"The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast" by H.P. Lovecraft and R.H. Barlow

Personally I felt this one was weak. It had some interesting ideas, but failed to develop them in an interesting way. I rather came to the impression after Yalden had passed through the second cave and was passing through the narrow corridor, that he had really entered the mouth and was going down the esophagus, and the reason the Anathas didn't appear to be at home in the cave is because Anathas *was* the mountain in which the "cave" (his mouth) was located. I was actually disappointed at the conventional ending. Boo!

But hey, at least this is a short story that is actually short, so there's that.

The pictures used is 'Shoggoth, from Lovecraft´s "At the Mountains of Madness"', Illustration by Pahko. Used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).

Although the picture is actually of a shoggoth, it strikes me as being a good candidate for what the Wizard-Beast might look like. Might even be, for all we know. The only clear inconsistency is that the shoggoth in the picture has more than seven eyes. And yet, it is possible where the number seven is used in the text, that could just be the number that were visible to Yalden, and perhaps there were more he couldn't see. We'll never know!

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hwb.aspx