Chapter 19: The Shuddering Yurt of Dolgorsürengiin Tömörbaatar
Chapter 3729: The Shuddering Yurt of Dolgorsürengiin Tömörbaatar
In the fractured breath of the steppe wind, Dolgorsürengiin Tömörbaatar lived, a man tethered to the pulse of horse-hooves and the lowing of yaks. His name, once warm syllables in the hearth of his mother’s song, had turned brittle—a flaking note in the mouth of the world. He spoke with the clatter of bone and the hush of felt walls, but the air outside the yurt was an endless gnawing, eating at the edges of sense.
The yurt’s lattice skeleton creaked as if each wooden spar were a ribcage of the earth, and he felt the wind’s teeth worrying at its skin. In this quiet flurry of past and breath, Tömörbaatar communed with the spirits that had been forgotten by most—chitinous echoes scuttling in the corners of memory. His father’s voice had been a baritone drum, cracked by vodka and frost, but it was gone now—slurped up by the murmuring dark.
He watched the smoke from the stove’s iron belly. It slithered around the chimney hole, seeking a way out or in, coiling like a language spoken backwards. The black tongue of it whispered of spirits older than any shaman’s bone rattle. In this breathless telling, the smoke promised him that the air itself was an alphabet of death. He believed, for a time, that if he could decipher the plumes, he might slip his mind into the spaces between.
He rose and stepped outside, where the horizon boiled in a mirage of endless steppe. The goats bleated a staccato litany, their cries each a rune in the dirt, a poem etched in hoofprint. The horses watched with eyes that glowed in the dusk, their nostrils flaring with the scent of something older than grass.
There, at the edge of vision, he saw the cosmic horror that had no name but all names. A flicker—a tangle of lines, pulsating, unbound. It moved as if every word ever spoken had been stripped of meaning and forced to crawl across the plain, mewling for new syntax. Tömörbaatar’s mind cracked open like the skull of a goat, and through the split, he saw the end of all language.
He fell to his knees, the steppe’s cold hands cradling his face. His tongue tried to shape the words of old prayers, but the horror’s presence dissolved each syllable into a noise without contour. Even the birds—white cranes spiraling above—sang in a language of rasping vowels that curdled in the air. The dogs, usually howling in the night, had grown silent, their hackles bent beneath an unspeakable weight.
In the distance, the herds still moved, a slow undulation of meat and bone, oblivious to the dissolution of all coherence. Tömörbaatar pressed his forehead to the earth, felt the world’s pulse skip, a drumbeat that had lost its skin.
The horror whispered to him in a chorus of dry grass and crackling ice. It told him that the yurt was just a husk, that the steppe was an exhalation of cosmic lungs, and that he—he was a vowel in the final gasp of the universe. His breath turned to dust in his mouth, syllables unravelling in the wind. He understood then, in the marrow of his spine, that there was no language left to hold him. Only the cosmic cacophony remained, a devouring syntax that even the steppe’s eternal silence could not deny.