Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to Nocturnal Transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales, both and new performed by your humble narrator, Kristen Holland.

So, this is how it feels to be on the other side of your hundredth transmission. I must admit,

gentle listener, it's a nice feeling. Don't worry, we're not planning

on taking our foot off the gas now we're in our dotage. Oh no, we're just warming up.

On this 101st episode, we mark another event of note, our longest story title yet.

This record was previously held by the preternaturally talented

Jack Afon Rees, with his, My Neighbors, just a giant spider in a trench coat, which we featured on our 36th episode.

I'm afraid the crown must pass now to Aaron Vleg, as we proudly present their epic tale.

Al-Qadab, Al-Gul, being the singular memoir of Ibn Al-Warif, the only known son of Abdul al-Hasred,

called the mad Arab by some.

Enjoy, gentle listener. I used to be just like you. How long ago that was, I cannot recall, but I must have.

I shudder to reflect upon that, a cursed time, and would banish all memory of it.

But the regret that I was born as one of you.

I too was possessed of a mind piteously small, uncomprehending of greater things, scurrying among a throng of fellow cockroaches,

fit only to be crushed beneath the heels of beings far, far greater than yourself.

My history is of no importance, only that my father was either dead or a rogue who would have costed my mother in the shadows near the bazaar or some other such fairy tale.

Her family was of great wealth and class, and she saw to it that I was schooled in the best universities.

Al-Azhar in Cairo, Mecca, and finally, that most auspicious year in Baghdad.

They had wanted me to become a medical practitioner, like the great patriarchs of my line,

treating the maladies commonplace to wasting human flesh,

and pondering the mysteries of that greatest adversary of all,

death itself.

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