering over the crackheads. Interesting. So they are cannibals. Ker-Nu moved with electric speed, severing the limbs from his prey, then cast an illuminated net over all of them and disappeared into a blur back to Englesey in Vales.


* * *

The body of the young boy lay still as the figure danced around him. It was the cold season, and the father believed it was the cold that took him. At least working the earth allowed him to warm up.
Traditionally, it was the mothers task to dig the grave, as the word for “hole” and “womb” were the same. But the mother had passed last year.
The dancing figure traced star patterns on the ground with his feet, dancing and muttering utterances of ancient beings and their celestial names. Then, taking the body of the boy above his head he danced around the hole 9 times. The rest of the family watched in silence as the dancing man in all his wisdom completed the ninth lap and lowered the boy gently down into the earth.
Facing East and wrapped in the best cloth the family could offer, the body was covered body with the soft cold earth.

Years later archeologists would stumble upon this grave site, and announce that a boy aged about 8 had died in archaic times. He faced East, and there were shreds of cloth found on his bones. This meant that the early men knew how to make cloth, and found importance of the sun.


* * *

Outback in the thundering forest valley, a distant sky sound found its way into a cave of kids, where it woke up Sim and Kilo from their sleep.

32 seasons young, Sim, now the oldest among them, was used to waking up from her dream to a sound at night. 5 seasons younger than her, Kilo, now the second oldest, woke up to the tip toeing footsteps of Sim. Kilo went over to the enterance where Sim had finished investigating the reach below. She had zoned out on the shifting night sky, where through the storm, lights moved out and away in every direction and nothing was fixed in place and it looked like the ground was falling and she was about to lose balance and fall when her trance was broken by growling sounds from right behind her and she gasped and she almost screamed and it was very close but it was just Kilo playing a prank. So she started chasing him out of the cave up the mountain into the forest where there was a small waterfall and Kilo hid in its gorge and Sim saw him dissapear behind the curtain of water so she plunged into the warm shallow lake and swam under the plunge but there was no one but suddenly Kilo appeared behind her and bit her on the waist and Sim went around and bit Kilo on the neck and they kept biting each other inside the gorge and Sim spread herself on a smooth volcanic surface and Kilo bit lower and lower on her sides and water splashed from where it plunged in the pool.

Over on the overhang, behind the growth, something treelong with horns and hooves stood and stared from its hole. A branch of light hit the shallow lake. It spread through the water. Then later, it made sound. Kerrn-Un-Sem headed for the cave.


* * *

The modern men sit in their ivory towers, with their science and technology, and rejoice in the conquest of myth, in the exile of superstition from the world.

But those who know, know.

Sometimes stories make their way back to the cities, disturbing those who have sunk perhaps a little too deeply into the comforts of modern life. In 2007, the bodies of a hunting party were recovered on the French-Spanish border, deep in the Pyrenees. Such a discovery was in and of itself not unusual, but the state of the bodies alarmed authorities in both nations. The party, consisting of three young bankers, had been badly gored, leaving marks far deeper than similar injuries caused by a raging bull or goat. Given the size and clinical nature of the wounds, the French police concluded that the party had encountered a dangerous person, not an animal, and had been murdered. In response, they placed a warning over the area for the rest of the year, and conducted an intense investigation.

No culprit was ever found. The detectives assigned to the case eventually reasoned that the snowfall in the area, coupled with the treacherous terrain, had given the murderer a way to escape. As no similar cases occurred over the next decade, the case was eventually left unsolved, a strange footnote in the history of one of Europe’s loveliest places.

The rural folk in the Basque forest south of the Pyrenees have a different view of what caused the incident. Young, successful bankers from London and Paris often made their way to this part of Europe, and many of them wanted to hunt the golden ibex, a strange animal renowned for its horns. The Basque knew, and they would warn such people that forces more powerful than them would not approve. Such superstitions were of course ignored; what force was stronger than a bullet? What “being” could outsmart a GPS app? Modern people know better than to fall for such illogical ideas.

