Green Testament

Title: The Green Testament, AKA The Testament of Dikh, The Green Testament of Dikh, The Subterranean Scripture of Dikh, The Narrative of Dikh, and others.

Origin: Harlan Ellison, "From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"

Quotes

'D' is for Dikh. He is sick. He writes his books in the lowest level of a Deep Labyrinthine Grotto. His books are filled with things no one ever wanted to know. Unsettling things. He became part mushroom many years ago, but even the small lizards that come to feed off his body do not realize he as once a man. If he were on a desert island he would write his awful stories and send them out in bottles. But there, deep in his grotto, no one will ever read a word he has written; written with shards of sharp stone in the blood of lizards; written on walls that go deep into the earth. But one day they will need fossil fuels, and they will break through the wall of his grotto, and they will find the books, written on endless walls. And they will find the thing with a tormented face growing in the moist soil of the underworld.
— Harlan Ellison, "From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"

The original tome, called "The Green Testament" by its discoverers, was written upon the walls of a grotto deep in the Hollow Earth in Mantong glyphs scrawled in the blood of some form of subterranean lizard which glows a faint, sickly green. This original version - actually containing hundreds of terrible books which would take lifetimes to read in whole - consists mainly of the awful, introverted thoughts of its partly-fungous author, Dikh (see below), with most of the dull, rambling, miserable, and nightmarish text being dangerous to any human reader's sanity, but little of it of any real use to anyone but its author, being records of Dikh's dreams, disappointments, insecurities, anxieties, fears, and day-to-day aches and pains and complaints. Scattered throughout the original text, however, are elements of genuine Mythos material: gibbering accounts of Dikh's deranged annoyances and worries concerning other beings, of fabulous places that Dikh has dreamed of visiting but never emerged from his grotto to behold in the flesh, vague memories of past lives, the words to spells which have gotten "stuck" in Dikh's head and repeated annoyingly until written down by Dikh, accounts of distant chants and strange cries which have echoed into Dikh's grotto from distant caverns deeper in the earth, and so on - all versions of the tome other than the original consist of selected excerpts from the original as recorded by a nameless discoverer, translated into other languages.

The Green Testament of Dikh, Original

• author: Dikh, a solitary, part-mushroom entity
• Language: handwritten in Mantong
• Number of known copies (if rare): 1
• Last known location of surviving copies (if rare): scrawled on the walls of a grotto in the Hollow Earth

Physical Description:

This original version - actually containing hundreds of terrible books which would take lifetimes to read in whole - is written upon the walls of a grotto deep in the Hollow Earth in Mantong glyphs scrawled in the blood of some form of subterranean lizard which glows a faint, sickly green.

General Content:

The original, complete "Green Testament" of Dikh, consisting of hundreds of "books" scrawled endlessly on cavern walls, mainly contains the awful, introverted thoughts its author, Dikh (see below), with most of the dull, rambling, miserable, and nightmarish text being dangerous to any human reader's sanity, but little of it of any real use to anyone but its author, being records of Dikh's dreams, disappointments, insecurities, anxieties, fears, and day-to-day aches and pains and complaints. Scattered throughout the original text, however, are elements of genuine Mythos material: gibbering accounts of Dikh's deranged annoyances and worries concerning other beings, of fabulous places that Dikh has dreamed of visiting but never emerged from his grotto to behold in the flesh, vague memories recalled from past lives, the words to spells which have gotten "stuck" in Dikh's head and repeated annoyingly until written down by Dikh, accounts of distant chants and strange cries which have echoed into Dikh's grotto from distant caverns deeper in the earth, and so on.

Mythos Content

Spells:

• Sanity Loss:
• Mythos Knowledge:
• Occult Knowledge:

Appearances

• Fiction: Harlan Ellison, "From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"

The Green Testament, copies

• author: Dikh, a solitary, part-mushroom entity, as transcribed in excepts by an unknown explorer
• Language: Usually English
• Number of known copies (if rare): unknown, probably a few dozen

Physical Description:

A transcription of selected excerpts of the original text into English in pulp paperback format, and sometimes translated into other languages, typically accompanied by woodcut illustrations of varying quality executed in imitation of medieval illumination.

General Content:

Disjointed, rambling fragments of the original text, generally distilled down to elements of genuine Mythos material, representing gibbering accounts of Dikh's deranged annoyances and worries concerning the mythos entities he has encountered, fabulous places that he has dreamed of visiting but never emerged from his grotto to behold in the flesh, the words to spells which have gotten "stuck" in his head and repeated annoyingly until written down, fragmentary descriptions of distant chants and strange cries which have echoed into Dikh's grotto from distant caverns deeper in the earth, and the like. Most of this content was inspired by things that Dikh saw and heard in the Hollow Earth, but these entries are freely mixed with equally fantastical and bizarre dream material which may have been inspired by unintentional trips into the Dreamlands, or even by mystical visions of still more alien worlds and dimensions, though it could as easily have been created entirely by Dikh's subconscious imagination, and it is unknown by any sane scholar how much of the tome is drawn from reality, and how much from fantasy.

Mythos Content

Spells:

• Sanity Loss:
• Mythos Knowledge:
• Occult Knowledge:

Dikh

Dikh, author of books of the Green Testament, is a silent, tormented thing that today grows in the moist soil in a deep grotto of the underworld, now mostly fungous and immobile, but at one time at least partly human, or humanoid, at the time when he wrote his books. Dikh descended into the underworld a very long time ago, in some distant age of human or pre-human history, though it is difficult to tell from Dikh's writing exactly when. Dikh's books are written in Mantong glyphs, a language known in elder Lemuria long before that continent was destroyed, but also brought to the Hollow Earth from by the Deros even deeper in antiquity, where it is still whispered among many hellish denizens of the Hollow Earth to this day, leaving the approximate age of Dikh and his testaments uncertain.

Appearances

• YSDC, inspired by: Harlan Ellison, "From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"