I had a sudden flash of inspiration and typed this shit out in 5 hours.

Given the style, I'm not gonna edit this. All the misspellings, typos, and inconsistencies are just flavour for this story. ANYHOWWWW

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I'm no artist, and I'm no writer. But for my own sake, I have to write this down.
I'm not even sure what I'm trying to do. Is it for my sanity? To reassure myself my memory hasn't gone? I've scheduled an appointment at a local clinic. I need to know if I have dementia, or if I'm a schizophrenic. No amount of whiskey or hard drugs will convince me that what I saw wasn't real. But was it?
The actions of a person after a traumatic event depend on their instincts. I am a woman of science…but what I saw defies what I've come to know as the real world. In the world of science, we postulate, we experiment, and we theorize to prove the knowns and unknowns of the universe. As a species, humans have come so very far, but a tthe core of it all, we may think, and we may philosophize, but we are still mere animals crawling around in the muck of evolution, still blind to the true nature of the universe.
I can't help but think that this is for the best. No longer do I want to be in the scientific community. I'm not even sure I want to live. I can't decide if my mind is right or not. I can't shake this anxiety. Even as I type this, I can't get it out of my head.

07/12/2001
I think here is a good place to start. I am Diane Hoffman. Geologist of the University of Colorado. I was traveling to Rekyak. I remember wondering what that name was. I hadn't heard that word before and no Internet search turned anything up on it. I didn't think much of it at the time. The town has been of some interest since the Colonial era and has remained notably untouched. It sits in between Mount Hood and the town of Friend, in the middle of the wilderness. It is usually regarded as a resort town, though when I was there, I was the only non-Native guest.
Early on in my travel…like a few hours, I regretted not bringing company along. The vast deserts of nothing in Colorado put me in a trance. It made driving difficult and I was thankful when the occasional hill began to break up the landscape. It took days for sand to become grass. Grass became prairie. Prairie gave way to forest. Likewise, flat earth gave way to bumps. Those bumps became hills, and eventually those hills became mountains. Gradually the temperature shifted from blisteringly hot to mildly cold. Cheap motels dotted my journey. Nights were spent admiring clear skies with a beer in hand. The occasional gas stop or phone call broke up the long stretches of solitude.
The car ride was a whole lot of nothing that only an outdoorsy person would really appreciate. It will be a while before I feel the desire to leave my room again. When I arrived at Rekyak I remember seeing a long fence in serious disrepair, so old the wires had rusted apart and the aged, splitting posts were the only real evidence there had been one. I could barely make out the carved welcoming sign. It looked as if it had been there since the Western Expansion. The inside of it was not what I expected. Most of the town was extremely decayed, with people still living in cabins. Town electricity was supplied by portable generators. The hotel, the most modern building, looked as if it had been built in the 70s, with hideous color choices mingling with rust, exterior mold, peeling paint, potter's wasp nests, and lots of overgrown spider webs that quite frankly were terrifying to behold in their own rite. If I hadn't worked outside near nature I would have considered it quite disgusting. It wasn't until I began settling into my room I noticed the first oddities of Rekyak. In the windows were hung pyrite charms and crystal totems. I remember observing them closely, and being mesmerized by the ornate and painstakingly minute detailing. Those charms and totems I now wear on my person at all times. One of them was a ring of pyrite with flint held in the center by sculpted nails. The nails had been engraved with jagged spiraling, and to my shock, had been damascened with gold. The other was a half sun of rutilated quartz. A half ring of stone with waving spikes painstakingly carved upwards, hanging from a brass ring. It was polished to such a fine degree it sparkled no matter what angle it was held, and felt wet to the touch. I did not think much of it at the time, but that particular object always felt a little cold to the touch. I went to the front desk about these objects, not so much opposed as to wondering where I could purchase them for myself. I remember the man clearly as if it were yesterday. A tanned young man, a handsome one at that. He was obviously an outdoorsman and looked it, wearing light button up shirts of various plaid patterns, a cowboy hat, and heavy hiking boots. I also remember he carried a huge Schrade bowie knife. His smile would have been perfect except for the gold tooth at the front of his mouth. He told me to keep the objects for myself. It was an act of generosity I did not think about at the time until he showed me he had about a dozen more of each in the back room for other guests. They were a local made specialty.