Perhaps so. But in the forest and mountains of Europe, something old lurks.


* * *

For a long time I went to bed hungry. There is a difference between the hunter who needs his kill and the one whose belly is already full. There is a difference between an artist who needs to create and one who creates as passtime. The artist lives to depict suffering, said the paranoid schizophrenic man who lived between my apartment and fremont street. Think of the guy or chick who took time from their busy life hunting and gathering to paint on the walls of that old french cave. Of course, the pickings could have been easy. An elk herd full of dodo elks, unafraid of the recently evolved human, they don't know what's good for them. But maybe the drawing on the wall was a meeting of some imperative to create, satiating a very real hunger. Time was valuable in the old days, and it passed quickly, and someone spent theirs on depicting the horned god of the hunt.
The only conclusion is the god is not the god of any hunt but the god of the needed hunt, the wild hunt. Desperation. Yearning need. This is what drives nature, this is the point of interaction between man and nature. This hunger wears away at the flimsy psychological barrier man has between himself and the climbing vines, straining saplings, the small mammal risking predation to gather seeds. A man with wild features, a human with the head of a deer. Now we've destroyed the foundation of nature, we make themeparks of her most charismatic vistas, we feel confident enough to try our wits against a plague (the original invisible people killer, even today we scare ourselves with images of creatures with the withered limbs, pale faces, darkened eyes, cachexic features of the sickly and infirm), I wonder if a person can connect to that natural yearning which is always there in the tribal subconscious to create or to hunt. Will it express itself, if it does, in violence or in creation?


* * *

“You’re a fucking retard, Klem. There is no way that the artifact is real.”
“And how can you be so sure of that, Dr. Black Scientist Man? Have you bothered to apply even so much as XRF spectroscopy on the object to determine its composition?”
Klem lit a cigarette with a vast and cool level of disgust.
“Furthermore, have you noticed that the horned figure depicted on the pommel of the handle doesn’t exactly look human? That is not a smile of happiness on his reptilian face.”
“Klem: it’s impossible. There is no fucking way that a large knife could maintain such a perfect condition for 201.3million years because there is no fucking way that such a knife could exist at that time, let alone inserted into the fossil skull of a giant killer rauisuchid! It simply has to be a hoax! Besides, even if there was some lost saurian civilzation, there was never any dinosaur with those kinds of horns. They remind me of a ram. A lost civilization of horned saurian badasses who seem to do battle with the killing machines of the day. Yeah fucking right. This sounds like something some basement dweller on 4chan would think of.”
“Maybe they didn’t all have those horns. Maybe the smiling horned one on the pommel was some kind of god or demon. Isn’t there some kind of ancient horned god tradition in European mythology and art? Maybe it’s like that.”
“Klem, are you implying that the Horned God actually has origins in an undiscovered saurian civilization that antedates the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event? I’m so disappointed in you that I can’t even laugh at you right now.”
“Fuck you, Dr. Black. I’m taking that artifact to the lab right fucking now.”
Klem flicked his lit cigarette at Dr. Black as he stomped out of the lab.

2 days later, Klem found Dr. Black in the lab, holding the golden knife that seemed to come from another world. Staring at it. Klem knew that he had read the results of the XRF spectrum test. 33.3% gold interwoven around a diamond lattice constituting a further precise 33.3% of its mass with the surreal additions of boron and cobalt- we could not possibly make that knife with our current technology.
“He will always come back, won’t he, Klem.”
“Who will always come back, Dr. Black?”
“He of the eternal horns.”
“Oh the horned one there. Maybe that’s why he’s smiling.”
“Or maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“200 million years old! I bet he knows many things we do not.”


