A DIABOLICAL INSTRUMENT
It emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a direct jut of rock from the planet's hot mantle, tempered in cool seawater, then thrust towards heaven like a crude dagger. The atmosphere has answered its challenge in kind with never-ending antarctic winds, weathering its edge down to mossy stone. Today, this lost piece of Hell is known as Macquarie Island, though it has likely known many other names before.
The first written record of this austral land didn't emerge until the early nineteenth century, and those colonial explorers who "discovered" it told tale of ancient wrecks already present with no recognizable origin. After their arrival, this already hostile former chunk of the underworld became a large-scale industrial operation for boiling millions of penguins into oil. They were placed in large metal vessels called “digesters” directly on the shoreline, which could process up to two-thousand birds at a time. Such industry also created regular conflicts with deadly elephant seals who routinely made landfall, and thenceforth also found themselves hunted. Invasive synanthropic species like rats and rabbits arrived alongside man to compete with local populations, further escalating this ecological crisis.
In 1917, Perth occultist Richard Pick claimed to have come into possession of a four kilogram slab of peridot from the island, a gem only formed in mantle and meteors, which seemingly already had one of its surfaces polished flat upon discovery. According to his personal letters to India's Theosophical Society:
“This stone is only forged in the domain of Hell, and seems to bring Hell with it. I have found its polished surface to be of the finest quality for scrying, and my assistant agrees that the visions he sees of spirits are much more clear, yet also more hideous and gruesome in form. Jason has had nightmares of winged beings condemned to cook in cauldrons of Hadean effluvia ever since our Goetic experiments began, which we presume to be those angels which fell alongside Lucifer in the time of Enoch. We have planned a short voyage to the isle of its origin to learn more of the race which created such a diabolical instrument.”
After Pick’s death, his scryer Jason Farquhar abandoned magical study and joined the Anglican priesthood, inspired in part by Charles Darwin. He would preach that "Hell predates man, has evolved alongside all life, and meets it where it is." Today, Macquarie Island is a UNESCO heritage site, and only a small portion of the public is permitted to visit each year. The penguin and seal populations have recovered miraculously over the past century, while the cylindrical husks of abandoned digesters rust away in salted air.