With that, I went to exploring the town. There wasn't much to explore. I can say that I am glad I had thick cow hide boots. They were not the best choice for hiking but the amount of snakes in that town was amazing. People just carried forked sticks with them wherever they went. At first I was mildly alarmed, since I was worried about the impact on the local ecosystem. However, a few days staying there told me just how imbalanced that ecosystem was and that a few dozen missing snakes would actually be doing the place a few favours. I can say I did not encounter a single mouse or rodent on my stay, however. It was mostly houses. The people here mostly live off the land. What money they do make comes from those that had jobs outside of the town. There were a few, but it was enough to bring in modern supplies. Plus, the hotel did well enough. I remember thinking it odd that in the 21st century there are still small pockets of the population that live like this. Had it not been Rekyak I might have moved there.
07/15/2001
This was after I'd dispensed the pleasantries with the townspeople. By this point I was aware of the strange religion they were part of. While few were actually Native American they assured me they were keeping the local traditions alive, and I believe them. They were following a dead religion of the local Warm Spring tribes. I doubt any tribal official in the Warm Springs would acknowledge them these days.
The true attraction to Rekyak lies in the wilderness behind the houses and hotels, the rock fields that has astounded geologists for centuries. These rocks are not normal in the slightest. They stand among the forests like trees on their own, jagged boulders of multicolored crystal. At first glance it looks like huge chunks of amethyst, but on closer inspection on finds metallic crystals and streams of white inside of it. The chunks of this crystal range from the size of one's thumb all the way up to being as big as a cactus. These chunks seem impervious to weather, and stand perfectly clean, even after rainstorms. However, I remember thinking it eerie how quiet it was in there. Not even the rush of wind in those crystal forests, no buzzing of insects, no snakes, no rustling, nothing but plants and dirt that was far too soft. As I strode through these immense fields I wondered how this was not some sort of national treasure, something that hundreds of thousands of people did not visit every year. It was as if some cosmic geode had shattered on this forest. Nothing but trees and crystals for miles upon miles. Every so often I'd come upon one spot that seemed strangely circular, almost like the crystals had grown around it. Some of them were eerie, looking like melted wax figures covered in a crust of multicolored crystal. These pieces stood varyingly around the normal height of human beings. Many of them were broken and did allow me to sate my curiosity by photographing the cross section…which alleviated the assumption in the reptilian part of my brain that people were inside of these things. For the first few days I did nothing but photograph and map this area, which was hugely difficult. Since everywhere was so different and the fields were so vast, it all ironically looked the same.
Not too long into this, one of the townswomen, an elder, came up to me concerned about my ventures into the fields. It was considered sacred and she did not want me damaging them, so I asked how I could continue my study and avoid profaning the grounds. She requested that I not dig about. I assured her that my expedition did not call for damaging the environment in such a way, and even if it did, I could use ground penetrating radar to get a cross section of the area. Strangely, she knew quite a lot about GPR and we struck up a conversation about high energy electrical engineering and electromagnetism, which I had to bow out of since my area of expertise Is geology. This woman did not look like the type to know about that. She was an elderly Native American woman with extremely long gray hair. She walked tall despite her age, and while her clothes were traditional, they did not match any culture I'd ever seen. They were very black and featured lots of crystal spikes. It was almost gothic, but did not quite cross the line into European or 90s American culture. But it was nice to know that I could rely on the locale for electronics repairs if my equipment broke or gave out.
