The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Page 18
Happy New Year!
Just one more page to go. I’ve been spending my non-Sarnath days working mostly on my Secret Lovecraft Project (Yes!! So close!!) and the tabletop game. A lot of the holidays was taken up on Otaku USA work and my usual articles on Anime News Network, such as this one on The Greatest Manga Censorship Fails. In RPG Land, I am working on some new D&D-esque stuff, and I also finally took a look at the soon-forthcoming, Kickstarted Japanese RPG Tenra Bansho Zero, and it looks really good; I can’t wait to try playing it with a group.
See you soon for the final page, and after that, a big announcement!
I don’t quite understand what happened in the last few pages (haven’t read the story before). Seems like there’s some missing text somewhere. Will this be explained in the last page?
Particularly: where did these guys come from again? Are they real? Are they ghosts? Are they alive or dead? Are we supposed to know? Were they actually alive but just hiding below the lake the entire time?
Is it that the people of Sarnath ate of the great fish, that in turn had eaten of the Beings of Ib? And once the fish were in the people, that this gave the Beings, or what was left of them, a new spark of life, new bodies in which to exist? And the feasting Sarnathians began to turn into Beings of Ib?
There isn’t much explanation in Lovecraft’s story of what actually happens, except that suddenly, the Beings of Ib are back. In the comic I tried to offer my own explanation with visual cues…
Uh, wait, the humans turn INTO the beings of Ib? Is that what’s happening?
Not so much turn into the Beings of Ib as get possessed by them. At the bottom of page 14, we see a sort of seed beginning to germinate, inside one of the Sarnathians. The Beings of Ib, or some of them, have been granted a new body in which to become re-born.
Something not exactly in the short Story. The Ibites rejoicing in the riches of Sarnath. The beings of Ib worship Bokrug the swamp lizard god. Wonderfully drawn. The flabby lips their strange silence. The impression we get that somehow the Moon is involved in their return. (They had originally been slaughtered by the humans who cam thousands of years before.)
Amazing work, a great interpretation.
The seed is in the throat of Bokrug and Bokrug awakens in order to destroy Sarnath. That’s what i remember last.
Rereading this with great enjoyment years later, it seems now a lot clearer to me what seems to have happened. “You are what you eat”…
Perhaps reading William Cardini’s “Vortex” helped to prime my comprehension.
I wonder, will this story ever be published together with the other Lovecraft material that didn’t make it into the “Kadath” book?
Hi Esn!! Good to talk to you again!! I’d love to gather “Sarnath” into some kind of collection sometime, but I can’t say I have any immediate timeline for it. Currently I’m working nonstop on Dreamland RPG: dreamrpg.com (forgive me if I already gave you this link)!!