Ælf-Adal

They come from out of Nightmare, though whose, or why, no-one remembers now. They may have been the dying dream of a coma-locked Devil, that cracked its sleeping skull and clambered out into our world. They may have been a shadow in the deep dark mirror-world of man, the fearful place we go to in our frightened dreams, brought forth by art, or chance or ancient science.
But they spring from the ecology of dreams, they are born from its substance, made to feed and feed upon those visions of our fear. Imagine a world composed only of the nightmares of all the thinking, sleeping minds, a strand of hallucinatory darkness shifting in its substance as dreamers wake and sleepers slip in and out of terror in the night. A world where the only stability comes from the mass memories of shared catastrophes. A world that contains all knowledge held by any thinking being, yet only in its dark reflected form. A world where predation is absolute, where all things hunt and kill and there is nothing that does not, in some small way, do harm. A world whose demiurges and creating gods, those beings that fill it with their life, who imbue its every moment with their black creative fire, are also its victims, targets and foes. A world that hates its creators.
This is the world of the Ælf-Adal, where they slowly grew, shaping themselves from the coagulated stuff of thought. This is where they first formed independent minds, where they made their society, where they built their mighty civilisation, a city seen in many dreams but never recognised. How long they lay there thinking dreaming thoughts, nobody knows. Some say longer than the life of man, some say longer than the life of the world, some say longer than the stars.
No-one is certain who declared the war, whether their psychonaut scouts broke out, hunting dreamers as they woke, unwilling to let go, even on the borders of night, or whether some psychic human crusade discovered them and penetrated into Dream to burn out the parasitic thought. But, in dreams and sleep, and in the daylight of the waking world, a war began.
It was a war of tragedy and loss. The regularity and substance of our world made it a kind of hell to them, and the impossible fluctuations of Nightmare swallowed whole cultures of man. The Ælf-Adal were made from the memory of pain and knew, in some form, everything we knew, and held strange magics impossible to counter and understand. But we were their creators, or the sustainers of their world at least, and they could never fully understand the sights they saw unfolding as the sun rose. The substance of humanity was dense and strange and different than it was in dreams and here, man did not always run but sometimes fought, and sometimes won, and as the numbers of mankind decayed, the world of Dream began to shrink and tighten round the black cities of the Ælf-Adal. As well as that, once the war began, the nightmares of mankind filled mutually with one shared terror: the fear of the Nightmare Men, and these twice-reflected visions, the Nightmares of a Nightmare, filled their ancient civilisation. As monstrous and strange as they, but not independent, not truly-thinking beings, mere reactions and distractions, but dangerous enough in their way.
It was a prophet, or strange Nightmare-Demon that led the Ælf-Adal beneath, away from the light, away from the reach of man Here, in a dim strange corner of the material world so dark and fluid that it seemed almost like a part of Dream, they lay and waited, rebuilding their mighty and decadent civilisation, one based on and drawn from the shattered memories of the greatest cities ever made. Yet now real, encoded in stone deep beneath the earth.
The Ælf-Adal are not-quite-real and not-quite-dream, but they are beautiful, the colour of the darkness, and they never age. They can live and eat and breathe and die. And hate.
Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water is black and dark like North Sea mud. Imagine things living in it, thickly-knitted limbs churning like a mower motor left tipped up and switched on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea. They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their own flesh in substitute for reaching yours. Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief writhings of that midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.
Imagine that the glass is beautifully made. Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water, but, when the light slants just so across the pane, a field of translucent harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people, inside the surface of that glass. This is how much the Ælf-Adal despise you. This is how much they control that hate.
The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and event. Though they know it well, the wound of you will not close. Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is like a knife twisting in the skin. No other species could absorb such titanic contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain. But the Ælf-Adal are old; they know much of patience and control. And they know that they are born from the substance of your fear and that if there was nothing left to feel afraid, they might well die.
So.
Everything that can be done is being done. The situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must endure, as they have for so long. They wait and plan for an inverted world, a world where societies and civilisations and empires and species exist purely to instill and sustain fear. A world where dreams enslave the dreamer. Where the walls between sleep and waking tumble down and both realms become one sweet eternal whole. They will live to see it.

Geographic Distribution

• Endless Dark