Flying Polyps

Overview

Before the cones built Pnakotus, the flying polyps ruled the skies of a younger Earth. They are not wholly material: sight passes through them unless they will otherwise, yet wind obeys them, stone crumbles beneath their passage, and the tunnels they carved through the planet's crust still whistle with air that has not breathed in millions of years. The Great Race of Yith drove them back, but could not destroy them; the polyps retreated underground and wait, as they have always waited, for the cones to grow careless.

The archive classifies the polyps as existential hazard in any region exhibiting impossible wind patterns, windowless ruins with corrosive scoring, or mass disappearances accompanied by a sound like piping torn by a hurricane. They are the reason the Yithians fled forward in time. They may be the reason certain storms on the Australian interior have no meteorological explanation.

Description

When visible, by accident or by dying light, a flying polyp suggests a great barrel of corrugated flesh, rimmed with tentacles or pseudopods, hurtling without wings yet borne on currents of its own making. The surface is semi-elastic, iridescent, and repulsive; the mass can narrow to enter conduits humans could not pass. Invisibility is not illusion but a property of their matter, which interacts with light as though it were thinly spread across another angle of space.

They leave five-toed prints in stone when they choose to land. They leave tunnels that spiral and branch without map. The sound of their movement is a whistle, high and sustained, that survivors hear in dreams decades afterward.

Historical Record

Yithian records, as recovered through Peaslee, describe wars spanning epochs: the polyps conquering, the cones resisting with lightning weapons and mind-craft, a long stalemate ended only when the polyps learned to strike from beneath. The final siege of the Australian city ended with mass mind-projection into the future; the polyps remained in the tunnels, feeding, growing, remembering.

Elder Thing frescoes in Antarctica mention unrelated aerial wars; whether they refer to the same species is disputed. What is not disputed is the wind: expeditions near polyp-tunnel entrances report equipment failure, nausea, and the sense of vast movement in empty air. Two surveyors walked into a cave in 1948; the whistle lasted three days; nothing human emerged.

Archive Notes

Do not enter whistling tunnels without tether and incendiary charges. Invisible mass may be detected by dust displacement; trust the dust more than the eyes. Cross-reference with Yith files but do not assume the cones are allies; they are survivors, and survivors sacrifice others. If wind rises without clouds, abort the site. The polyps were here before us. The archive sees no evidence they have left.