There is a particular horror that does not get discussed as often as the monsters, and it has no face at all. It is the horror of complete erasure. Not ruin, which leaves something to photograph and argue over, but erasure, which leaves nothing, not even the argument. Lovecraft wrote its definitive case study when he was still a young man, and he set it a thousand ages before any date we would recognise, in a story about a city called Sarnath.
Before Sarnath there was Ib, a grey stone town on the shore of a still lake, built by beings who had come down, it was said, with the moon mist. They were not pleasant to look upon. They were voiceless, and flabby, and green, and they worshipped a water-lizard idol named Bokrug, and they kept to themselves and harmed no one. The men who later built Sarnath could not bear that such things existed. So they went down to Ib and killed every one of them, and took the green idol of Bokrug back to Sarnath as a trophy, and set it in their temple, and that night the priest who guarded it was found dead, and the idol was gone, and in its place on the altar someone had scrawled a single sign.
For a thousand years after that, nothing happened, and this is the part the story understands that lesser stories do not. The doom did not come the next morning. Sarnath became the most splendid city in the world. It held a festival every year to celebrate the destruction of Ib, and the festival grew more magnificent as the memory it marked grew more distant and more comfortable. A thousand years is long enough for a crime to become a holiday. It is long enough to stop believing that anything is owed.
On the thousandth anniversary the lake began to work. A green mist rose off the water. The old idol of Bokrug appeared again in the high temple, and the revellers who had gathered to celebrate the end of Ib looked out and saw, where the proud columns of Sarnath had stood, nothing. The nobles of the neighbouring lands who had travelled to the festival fled and were not pursued, because there was no longer anything there to pursue. Sarnath was gone utterly. Not fallen. Gone. Travellers in later ages found only a still lake, and in the lake, where the city should have been, a single green stone idol, very old, to which the lizard-things of the marsh were observed to bow.
What should be studied here is not Bokrug, who is only the instrument, but the completeness of the account's silence afterward. Ib was erased and remembered just long enough to be gloated over. Sarnath was erased and not remembered at all, except as a cautionary shape in a story that does not name a single survivor's descendant, because there are none to name. Two civilisations, one lake, and between them not a wall or a road or a grave that anybody can point to now. The record simply closes.
It is worth sitting with how unusual that is. Most of what frightens us leaves evidence, and evidence is a kind of comfort, because it means the thing that happened was large enough to leave a mark and small enough to be marked. Erasure refuses you even that. It suggests, very quietly, that the scale on which some things operate is a scale on which your whole city, your festival, your thousand years of getting away with it, is not a mark at all. It is a rounding error. Somewhere a count is kept, and your line in it is brief.
The lake is still there, in the story. That is the last image, and it is the correct one. Not a ruin. Water, level and patient, with the idol underneath, and the marsh-things bowing, and the surface giving nothing back.
Heard on Cyclopean Frequencies, in the track "Sarnath." Listen on Bandcamp.