• Published 24th Aug 2013
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At the Mountains of Discord - Glimmervoid



North of the bountiful Crystal Empire lies an icy land of cryptic mystery. Its inner reaches have never been explored, but a Canterlot University expedition is set to change this. Cthulhu Mythos crossover, inspired by At the Mountains of Madness.

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VI — An Elder History

VI — An Elder History

From the crystal mural, other information found later and clues derived from the October Codex and similar forbidden literature, I have concocted the following history. Be warned, much is supposition on my part, and while I feel it fits the information available, that information is scarce to the point of uselessness. Much of it I deduced at the time but the finer details came later, when I returned to Equestria and could consult my sources.

The story of the Elder Things began on a far off world, in a solar-system utterly unlike our own. The mural showed nine planets in orbit around a star, of which the third appeared to be their place of origin. The earliest pictures were incomprehensible to me. One showed an unknown alien, even stranger than the Elder Things. It looked like a large, oval-shaped cask with starfish-like appendages at both ends. Other bizarre beings were depicted next to it: something like a mutated octopus, a huge polyp, an eyeless toad covered in twitching tentacles and further, still stranger things which I cannot adequately put into words.

The narrative became increasingly coherent as it moved forwards from the Elder Things own eldritch prehistory. A brief diagram exhibited their evolution, from animal simians of some kind, to upright, intelligent tool users. They built great cities of metal, wood and stone on their home planet and finally reached for the stars. They did so in great ships, which flew the aether on jets of flame. They reached distant worlds and built great cities there too. Their empire was bountiful, their technology a wonder to behold and their magic just as advanced, though as creatures of developed intellect they did not overly differentiate the two.

This empire was not unchallenged, however. In their outwards expansion they encountered the Mi-go, a fungoid race of fearsome and terrible power. If the mural conveyed the cause of the war, I couldn't recognise it for what it was. The Eohippus Fragments give some hints but only in their typical way of tiresome rambling words. The Fragments name the ninth planet in the Elder Things' home system 'Yuggoth' and vouch it sacred to the Mi-go. Perhaps the Mi-go fought to reclaim it, but such an idea is well beyond the realms of reasonable hypothesis. How, after all, can any pony properly interpret the interactions of two alien species, who may think in utterly alien ways both in comparison to ponykind and each other?

Whatever the cause, the war they fought is a terror to even contemplate. In a prehistory before prehistory, these two powers ripped open the hearts of stars, shattered planets, birthed new gods using forbidden experiments and loosed old upon their enemies.

The Elder Things fought using two technological paths. At the war's start, the mechanical held dominance. They created terrible machine weapons and pushed the boundaries of material science to craft substances that shocked even them.

As the war continued, however, the biological rose to prominence. On this path the Elder Things created the dreaded 'Shoggoths', protoplasmic beings whose very cells were encoded with deadly secrets harvested from the hidden structure of the universe and the Great Old Ones which lie sleeping within it. The mad zebra Abdul Alhaizum speaks of shoggoths with even greater reluctance than he does the Elder Things. He claims they were biologically immortal ('eternal save for mortal wounds from weapons perilous') and metamorphic of form. As evidence for this last, he cites a case where the Elder Things modified a shoggoth to tower over mountains and a second they made smaller than an insect.

Even the Elder Things feared what they created and restricted the shoggoths' ability to reproduce. From what I can interpret, shoggoths completely lacked the ability to self-propagate. Instead, they were transformed from suitable base stock — specially engineered life forms, encoded with genomic potential. The transformation process seems complicated and technologically rigorous, using infusions of strange chemicals and secret genetic keys, known only to the Elder Things. These life forms also served as the shoggoths principle food stock. While anthropophagic at first glance, the shoggoths were aliens among aliens. Only creatures such as themselves could contain the full range of needed nutrients. In emergencies they could eat any organic or even inorganic matter, but this resulted in a wasting sickness.

It is also around this point that the Elder Things abandoned internal reproduction. External wombs took the place of native biology, which I can only imagine proved better for all concerned. The competing interests of foalbirth, the large heads common to sophant species and hips fit for bipedal motion couldn't have made for a pleasant experience. Extensive technological augmentation also appeared in their records — at first crude but growing quickly in complexity and maturity until invisible.

How long the war lasted I cannot say. The mural portrayed a continuous narrative from left to right but gave no hint as to passing time. Presumably the alien writing I couldn't read contained that information. The October Codex gives no clues at all, and the Eohippus Fragments speak in poetic terms — 'the spring, summer, autumn and winter of stars'; 'uncounted generations'; and 'time enough that even dreaded Yog-Sothoth took note of its passing'.

