The consequences of staring directly at an Outer God were far more severe than Schiller had imagined.
Especially since this Outer God was no obscure nobody. In all of Lovecraft's works, no investigator had ever looked directly at him. Even descriptions of his avatars were limited to a few scant lines. Yet within the Cthulhu Mythos system, the more mysterious something was, the more powerful it tended to be.
And Schiller's talent for psychoanalysis—his empathy—made him more susceptible to sensing the presence of terror. Although he had stared directly at Nyarlathotep's true form from within the dream world, in the Cthulhu Mythos system, all things in existence were merely Azathoth's dream. That was no different from facing Nyarlathotep directly.
That initial sensation of splitting headaches had not been the consequence. It had only been a warning of what was to come.
Schiller fell into dreams. He began to repeatedly have the same one: he saw a massive ancient city in the sky, on the verge of collapse, while he himself was trapped in an endless maze of rice paddies on the ground.
Blood tears continuously flowed from the eye sockets of a giant female corpse nailed to a cross. The blood soaked the paddies, making every step through the mud difficult for him as he sank deeper and deeper.
When he focused on the real world, he could briefly escape the entangling earth by falling. But the slightest lapse in concentration sent him back into the maze, crushed by seemingly endless stalks of grain until he could no longer find a whole self.
Schiller could no longer tell which parts of the hallucinations came from the beastification curse and which came from Nyarlathotep.
He only knew that the two forces interacted, even complemented one another, sending his mental state into