| Many thousands of years ago, they ruled the globe.
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| But the pressing fist of great power carried a heavy price, and now their
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| dominion has fallen beyond time and shadow.
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| Look now, to the interior world…
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| Ah yes, the ancient map (its true origin unknown… mayhap crafted by the same
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| vaunted cartographer as the infamous Piri Reis map itself?) won in a game of
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| cards at Portsmouth Docks… a fortuitous hand indeed!
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| (This could eclipse even Blackthorne’s discoveries in Antarctica!)
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| Wagered by a grizzled mariner (in whose weary rum-addled gaze gleamed the
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| knowledge of something far greater)…
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| Twin axial portals to the inner reaches… one at the very polar pinnacle of
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| the world, the other hidden beneath the lost ice-bound megalopolis!
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| Seeking answers to the cryptic riddles of the universe,
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| Secrets of the blackest (most impenetrable) deeps of the umbra,
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| Wreathed in frozen shadow and ice-bound peril,
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| Subterrene halls of horripilated wonderment…
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| Tatsumaki Maru voyage north, ever north!
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| Cleave a path through the massing Arctic ice!
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| Agleam with all the colours of the aurora,
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| Far beyond Ny Alesund lies our goal.
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| Invocations and ideograms (dreams of the Xtaxchedron?),
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| Conjuration of the inner world’s (tenebrous) denizens,
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| And their star-spanning progenitors, spawned beyond the outer-world night.
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| These darkling subterrene dominions, astir with strange and terrible beings,
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| sired by entities whose genesis was far beyond the nighted void of our own
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| outer-world! |
| The legacy of the First Ones, spawn of the Mera! |
| But,
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| it is here written that one day, when even the War of the Lexicon and the
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| cataclysmic Great Chaos War have faded to naught but distant memory,
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| a great conflict shall be waged between the forces of Order and the dread
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| avatars of the Z’xulth. |
| Vile fiends of the Outer Darkness,
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| They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo, the Dwellers in Eternal Shadow unleashed
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| through The Gate to That Which Lies Beyond! |
| The Black Galaxy disgorges its
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| malignant horrors! |
| Mankind shall suffer inestimably at the hands of these
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| sinistrous black titans of maleficent Chaos!
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| These stygian pitch-black vaults are filled with batrachian devils,
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| Dire crystalline watch-dogs of the chasmed deeps,
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| (For the gleaming jewels of truth are not without their protection…)
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| Vril-gorged adamantine fiends of the threshold,
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| Spawn of the ersatz interior sun.
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| (Behold, a vast plasma-fueled crystalline illuminatory orb… a vril-sun rising!
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| And marvel at the colossal terra-forming machines of the First Ones!)
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| Quaere verum… Sic itur ad astra!
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| Far, far beneath the surface of this coruscating sphere, at the very heart of
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| our mysterious globe, lies the true path to man’s dark destiny beyond the
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| heavens… |