"The Coming of the White Worm" by Clark Ashton Smith

(Chapter IX of the Book of Eibon)

Rendered from the Old French manuscript of Gaspard du Nord.

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The book I'm reading kept using the word 'steam' where it clearly should be 'stream'. The rest of the text seems to be edited just fine, only that one word is consistently wrong. How weird.

The picture used is "Rlim Shaikorth" by spaghet2forghet, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).

Many depictions of the white worm exist, but most are not under the Creative Commons license or something comparable, so this is the one you get. It's not bad. There was one I liked better, but couldn't use it.

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/29/the-coming-of-the-white-worm-%28abridged%29

Apparently the book I am reading from uses a shortened form of the story, which I did not realize until I got to the editing. The full version of the story can be found here:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/28/the-coming-of-the-white-worm

Evagh has some servants, there's a prophecy, etc., so some nice details not found in the version I recorded, but obviously still fundamentally the same story.

It appears the abridged version was the one originally published in 1941, the full version being deemed too long. It wasn't until 1989 that the unabridged version was published. So by using the abridged version here, you are getting the experience the initial readers of the story would have had.