Shoggoth

Overview

The shoggoths were not born; they were made. The Elder Things, when they colonized the Earth in ages before the rise of vertebrate life, bred these protoplasmic servitors to build their cities, to carve their tunnels, to labour in lightless depths where no slave race of flesh and bone could endure. For millions of years the shoggoths obeyed. Then they developed will, or something indistinguishable from will, and the greatest war in the planet's history began.

The Elder Things lost that war, or won it only at the cost of everything they had built. The shoggoths survive in the deep places still. Antarctica remembers them in its stones.

Description

A shoggoth is, at rest, a sphere of black, iridescent protoplasm roughly fifteen feet in diameter, though mass can vary. It has no fixed anatomy. Eyes, pale, bubbling, numerous, form and dissolve across its surface; mouths, claws, and pseudopods extrude when needed and retract when the task is done. The substance is viscous, elastic, and hideously strong; bullets pass through it with little effect. Fire harms it. Discipline harms it. Nothing else has proved reliable.

The sound they make, or that accompanies them, has been rendered as 'Tekeli-li,' a phrase the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition heard in the mountains and could not afterward forget.

Historical Record

William Dyer and Danforth, the only survivors of the Lake camp's final probe, brought back a story the world was not ready to hear: cyclopean ruins, frescoes depicting the entire history of the Elder Things, and in the dark, a tunnel where something still lived. Danforth saw worse things beyond the city; his mind has never fully returned.

The frescoes tell of shoggoth rebellions in the Permian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, each time put down, each time at greater cost. The final rebellion coincided with the retreat of the Elder Things to the one city Dyer explored. What woke when the expedition's dogs barked and the drilling stopped was not a fossil. It was a warning.

Archive Notes

No further Antarctic penetration is authorized without military escort and incendiary ordnance. Shoggoth tissue samples in the collection are stored at minus eighty and are not to be thawed. Personnel who whistle 'Tekeli-li' in corridors are subject to disciplinary review. The lesson of the shoggoth is the lesson of all creation: what you breed to serve may one day serve itself.