However long it raged, at last a group of Elder Things grew tired of the unending bloodshed. They took a fleet of ships and sailed across the galaxy, far beyond the reach of either belligerent empire.

How, or indeed if, the war ended is unknown, for all history I have access to follows this disparate group of starborne wanderers. On these 'ships of ice' they travelled the cold paths between stars, until they found the world that would become their home: ours.

There they set to building a great civilisation. Their cities covered the planet, and they filled the orbitals with artificial satellites, whose purposes I can scarcely imagine. This, I believe, is the origin of the mythical Ring of Hue'min'I'tep. Conventional folklorist wisdom relates it to the earth pony marriage custom of exchanging necklaces — a symbolic legend representing the Elder Things' union to and mastery of the planet — but based upon what I learnt in the Uncharted North, the truth is far more literal than that. Some images even suggested that they set the sun and moon in the sky, but perhaps I am interpreting these wrong. Such an extraordinary claim surely requires extraordinary proof, which I most assuredly lack. Perhaps the carvings merely indicated that they raised and lowered those celestial bodies in that distant and forgotten epoch of history, much as the unicorn tribe did in the past and the Princesses do to this very day?

Those early days represented a golden age for the Elder Things. Their culture flourished in the peace of their exile. Contrary to Abdul Alhaizum's assertions in the October Codex, they did not forsake their shoggoth servants. Instead, they repurposed and modified their warriors for gentler duties. It was these altered shoggoths who built the cities, mined for materials and preformed the diverse drudge work required to maintain a high quality of life for their masters, beyond that experienced even in cornucopian modern Equestria. The Elder Things controlled the shoggoths through some invisible means, possibly telepathic or perhaps something even more exotic. I have read a number of interesting papers out of the Tottingham colleges, concerning the use of electromagnetic waves to transmit messages. While the work is far from proven, it is a possible avenue the Elder Things could have exploited.

On the subject of governance, I can only guess. The mural depicted occasional figures giving impassioned speeches before cheering crowds, but whether they represented a series of powerful demagogues or were the by-product of some other system, such as earth pony democracy, I do not know. Certainly there was some system of government, for I cannot imagine their great and ordered cities arising through spontaneous anarchistic cooperation. While the abnormal minds of alien beings might allow for such a polity, evidence suggests that Elder Things were conventional in this regard. One thing I will say for certain however: there were no immortal princesses like figures, such as our own Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. They were not so blessed.

The subject of diet is an important one for it touches upon one of the central pieces of the Elder Things' legend: that they created all life on this planet. This I can categorically say is not true. The mural clearly depicted rudimentary life already in place when the Elder Things arrived, but it was basic, barely multi-cellular. Having said that, it would not be an exaggeration to name the Elder Things as life's architect. During the war with the Mi-go, they'd become masters of biological science and had lost little of that skill since.

They engineered and adapted the native life, granting it increased complexity and many other useful attributes. I have reason to believe they also crossbred it with their shoggoth servants. As I remarked earlier, shoggoths can only survive in the long-term by eating life infused with their own alien nature. If modified in such a way, the native life would serve as a ready food source and could be used as base stock for the creation of new shoggoths. A number of quite prominent carvings towards the middle of the mural depict shoggoths eating large ferns. While not definitive, I have other reasons for my belief too, detailed elsewhere.

Before long, proto-trees and other plants covered the planet, alongside basic animal life. These the Elder Things farmed, ate and hunted. Professor Rock Watcher was correct in his earlier dietary assessment: they were omnivores, eating both plant and animal matter.

For an indeterminate time, the Elder Things dwelt unified and at peace, but that wasn't to say there were no threats. It was during this stage of their history that they first encountered Discord and likely other creatures of foreign and vexatious power. Still, to the best of my information, these events did not disrupt their civilisation to any great degree. It was only a matter of time until one did, however.

Abdul Alhaizum names that disruption Yeb-Ineat. The Elder Things depicted her as a voluminous cloud of cancerous growths, chitinous appendages, pseudopodial extremities and bug like eyes — a gibbering horror from the depths of space. She came on the solar winds and smashed into the southernmost continent, which even today is accursed and inhabited by monsters though tectonic forces have moved it to a quite different position.

