The Great Old Ones
From the cold, black stretches between the distant, flickering lights of the stars drift beings of power so ancient that their genesis cannot be recalled even by divine auger. Perhaps they are the orphans of worlds long dead. The Gods of civilizations that have long moulded into stardust and have been left stranded and estranged of their divinity. Perhaps they are beings torn out of time and thrown into the furthest, deepest reaches of the universe by even older beings who could not bare the sight of them any longer. None know with any certainty, and those who probe such questions invite the nauseating gaze of their alien intent.
What is certain is that The Great Old Ones wield power akin to The Endless, and in some circumstances, greater power. The Great Old Ones are not bound to belief. Their strength does not waver when their names are no longer bore upon the tongues of mortal kind. In fact they seem to grow stronger in their secrecy. Growing fat upon hiddenness. Each discovery, each insight gained of them stripping away their ability to rot mortals with their eldritch power.
The Great Old Ones are beings of horrific figures. It is said that uncloaked, the very sight of such a being can drive mortals to insanity, though few lunatics in all of history have ever claimed to have seen more than a naked hand of these terrors from the deep.
The motives of the Great Old Ones are unknowable. Their desires immutable. Even their closest, most ardent cultists cannot claim to know their mission. It is this unsettling truth that makes them most terrifying. They are beings so alien, so obtuse, so unreasonable to the law and order of the universe that the very shadow of their presence perverts all that it touches. Coupled with the knowledge that there is no way for mortal kind to know how many of the Great Old Ones lie in the nearby shadows of the stars, or how many are already here wriggling in the earth or snaking along the spines of madmen, makes the Great Old Ones perhaps the most frightening enemy of all.
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