I decided to brush up on the local culture to avoid intruding on their rituals or profaning them in any way. I found that the region is known as Vertnylo Fa'Xhi, a word that has lost its meaning to modern ears. Much of their culture has lost meaning to modern ears, though they keep the tradition alive through dedication. I can't help but admire their commitment to keeping history alive. I found their iconography eerie. Everything revolved around stone and metal, and particularly the ground. According to the legends, this used to be sacred hunting grounds for a long lost tribe. This tribe was bigger and stronger than those of surrounding tribes, and were referred to as giants. One night, their gods appeared before them and lived among them. Translation of the texts written on partially rotted animal hide either say that these rocks are the remains of those gods or their structures. However, surrounding tribes curse the area and consider those venturing near to have a death wish. I was not privy to many of the rituals, though what I did see did not make me comfortable. They offered to show me a ritual in their community building, an appeal to their unnamed god. It involved snake skeletons entwining a cow skeleton, lots of crystals and a small fire which they threw potassium and strontium salts into. The crystals that had were fluorescent and glowed so bright it was hard to behold. Their chanting and throat singing was the stuff of nightmares, and they acknowledged that their rituals were odd and would keep it to a minimum. I decided to add the religious artifacts to my own personal library of pictures. Now I use them as a reference to reconstruct these rituals.
07/17/2001
This was the day I decided to search the history of Rekyak in the news. A year from the founding of Oregon, the Warm Springs region was subject to a war between the Native Americans and settlers. In an upsetting turn of events, the settlers lost. Five hundred settlers and Native Americans died in that battle.
1918, there was an attempt to build a town at the agreement with the native population, and Rekyak was built. Two hundred settlers funneled in, but in the ensuing weeks, disappeared. A government investigation turned up nothing more than the left behind affects of the settlers. What had been built, Warm Springs tribes took over, which was the birthplace of the current culture. Those that settled here splintered off from the rest of the tribal coalition. After the initial attempt to settle, interest largely died in Rekyak, save the few who were brave or too stupid to settle here. The people that came were mostly just that. Criminals or ignoramus people. But Rekyak took them in and in another strange victory for the Native Americans, converted them from Christianity to their unnamed religion.
Gold prospectors occasionally defiled the land, but were almost always found horribly mutilated. FBI investigation concluded the Natives were to blame, but oddly, Warm Springs tribes remained untouched. What was perceived as injustice led to more tensions with outsiders, who came in…but they disappeared too. There are a lot of these sorts of incidents of disappearances and mutilations blamed on local tribes.
In the 20s, there was basic development, but no permanent residents. In the 30s, moonshiners used the town as a base. Reportedly, the liquor that flowed from Rekyak was legendary. However, the remoteness of the location led to any possible capital development being any business. Upon further investigation there are the remains of stills out in the woods. The sheds have long since decayed, but some of the copper still remains…what hasn't been looted by scrappers, anyhow.
Further down the history…this place is rather notorious among conspiracy theorists and similarly minded mystics. Books have been written on this place and a quick look through online bargain bins did not turn up anything I'd take with any amount of seriousness.
In the 40s and 50s there were attempts to establish a mining town nearby, but that was burnt down in an industrial accident, and the people living there seemed to have rioted and killed one another.
…I'm only covering the surface. The rest made me physically ill. The Internet was oh so kind enough to preserve the grainy black and white photos of the worst incidents here.
07/18/2001
This was when I started chemically sampling the rocks. The data is gone now, so I can't give you the complete analysis, but I can tell you that there were compounds that shouldn't have been there. Imagine sampling a rock that you carbon dated to be twenty thousand years old…it had the hardness of carbide with the chemical resistance of a gold alloy. Yet…it was infused with polymer. Twenty thousand years old, and it contained plastic. Plastic Is nothing new to humans. There is evidence of rubber in 1600BC. 1000BC marks the first evidence of Shellac. But that's not the type I found. If it were that sort of organic polymer, I'd chalk that up to geological weirdness. These were complex synthetic polymers. Advanced plastics that have been developed only in the past few decades, and they were infused in rocks twenty thousand years old. I don't even remember what the crystals were…some alloy oxide in a molecular matrix with various impurities. The white streaks were a calcite compound stabilized again, with metallic compounds that gave them superior weathering resistance. I was not able to figure out how these rocks broke the laws of physics and resisted weathering for tens of thousands of years.
These rocks are so chemically complex they're alien. As a geologist I can adamantly with 100% certainty say these rocks did not come from Earth. They're too alien. At the back of my mind I thought about the old folklore of this place, remembering how Vertnylo Fa'Xhi is supposed to be some sort of graveyard to a god.
