To the Daemon

by Clark Ashton Smith

December 16, 1929


Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have
ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Nay,
tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of
space: for I am a little wear of all recorded years and charted lands; and the
isles that are westward of Cathay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote
enough to be made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new
for my thoughts to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons
that are too recent,

	Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the fore of
legend and of which there are no myths in our world or any world adjoining. Tell
me, if you will, of the years when the moon was young, with siren-rippled seas
and mountains that were zoned with flowers from base to summit; tell me of the
planets gray with eld, of the worlds whereon no mortal astronomer has ever
looked, and whose mystic heavens and horizons have given pause to visionaries.
Tell me of the vaster blossoms within whose cradling chalices a woman could
sleep; of the seas of fire that beat on strands of ever-during ice; of perfumes
that can give eternal slumber in a breath; of eyeless titans that dwell in
Uranus, and beings that wander in the green light of the twin suns of azure and
orange. Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs
whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.