"I primarily know that name because my sister asked me to worship him! And help sacrifice people to his herald! While she was being driven mad by horrible occult knowledge and high on the nectar of a horrifying demon!"

"And I had a vision... the night Carrie died. It's been coming back to me in pieces. But it was huge, impossible vast, filling the sky, and it had an eye... or many eyes? And it was swirling with destructive force. In the books. There's a lot about stars rearranging themselves, or dancing, or winking out one by one. And there was one book about someone that Azathoth chases from world to world to world endlessly. Nyarlathotep was in that one, too."

"I was taught it as a secret name of God, one with power, able to grant me protection through a day and night of prayer. I do not believe He would ask for human sacrifice, though vastness and stars dancing seem less obviously contradictory."

"In the book, Nyarlathotep said that those worlds would be spared from destruction so long as Azathoth's gaze remained on him, and not on the worlds."

"Who... taught you that?" He is doing his best to come across as casually curious and not accusatory or deeply skeptical.

"Sister Berhane."

"What else did it say... the man had dreams like my vision. Of a huge eye gazing down on the world. And he escaped through a portal in... the "flesh of Yog-Sothoth", whatever that is. Do we know what Yog-Sothoth is?"

"We don't know what Yog-Sothoth is, it's only come up the once."

"Okay what if we just make a list of names and the weird things said in connection to them. Maybe include lines between ones that might be the same."

"I really wish I had a corkboard and string. -- wait, Sister Berhane made a volcano go off, or at least participated in a group effort of making a volcano go off, and I assumed this was some kind of geological thing at the time but now I'm less sure, Araari do you know how she did that --"

"She said they prayed for a miracle and God provided one."

Araari gestures at Oswald and nods.

"Right. That's. Not great."

"Where were you at the time?" he asks, narrowly avoiding suggesting without evidence to a lady that she might have been an adult 8 years ago.

"It was the year before I joined the nunnery. I was still living with my father."

"-- uh. A thought just occurred to me.

"So, you guys remember Genial Brooker -- Araari would not remember Genial Brooker. Araari, when we were in LA someone told me that he had shoved a crucifix into a mouth and turned it to stone. And. It does not really seem like, like we live in the sort of world where an all-powerful force for good watches over every falling sparrow and cares deeply that everything be fine, right, so I've been wondering why that happened -- but if Azathoth is a name some people use for what they believe to be the Christian God, and demonstrably sometimes he'll fight Nyarlathotep on behalf of people who pray for him to --"

Oswald instinctively rubs the rosary they got from Genial, which he has continued to carry everywhere. He looks at it with concern.

Yeah. Mordred still has Gale's rosary around his neck, under his shirt. He's not sure he's a fan of that fact.

"That seems like a more complex explanation than acknowledging a miracle in which God protected you through His symbol. But I am--aware that we disagree on the sort of world we live in, and it is--good to know, if nothing else, that people may use the name of Azathoth for different things. Perhaps they use other symbols of God for other things as well, perverting them to their ends. I am-- unsure if we should be invoking a powerful name so often if we suspect it may be the name of a demon or false god."

"What happens, when you say their names, do you think? I'm not sure avoiding it entirely is a sensible level of caution but -- I mean, it'd be such a stupid way to go out--"

"I do not know. I am only really familiar with the one name, and only as something I can use for protection in dire circumstances; but I have seen miracles worked under that name as well as the more common names of God, and overestimating its power seems-- safer than the opposite."

"I think we should be more careful of the warding stone, also. Not that it can't be helpful but -- it is suddenly very salient to me that it's an image of an eye--"

"And it's not as though we don't know that these powers can have seemingly beneficial results." Like Lev's mysterious good health.

"Should we come up with another name to refer to it? The Star, the Eye, the Beholding-- It occurs to me that this might be why all the gods have so many names."

"If we call it the Eye then combined with the Mouth we are necessarily setting up a body part based naming scheme. I don't mind if we do that but we should be aware of it."