Either way…this was jarring.
Later that night I remember being awoken by a strange rumbling outside. Not outside my window, it was beyond that. I remember shining my torch on the wall of forest outside and seeing the weeds and ferns moving. There was no wind. Most nights I could play it off. It was in the Cascades, after all. But the nights when there was no wind…I couldn't sleep. I still can't sleep without the lights on, or the radio, or the television, or something.
07/25/2001
How could I forget this little detail?
I forget when I first began to suspect this. Maybe it was the 25th, but maybe it was sooner. I don't know. I wasn't paying attention to the date. The townspeople were nice enough, but something I could never not notice was the view outside my window. I am an outdoors girl. I tend to notice my surroundings. And I could have sworn, the plants, rocks, and ground shifted at night. I don't think the ground ever stayed stable at night. From the time I first noticed it, it merely annoyed me. Was I seeing things? Was my memory that bad? I took pictures of the view outside of my window and dated them on my camera. Yet every time I compared them, it was me who was wrong. Eventually I just closed my blinds and did my best to ignore it. Just pretended I was in a cave. I've stayed in caves before. At least the walls of the hotel room stayed the same. I remember noticing the cobwebs dull of bugs. Spiders and snakes really love Rekyak.
I remember this being the point when I stopped enjoying my stay there.
07/27/2001
Was it here when I started just looking at the rocks on my spare time? I remember noticing that the rocks from Vertnylo Fa'Xhi were always slightly warmer than room temperature. I even put them in my refrigerator to test this. That fridge was a holdover from the 60s. One of those old lead-lined ones that latched shut, that were unsafe because kids would always accidentally lock themselves inside of them. Even that piece of shit cold make food cold and I suspect it's shut off whenever no one is using it because it was in too good of condition for its era. I'd pull my rock samples from the fridge after 5 hours of cooling and they would still be warm. The immediate explanation I had for this was some radioactive isotope I missed. I panicked and pulled out the Geiger counter. The rocks aren't radioactive. So the heat I could not explain. If it were some slow acting exothermic chemical reaction, that might have explained it. However if that were the case, the rocks would have changed in a matter of hours.
07/29/2001
I found out that these rocks absorb radio signals. While I was in and around Vertnylo Fa'Xhi I noticed that my phone was completely dead. When I tried to do an infrared analysis of my own samples, the machine registered nothing but a blank void. I was curious to see what would happen if I let them absorb more energy so I left it on. Nothing really happened other than the rocks got kind of hot. Warmed up a cup of coffee on them. Kept heating them but it capped off around 300 degrees farenheit. Just wrapped them in foil and used them to cook some food. It made me wish I had a turkey. I cooked a chicken by warming up rocks in a campfire, wrapping them in foil and cooking the bird from the inside out.
08/03/2001
It was on this day I took some of my equipment to the town elder for repair. My computer, phone, and other pieces of equipment were acting up and I couldn't figure out why. She said that was common in the area. Something about the rocks did that to electronic devices and there wasn't really anything she could do. I asked her what the deal was with Vertnylo Fa'Xhi, and the strange properties of the rocks. She tilted her head at me and told me geology was supposed to be my area of expertise. Given everything that had happened I kind of wanted to backhand her.
Turning on the television at night was useless. It didn't quite have static on it. It was more digital than that, and instead of that static white noise, it had…weird chittering noises underneath the static. There might have been a weird bass tone to it, but let's just say old CRT televisions were not known for their massive subwoofers, and this was no exception. It was from the fake wood paneled era of electronics.
08/08/2001
I remember this date. After so much weird shit happening, I finally decided to venture out during the night. No one warned me against it and the worst I'd encounter was a pack of wolves. The townspeople knew I was packing Remmington shotgun on me, which was just as well. Everyone else was packing some sort of weapon to defend against predators like bears. Not openly slinging shotguns, but a few people had some insanely big revolvers. I doubt anyone would oppose me walking around late at night with a shotgun.
