In the dimly lit corridors of the forgotten fane of Ylourgne, where the stones themselves exhaled the dust of immemorial aeons, the sorcerer Malzain wandered alone. He came seeking the fabled unguent of the elder gods, that unctuous essence said to confer visions of the ultimate abyss.

The air was heavy with the mould of centuries and the faint, acrid perfume of extinguished censers. Then the thing to unmake him occurred.

In the air he breathed the scent, which he noted as familiar, guarded by an angel in darkened robes. The fragrance rose like a spectral exhalation from some crypt far below, a mingling of myrrh and the black lotus of lost Hyperborea, of crushed asphodel and the slow decay of ancient ivory. He knew it at once—the selfsame odour that had clung to the cerements of his long-dead mistress, the witch-queen Liliane, whose tomb he had violated in the days of his first and fatal hubris.

Malzain halted, his staff of carved basalt trembling in his grasp. From the shadows of a cyclopean archway the guardian emerged. It was no common seraph of the orthodox heavens, but a being of solemn and terrible beauty, its form swathed in robes the colour of eclipse and midnight, its pinions folded like the wings of a great funereal moth.

The half-veiled face shone with a pallor not of flesh but of polished onyx, and in its eyes burned the cold fires of stars long extinguished.

“Turn back, seeker of the forbidden,” the angel spoke, its voice the murmur of winds across desert tombs. “The scent you recall is the breath of that which sleeps beneath. To claim it is to claim your own dissolution.”

Yet Malzain, whose soul had long since been corroded by curiosity and lust for the arcane, advanced. The angel raised no sword of flame, but merely extended a hand of translucent darkness.

At the gesture, the corridor extended into infinity, the walls dissolving into vistas of black gulfs, and the corpses of dead worlds floated. The familiar scent thickened, becoming almost tangible, a silken noose of perfume that wound about the sorcerer’s senses.

He remembered Liliane then—not the living woman of ivory limbs and mocking laughter, but the thing she had become after the rites, a withered spectre whose kisses tasted of the grave. The unguent he sought was her final gift, distilled from the essence of her own transfigured flesh. In breathing it, he had already begun the transformation.

The angel’s darkened robes stirred.

“You have known this fragrance before,” it said, “and will know it forever after.”

Malzain reached forth. His fingers closed upon emptiness, yet the scent flooded his lungs with overwhelming intimacy.

The fane, the angel, the very stones of the earth fell away. He found himself at Liliane’s violated sarcophagus once more, but now he lay within it, and she—or that which wore her semblance—bent above him, exhaling the same sweet, mortal perfume.

In the ultimate darkness he understood: the guardian had never been an angel of any heaven, but the shadow of his own forgotten sin, robed in the night of consequence. The scent, so greatly familiar, was the odour of his soul’s long decay.

In the recognition, Malzain ceased to be a man and became another whisper in the void of eternal corridors.