* * *

O selenic Goddess, I steal after you in the darkest of darknesses, into the gaping breach, stretched with goat-fists around the entrance, to Lascaux, where, lighting the golden torch, I illumine the crackled walls. O to scratch with one’s horns, chicken scratching, the scraggly surfaces, to inscribe, and mark one’s territory like a pissy dog. But Actaeon trusts not those hounds, cares not to territorialize, is as hunter much more cretinous. I’ve been drooling mongrelly for the yoni, with the rabid thirst of a lycanthrope. Ahoo. I’ve lived like an idler, walked in circles in the sacred grove’s clearing, frigging in the nightlight. The same wispy branches of pale green now continue subterraneanly. I walk backward. O to be the beast with the muzzle whereupon she’ll sit and squeeze. Wheeze and rut. I see the condensed breaths emerge from the dampening caverns. It’s part of how things play out. When I don’t sit and idle, I run and tear at the rabbits. I eat raw flesh. Don’t look at me; can’t you see I’m grooming. I never leave a mark, only a trace. Others develop it, into arabesques and labyrinths and hook-crosses. Apes, or humans, eating each other. Oh but the talking, the talking, to justify it. The chatter. I prefer drumming. Drum on the bum with the pan pipes. We are simple patriarchs and matriarchs. Burcks and dorffs and skis. All until those tools walked in, talked themselves into toiling away at the floodlights and tables in the complex of caverns. Not that some weren’t won over with intoxicants. Then a little slaughter and some suck, O milk is for me, and quizzically I peer as, deer in headlights, I turn around with a wizened, wisened wisent’s beard, a little foamy like it came out the can readymade, hunched like a reptile, oh so very Horny, seeing little worlds be destroyed and birthed, in Eros, as I catch sight of the Mother’s milkies hounding me. Others will devise the whole systems of cynegetics, I just spurt out the draining thunderclap. Chthonic oogabooga.–


* * *

Everyone that I know just calls it a fairy story. I heard it too of course, when I was young. It's told to keep the children out of the woods. One of the local kids wondered off into the woods once. I'm willin to bet he fell down the creek and drowned but it's better advertisement if we say god killed him. Either way he died and his body didn't show up for three weeks and when it finally did he was face down in an eddy 6 miles downstream of that bridge you came in on. Next to that birch forest. Most of him was gone due to the fish and birds.

An amalgam of nature that appears on all fours, running through the valleys and over the mountain paths. It has antlers like a stag, a face like an owl, the beard of an chamois. Its hands are bear paws, and parades a long horses tail. So he's known around here as the lord of wild beasts. They say its eyes are the things that really get you, you can hardly move because it stops you with its eyes. Yellow and dark, like two piss holes in a snow bank. When you look at eachother you just stop moving. So never look it in the eye. It smells like dead pine needles and campfire ash, that's how you know if its around. Course there's rumors that it smells like sulfur too but that wasn't until recent. They say if it gets you it'll eat you, I always thought that was kind of funny. If the thing had an owl beak it can't eat much. Mom always said that it liked the hunt, so it waited until you broke it's spell and started to run. The way you get away from it is you have to get it to see it's own reflection so that it gets paralyzed and you can get away. One of my friends used to carry a pocket mirror whenever we went camping, we always gave him shit for it. But it was nice when you heard something outside the tent, you know? They also say that if you manage to get behind it and give chase, it'll leave you be. But if a thing like that was chasing me, I think I'd just pull out a mirror. Course now you could just pull out a phone and show it itself and that would work too. Don't you think?
Anyway if you can get it to see itself in the mirror or whatever it thinks it's being hunted, and it don't like that.

Sorry, I get side tracked. The story mom told me was that this kid was caught by it while he was feeding the goats. After he was able to move again, he ran off and thinkin fast he hopped in the cows water tank and when the thing came up on him it saw itself in the water and froze. He got home and that was that. Not even some moral. Just used to scare kids.
I wouldn't get too excited over it.


