…Again I saw him, in a dream.
A vast round head with two great and circled eyes, dark-scaled but manlike nose peeking from rust red fur, and a wide laughing maw filled with tangled fangs. Two long tongues which dance and with which he sings, and a three-antlered crown from the back-left and back-right and from the center of his forehead. His eyes are red amber, his pupils dark pits, and their dim glow is like fire in the light of the fraternal twin and pale red moons.
Broad bony shoulders rest atop his barrel trunk, and from them and about them hang seven long great arms each with nimble, seven-fingered hands. And in five each are staves with which the great drums are played, the thunderbeat to which the satyr flautists blow and the dryad harpists pluck their strings, and a chorus of beastial throats howl with him in joy and revelry, and savage ecstasies. Yet in two, the foremost, shortest, and most human in proportion of his limbs, are held goblet and scepter. Goblet skull, scepter bone tipped with eye in polished amber.
He has no tail, and he rests on great haunches like vast, fat dragon’s legs, but they are as furred as the rest of him, brown and rust and bloody red. And his belly hangs low before him and trembles with his laugh and his booming songs, for each tongue speaks with its own voice such that never does his singing cease, his song like fire and thunder and laughing storms. All about him is endless black darkness, his throne within a great hollow in the hills, yet from the gaps in the rocks and stones and thickets that dot the slope many eyes shine peeking, beasts and birds and mythic things half-seen. . Bloodwine spills and fire gleams, and sparks of flame and falling embers flutter through his twisting crown, and then down among the graceful limbs of his many dancers as they twist and sway to his mighty drums’ primordial tune, falling from on high as they burn and catching in their horns and wild hair, and reflecting in their many-coloured eyes.
And he welcomed me, this king of wild things, and invited me to sit beside him. To slake my thirst with his rich and dark and heady wine, and to sate my hunger on the flesh of the many roasting monsters that were raised on upright stakes before him, over his hearth which was the great pit at the center of the hollow before his rough-hewn and crumbling seat of megalith stones.
And his presence rolled like water over me, like the rush of the heady wine and the melting of the fragrant fatty flesh in my maw, and I smiled and partook of all I saw therein. And I thought in wonder why it was that I had ever been afraid, when in all his arms all there was was revelry, and let go the passing shadow of all that I had been.
For there was no fear in all these savage things...