Elder Things

Overview

Before humanity, before the dinosaurs, before the continents assumed their present shape, the Elder Things came to Earth from the stars. They were scientists, artists, colonizers, a civilization that seeded this world as we might seed a garden, and fought wars here that make our histories look like children's quarrels.

They are extinct on the surface, or so the Antarctic evidence suggests. Their ruins are not. Their shoggoths are not. And in the deepest strata of the archive, a troubling question persists: did they truly die, or merely withdraw?

Description

The Elder Thing is barrel-shaped, five feet tall, with a radial symmetry that unsettles the human eye: five eyes, five tentacles at the top of the body, five more at the base for locomotion, wings folded for travel through space and the ether. The skin is leathery, marked with stripes or cilia; the mouth is triangular, the voice a piping whistle. They are not mammal, not insect, not anything our taxonomy was built to classify.

Their art was superb. Their science exceeded ours at its peak, they created life, crossed dimensions, communicated across the gulfs of space. Dyer and Danforth saw it in the frescoes: history painted on walls that had stood for millions of years.

Historical Record

The fresco cycle in the Antarctic city tells everything: arrival from space; war with the spawn of Cthulhu; the breeding of shoggoths; repeated rebellions; retreat to the last redoubt; the final collapse when the shoggoths overran even that fortress. The Elder Things were not gods. They were engineers who met powers older and vaster than themselves and paid the price.

Fossil specimens exist. Living specimens have not been confirmed since 1931, when something moved in the tunnels and the dogs died screaming.

Archive Notes

Treat Elder Thing technology as hazardous and potentially active. Their star-drive principles are theorized but not reproduced. Cross-reference with Mi-Go and Cthulhu files for the Triassic war period. Personnel are reminded: we are not the first masters of this planet. We are only the latest to forget.