* * *

I tried to warn them. Just leave me alone. Look, kid: I don’t like being here any more than you do. It’s not my fault that some asshole wannabe Merlin motherfucker managed to assemble enough kiatic energy to summon me back from my aeonic slumber using some kind of weird cyber-chaos magik. This world sucks. Fucking clown world. And for the last time: I AM NOT A FUCKING FURRY OK. How many fucking furries do you see walking around with big ass horns like these anyway? They would get in the way of yiffing. You ever try to eat some pussy with a giant set of antlers growing out of your fucking head? Maybe I should cut them off. I’m sick of you kids throwing shit at my fucking horns. At least you have better drugs these days. I’m a big fan of your whiskey and methamphetamine. Back in my day it was mostly shitty weed and a few mushrooms. But it was mostly fasting. By fasting I mean starvation because have you ever tried to kill a deer with a stone spear? Yeah, its not easy. You pussies wouldn’t last a week in the stone age. I survived for thousands of years, and back then I was drowning in pussy. All the girls wanted to get dicked down in the caves by your local hunting god. Now they just scream and run away when I smile at them, is it my sharp teeth? I’m a fucking carnivorous hunting god you fucking bitches. Do it again you little asshole. Yeah, throw another apple at me. Ancient hunting gods don’t eat fucking apples. But they might eat you. You know what? Fuck it.

*runs toward the group of kids taunting him then rips their throats out with his teeth before cracking their skulls open and eating their brains*

I tried to warn you.


* * *

The growth here is old, and the ever expanding branches extend both infinitely into the cold dirt and the lofty heavens. Its skeleton, dappled in green flesh, shields the forest away from the foreign lands. Here, in this satin cover of greenery, here, in the misty and wet corners of the earth, here, in the mossy shadows within shadows, he hunts, his antlers brushing the treetops, his cry awakening the prey and the predator within all men.


* * *

Our first sun was violet. The owl light abode dwelt in the polar dusk with Hyperborealis auroras and ball lightening halos. Cernunnos was yet unknown. Cronus' rings and children belonged to another: Kerrn-Un-Sem, The Crowned Ascendant, Lord of Change.

Before the beginning, before the Word, before God, before Time: Kerrn-Un-Sem.

After the End, after Water, after Flesh: Kerrn-Un-Sem.

In the Tides, by the Air, through the Trees: Kerrn-Un-Sem.

The First Man traversed the glaciers on foot. Far he passed over the transfixed seas in search of land. Slowly his subtle body became like the water, and hardened. His feet blackened first, then slowly his head. Forgetfulness obscured his subtle body, and his nature was veiled from all recollection. Now he could be seen by any thing, a dark splinter in the white expanse -- fortunately, there was only Kerrn-Un-Sem.

The Horned One saw fit to make land where there was none -- the First Man would walk for eternity into oblivion without assistance. He gored through the ice with his horns, releasing the oceans below. He churned and rent through the center of the world, everywhere sparking volcanoes rising out of the slurry to form the first continents out of shining black glass. Out of the smoke of endless magma fountains, still more horns gored both ice and land from the darkened skies. Out of the thunderstorms came the first rain, and from the rain new life to sustain the First Man.

Dust covered the First Man, blown from the infernos rising from below -- while he gradually regained memory of his Self as the rain melted his frozen form, too much ash had comingled with the frozen water that encased him, and his feet remained dark and frostbitten for a long time thereafter. He knew not whence he came, but the First Man felt relief at finding land at last, and knew the fire from the skies belonged to the Horned One. It would take many generations for the ash to wash away from Man's subtle body. Until that time, gratitude would have to be commemorated, though the name would be lost and change with man's tongues and half-memory of the Lost Time, when the First Man walked the stars and over ice. Let it be known, his name is: KERRN-UN-SEM, The One Before and The One to Follow.


* * *

a silent listening statue with undarkening antler aspects
clear of reason and sense expanse ancient, reaching
crystallized memory rings gleam meaning
even the unavoidable void will shudder
when kerr-nu drops optic chaos-cataclysm photons
cutting under shadow clashing truth-like shapes
remembering holograms of the all-light owl
his first and only law for sentient beings:

while you are alive, shine
with all your luminescent and light-like layers
have no grief at all
life is like a brief burst of brightening resonance
a short star script song
and at the end of every line of time
a hyper-black knight awaits
the light eater
a Devouring Darkness
and he demands his due