Yeb-Ineat made war on the Elder Things, pushing steadily north towards the core of their civilisation — what today is the Uncharted North. The Elder Things had lost much of their former war making skill but not all. From their laboratories returned mechanical weapons of great power and the feared war shoggoths, though whether they modified their existing stock or bred them anew I do not know. They met and halted Yeb-Ineat, but they did not know her greatest power. Abdul Alhaizum bestows two titles upon Yeb-Ineat, reflecting his understandable if superstitious reluctance to repeat the names of such creatures: Eternal Hive and Flesh Spinner. Hers were the powers of psychic subornation, absorption and adaption. She took the Elder Things and shoggoths who sought to oppose her and welcomed them to the hive.

The carvings depicting that time showed two mirrored forces, identical front lines supported by shining cities on one side and organic abominations on the other. Mirrored they might be, but Yeb-Ineat's forces were stronger, better. She improved what she took, sculpting their bodies until their former comrades could not hope to stand against them. Using these tactics, Yeb-Ineat again pushed forward, driving the Elder Things into retreat. In a desperate attempt to arrest her advance, the Elder Things used their advanced grasp of science to raise great mountain ranges in her path. Today these bastions and redoubts of elder time form the great east-west ranges which run through Equestria and beyond. I can only speculate as to what chthonic power has let them survive the intervening eon.

How effective these defences were I can only speculate. Certainly they did not stop Yeb-Ineat's advance, but they might well have slowed her, perhaps even critically for the Elder Thing artisans who created the mural gave them much attention. She broke through the Macintosh Hills, shattered the Unicorn Ranges, blasted Gem Stone Gap in the Crystal Mountains and bored Chill Withers Pass through the Stormwalds. Soon all that stood between the frightful invader and the very heart of Elder Thing civilisation were the Mountains of Discord, but they were well defended and the highest barrier yet. Yeb-Ineat threw her forces at those rocky walls, and, though she killed many defenders, they pushed her back. Again she tried and again the Elder Things repulsed her, though at even greater cost to their dwindling resources. The Elder Things might yet hold, but Yeb-Ineat's success was only a matter of time.

Desperate, the Elder Things conducted a great working. They created a wonder weapon in the natural hills north of their capital. Why they did not do so earlier I can only guess. Perhaps the attempt was difficult, dangerous or by no means certain — something only endeavoured as a last resort. Alternately, the weapon may have relied upon new technology — a recently discovered spell, for example, or advancements in mathematical theory driven by the needs of the war. Whatever the weapon's genesis, it turned the tide of the conflict. The Elder Things used it to shatter Yeb-Ineat, breaking her utterly and sending the fragments scuttling to the dark places of the world.

With the war over, the Elder Things reclaimed their world and did so with remarkable speed — or so the carvings seemed to indicate. As I've said before, time was hard to judge. They rebuilt their cities and planted anew their forests. One crystal carving showed a forest of gigantic equisetales, scaled up versions of what we'd found trapped in rock during the early stages of the expedition. Hunting parties composed of Elder Things and shoggoths roamed the land, wiping out the remaining spawn of Yeb-Ineat. This could have been the start of a second golden age, but disaster struck another time.

The precipitating cause of this second disaster is unclear. According to the anonymous author or authors of the Eohippus Fragments, the Elder Things' own wonder weapon doomed them. It 'sung to the night the music of crystal spheres of the Beyond-One, and frightful things heard its call.' Whatever the reason, the Mi-go came to the isolated Elder Thing world and brought with them a war the Elder Things must surely have thought long gone.

The Mi-go arrived in abominable ships, able to sail the cold aether between stars and equipped with powerful armaments. Their first act was to disable the Elder Things' wonder weapon. Their second was to rip the Ring of Hue'min'I'tep from the sky. Their third was to bombard the planet with such force that evidence for it exists in the geological record. This attack, I believe, is what we today call the Hoof-Hammer Event. The silver eggs also date to this period. If not for the Elder Thing occupants, I'd label them Mi-go weapons, but that is clearly not the case. Possibly they served as lifeboats of some kind, used to evacuate the Ring when the Mi-go attacked. If so, I doubt their occupants lived much longer for their salvation.

The Mi-go destroyed the Elder Things' cities once more, ruined their infrastructure and killed their population. The attack was sudden, swift and deadly but also short. Perhaps thinking their task done (assuming in their alien minds it truly was not), they left, but some few Elder Things survived in deep bunkers and similar armoured places. In time, these survivors emerged and sought to rebuild, but the damage was done.

