Shantaks

Overview

To reach Unknown Kadath, the dreamer must cross distances that have no analogue on waking maps. Some ride moon beasts' ships; some trust Nodens and his nightgaunts; others, desperate or damned, call the shantaks: great birds, scaly and elephantine, whose wings beat the thin air above the Cold Waste and whose loyalty is to powers that sit above the Dreamlands' pleasant countries. Carter rode a shantak and survived; he also heard its mind, and what he heard nearly broke him.

The archive classifies shantaks as transport and as weapon. Cults serving Nyarlathotep have learned calls that bring them down to rooftops. The Plateau of Leng looks up to their flight paths. They are not birds in any ornithologist's sense; they are something older, wearing feathers as disguise.

Description

A shantak is larger than an elephant, with a horse-like head, leathery scales, and wings that darken the moon when spread. The neck is long; the claws can crush stone. Riders sit in a depression between the wings, often in harnesses of silk or iron, and the bird's mind is sentient, cruel, and telepathic in a coarse, hungry way. It does not love its rider. It serves a chain of command that ends in the Other Gods and in Nyarlathotep's amusements.

They hate certain symbols and certain scents; cats' blood, some accounts say, will drive them off. They fear nothing else that lives in the Dreamlands, except perhaps the nightgaunts in sufficient number, and even that is uncertain.

Historical Record

Carter's flight toward Kadath remains the definitive account: ascent over the Enchanted Wood, terror over the Cold Waste, communion with a mind that dreamed of cities beneath the ice of waking Earth. He escaped when the shantak stooped upon prey. Others have not returned from similar rides.

Leng's high priests are said to keep shantaks in volcanic crags. Nyarlathotep's manifestations in dream often arrive with wings on the horizon. Waking sightings are vanishingly rare but not unknown: Himalayan travellers describe 'birds that cast no shadow' and climbers who vanish from peaks where no eagles fly.

Archive Notes

Do not summon shantaks without Kadath clearance and without telepathic screening afterward. If offered aerial passage in dream, refuse unless Nodens or the Elder Sign is involved. Cross-reference with Leng and Nyarlathotep files. Personnel exhibiting post-dream obsession with cold wastes or with 'cities under ice' must report. The shantak is a shortcut to Kadath and a shortcut to compromise. The archive has no safe category for either.