I happened to venture into Vertnylo Fa'Xhi. I couldn't believe what I saw. It was glowing. The rocks were glowing and undulating with a light that should not, that could not, exist. There was no chemical reaction. The compounds in these rocks was not phosphors. A complete chemical analysis showed nothing like that in their composition. What's more, I felt a vibration in the ground, as if there were an earthquake or an imminent volcanic eruption. I walked further into the fields, and I noticed the rocks were pulsing. I remember the pattern. Fifteen times a minute, even.
I remember the air was not silent that night. It was full of whispers, and I couldn't see who was whispering. It was too loud and there were too many voices hissing under their breaths. I'm not sure why I went further in.
Then I found it. The epicenter. The town elder and several others with in a recessed area in traditional garb, that same sort of Native American clothing that matched no culture I was familiar with. Strange symbols of cycles, straight lines and polygons. There were many glowing symbols painting on the ground I did not recognize, resembling Zodiac but far more alien. On pedestals were various stone and crystalline artifacts, carved and polished hedrons. A hexahedron with an all-seeing eye in the middle, a gaseous thing made of fire that seemed to stare wherever it wanted, as if it were not set into the stone but rather the stone was a portal to something. A massive 20 pound Quartz prismatic pyramid at another end, inlaid with some sort of metal snaking over its vertices and corners. It was perfect in every way except for it appeared to be writhing and boiling with viscera from within. At the last end of this triangle was a basal crystal of some sort, opened to a void. Inside the shining surface was infinite black. No…not infinite, there were teeth. Teeth, and writhing shapes. Surrounding all this were immense Tesla coils throwing lightning bolts a dozen feet long. Audio equipment, huge subwoofers two feet across blasting basal tones too low to hear but loud enough to feel. There were arrays of other electrical equipment I could not recognize, throwing out soft corona in a blue/purple glow that lit the area brighter than the glow of the rocks. The elder turned in my direction. Her eyes glowed brightly, her irises fluorescent to the light. She seemed younger…much younger, and she was taller. It was only through the structure of her face I was able to tell she was the same woman. She instructed the ohers to begin, and the ritual started. The equipment pulsed, glowed, and crackled loudly with electricity as she began an incantation. I found myself spellbound to what I was witnessing. Behind my eyes I felt my mind open into the vastness of the universe. I could see beyond the veil that darkness hid, what lied in wait. I could see things hidden from humanity, and I could see…purpose. I saw what life was. I saw who made it, for what, and why.
And right in front of my eyes, I couldn't comprehend. The Earth…moved. The stone rose up around us. Solid, but liquid. Crystals forming and unforming…each molecule within its lattice a universe of sentient infinity beyond the ability of my language to describe. And yet I stood transfixed, simultaneously understanding and understanding nothing. The dark ritual continued, and the Earth grew writhing tendrils of rock moving in ways impossible for a solid. I found myself looking at people sprouting up from the ground, made of the white and purple crystals. They were only shells, the physical manifestation of long dead memories and dreams. In the air, translucent balls of corona electricity began to form, softly crackling. They orbited around the ritual. I look away from it. The landscape was writhing and boiling around us. Vertnylo Fa'Xhi extended deep underground. The balls of light opened. Inside were voids. Voids of light. The eyes of Vertnylo Fa'Xhi. I looked in them, and I saw everything.
08/15/2001
This was my next memory. A week had disappeared. One moment I was standing and enthralled by Vertnylo Fa'Xhi. The next, a week had disappeared and I was looking at the wall of my hotel room. I spent days in that room, unsure of what to do. I found that the data I'd gathered on the rock samples was not there. My samples, while they looked the same, were chemically different, making the rest of my data completely useless without physical samples to bring back. I destroyed it in a fit of rage. All but my camera and computer. On that same day, I left.
I didn't sleep much on my way back. I'm not sure I'll ever sleep well again. What I know is beyond human language. I am no longer human. I no longer conform to the laws of this universe. I am eternal.
The only proof I have no lies in my camera.
The pictures I took of the ground outside my room? They're different…all of them. Even now I can spot the changes on my body. Before I was human. Now I am part of reality.