Whereas Yeb-Ineat had left the core of Elder Thing power relatively unscathed, the Mi-go did no such thing, and this event marks the downward turn in their power. They did not go silently into the night, however. These surviving Elder Things rebuilt a single great city, located at the heart of their old civilisation. It filled the plateau north of the Mountains of Discord, huge buildings of incredible architectural achievement. At the heart of this city they built a cyclopean spire, miles high and made from their strongest and most enduring materials. Perhaps I am projecting my own mentality but it seemed almost a challenge to the Mi-go: destroy us and we'll rebuild stronger than before. The rise of the spire marked the exact centre of the crystal mural, and I believe also its creation. The carvings before that point held a unity of style and purpose, while those after were more discordant, as if the product of a thousand hooves and as many artistic philosophies. Those surviving Elder Things left the second half of that great crystal arc for those to come.

Despite the seeming magnitude of these early achievements, such measures were fundamentally hollow. The Elder Things had lost the ability to design and create their most advanced technologies. The spire and other such creations were the products of scavenged machines they could no longer make or properly repair.

This decline is obvious in a number of ways. One was the mural itself. Over the entire first half and the early second, the carvings were projected into the heart of the crystal, voids covered by a flat skin of transparent stone. As time moved on, this technique was lost, and the carvings became more mundane — dung into the surface of the wall like the engravings made today throughout Equestria. Over the final stretch even this was lost and the degenerate descendants of the Elder Things turned to ink and other pigments.

The Elder Things' self-portraits provide more evidence. As I've remarked elsewhere, the Elder Things fused their bodies with technological devices of incredible complexity. During most of their history, these augmentations were invisible — the technology advanced and refined to be small and discreet. As their civilisation fell, it became cruder, bulkier. Some depicted late era Elder Things appeared almost more machine than living creature. Others abandoned augmentation all together.

It would be a mistake to label even these waning Elder Things weak, however. Their most potent tools were their shoggoths, and they took steps to preserve this vital resource against their industrial decline. Using their waning technology, they modified the few shoggoths who'd survived the Mi-go attack to create a number of useful breeds. Some were specialised for war, others for labour, a few for medicine and still more were cemented as generalists — jacks of all trades, masters of none. They also removed one of the oldest safeguards built within the shoggoths: the complex restrictions governing their reproduction. Probably fearing that the needed techniques would be lost, they enabled the shoggoths to breed through budding, gifting them with twisted fecundity. Technicians would remove specialised nodes from adult shoggoths and place said nodes in baths of rich nutrients. Given time, a new shoggoth would arise, a perfect clone of its parent. They used this to quickly raise a large and powerful force.

These shoggoths proved vital to their survival. When Malkart, star spawn of Cthulhu, came from a distance world, shoggoth legions drove him into exile in the deepest seas. When a shattered fragment of Yeb-Ineat arose and proclaimed the Kingdom of Corcosa, warrior shoggoths defeated the kingdom in battle and labourer shoggoths carved queer five-pointed stars into every surviving block of stone. They even fought a civil war when an insidious foreign influence caused a number of shoggoths to lose bodily cohesion. These monsters became ever-expanding waves of protoplasmic matter, their growth fuelled by the absorption of local life forms. I've seen parasprite spawns and out-of-control von Neustallion spells; what those ancient artists depicted was worse in every way, and yet the Elder Things and their shoggoths prevailed. They celebrated each of these victories and a dozen more on the crystal mural, as if each and every one represented the defining moment of their civilisation. It tasted of propaganda to me.

Their history proves the Elder Things cunning and resourceful. Given time, I truly believe they would have stabilised their failing technology and begun again their climb to greatness. This was not to be. Their technology continued to fail in a cascade like effect. Machines faltered, were repaired with cannibalised parts and then faltered again. Finally something absolutely vital was lost: the external wombs the Elder Things used to grow their young.

You must understand: the Elder Things had abandoned biological reproduction even before they came to our world. After so great a time without a positive selection criterion, the ability had degraded. The carvings depicting this time were morbid affairs. Despite all their remaining medical science, mothers died in childbirth and miscarried. Even the surviving children were sickly and disabled. Few lived to adulthood. Problems increased with each subsequent generation.

At the same time, temperatures around their capital and only major city began to drop. Snow appeared in some early pictures for the first time, with the winters becoming harder and harsher as time advanced. Pressed by so many other problems, the Elder Things were slow to investigate. When at last they did, it was already too late. Some decaying process in their once-wonder weapon had reached a critical state. It became a great entropy sink, pulling in energy and warping the weather. I can only conclude that this process continues even to this day and causes the unnatural cold which covers the Uncharted North.

Assailed on so many sides, the Elder Things faced their doom. The carvings on the crystal wall stop. Using a number of spells more commonly employed to analyse the providence of famous paintings, I found the remains of painted images, but they were too decayed to interpret. Elder Things undoubtedly continued to live in the spire for some time, but their end had truly come.