title: From the Ashes of Pompeii: and other dark tales by Manen Lyset
author:  Manen Lyset 
description: Manen is a Canadian horror fiction writer and sock puppet connoisseur. Manen's writing has been featured on Thought Catalog, the Nightmare Collective anthology and on Reddit.com/r/nosleep as /u/manen_lyset. This sentient blob of flesh can also be found on twitter (@manen_lyset) or in your bathroom mirror at exactly 12:35 pm on the full moon.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ## CHAPTER NINE
  
  
  Have you seen the one  
  who stands apart  
  cursed in a ritual  
  sealing his kind  
  beyond death the host  
  amassed and whirling  
  like a plague of pollen –  
  he stands apart  
  the First among all  
  ever veiled in time  
  yet outcast and alone  
  a T'lan Imass wandering  
  like a seed unfallen
  
  
  _Lay of Onos T'oolan_  
  
  
  Toc the Younger
  
  
  
  
  
  Toc the Younger leaned forward in his saddle and spat. It was his third day
  out from Pale, and he longed for the city's high walls around him. The Rhivi
  Plain stretched
  
  
  out on all sides, cloaked in yellow grass that rippled in the afternoon wind,
  but otherwise featureless.
  
  
  He scratched the edges of the wound that had taken his left eye, and muttered
  under his breath. Something was wrong. He should have met her two days past.
  Nothing was going as planned these days. What with Captain Paran vanishing
  before even meeting Whiskeyjack and the story making the rounds about a Hound
  attacking the 2nd's last-surviving mage and leaving f