Great Race of Yith

Overview

If humanity prides itself on knowledge, the Great Race of Yith is the humbling counterexample: a civilization that catalogued every species of every age, not from libraries alone but from residence within the minds and bodies of those species. The Yithians are cones of immense size, ten feet tall and broad, covered in scaly skin, equipped with four tentacles that end in delicate organs of manipulation, and possessed of eyes and sense organs mounted on stalks that retract into the apex. They are scientists, archivists, and travellers of time, and they are not our friends, only our predecessors in curiosity.

They fled their own world's destruction by projecting their collective minds forward into the cone-shaped beings that would dominate Earth long before mankind. When their enemies destroyed their bodies, they projected again, into eras not yet agreed upon. The archive holds that somewhere beneath the Australian sand, their records still wait.

Description

A member of the Great Race moves without legs, by expansion and contraction of a muscular, annular foot at the base of the cone, or by psychic assistance in certain chambers designed for transit. Speech is a shrill piping, but communication with other species is rarely oral: the Yithians prefer to exchange minds, sending their consciousness into a victim's body while the victim's mind is cast forward or backward to inhabit the cone. The experience, for the victim, is months or years of alien memory; for the Yithian, it is field research.

Their cities are cyclopean, windowless, and filled with metal cases that hold scrolls and devices recording the history of worlds. They fear only the flying polyps, their ancient enemies, and the possibility that a mind exchanged may refuse to return.

Historical Record

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee of Arkham vanished mentally in 1908 and returned in 1913 with no memory of five years, speaking languages he had never studied and drawing ruins that matched nothing on Earth until Australian expeditions found them. Under hypnosis he recalled the Great Race, Pnakotus, the war with the polyps, and the night the polyps overran the living city while Yithian minds fled forward into a future species, perhaps humanity itself.

The Necronomicon alludes to the cones obliquely; Alhazred knew they were not gods but scholars, and that their archives contained the truth about every cult and every horror mankind would later pretend to discover anew. Miskatonic's Australian survey of 1935 photographed foundations that should not exist. The photographs are classified.

Archive Notes

Personnel reporting 'lost time' with accompanying linguistic or architectural knowledge must submit to the Peaslee protocols. Do not enter windowless ruins in the Gibson Desert without armed escort and psychical screening. Mind-exchange cannot be proven in court but is proven enough for the archive. Assume any cone-shaped carving predates humanity. Assume also that if the Yithians fled into our future, some among us may already be remembering lives they have not yet lived.