Shaw-Shoggoth

“The eye behind the stars watched the crying world with indifference.”

Upon the crust there moved primordial shapes. These blackened things of long ago slumped down rocks, wrapped around plants and singed the dusty stones of shattered plates across the landscape. The planet had opened, and from the top of these natural cliffs poured the saliva of thousand year old evils.

As these poisons sunk into the earth, the molten core of fire and light grew to be toxic and green over time. From space orbiting forces could make out that the fire on the surface of the earth was no longer red or yellow. The flames of this world were forever tainted, tarnishing the globe in shades of black and green.

It was the shapes from space that had brought the planet to this state. On the day the planet's aligned the new order had created itself. From the farthest reaches of nothingness there came the awakening of primeval races, all looking to one location to call home. However, these forces were not without stubbornness. For ten days there raged a battle upon the surface of the earth.

A time in which the last humans were destroyed and countless terrestrial races attempted to colonize the world's surface. The biggest of these entities, who stood apart from the other alien species, wiped out those who would not worship them and established four black towers, constructed of malice and bile, in four locations across the globe.

These were the towers of the four gods of the new world, and it was after their rise that the many races fell in line, succumbing to worshiping the tetrad of unchallengeable overlords. The gods who owned these towers were the fathers of the lower races, just as the gods were sons to the eye which glared down from above.

For it did not matter if the gods would leave. The globe had been encapsulated by the eye from space, bringing the world to a state of supreme darkness with the eye serving both as the planet's moon and sun. As the world spun the eye's blinks forced the tides of the burning sea. The black and red skies were still as the flow of wind had died with the breath of the last mortal, a child, as the toxic air robbed him of any further breath.

From that point on there was no need for oxygen. Those who now owned the planet had no need to breath. All they desired was cause and effect. These actions stimulated whatever fraction of a soul these beings had been created with. They enjoyed any form of action. It just so happened that pain and misery were the easiest to produce and replicate.

Long after the death of the last human there existed a spark of human morals. Human morals were something unique to the human race alone. These morals were a set of beliefs each person was born with, and though they required guidance while growing, knew specific laws in this world were true without having to be told.

It was this set of morals which crossed paths with the embryonic ooze of an eldritch creature, spawning the slime which called itself Shaw. This ooze was a shoggoth. One of a race of miners, soldiers, servants to forces beyond the stars. These creatures, that had slumbered beneath the arctic, awoke again when the boiling atmosphere had melted away the ice and the seas, setting them free.

These creatures were shape-shifters, eaters of matter and servants to the four gods who had taken the earth. It was in the last days of mankind, before the air dried up, that a mortal man, both a warrior and an alchemist, transferred all that he was into a small pink ruby. This ruby he then swallowed as the skies fogged up in smog.

And when the gods of Old swallowed the land, this shoggoth swallowed that man, digesting that alchemist's ruby in the process. After this a metamorphosis took form. Though the alchemist new a person's own soul could not be transferred to a different vessel, his mind's copy would live on in the carbonated power of the pink stone.

So it was with underlying ignorance that the shoggoth writhed and burned upon swallowing the jewel, as the amalgamation of meaningless ooze shaped itself to form the image of the man who had created it. When the shoggoth awoke it was in the image of a human, had the knowledge of the alchemist and the morals of an advanced human.

The being looked around, terrified at the birth that had just transpired, but then calmed. For the world had entered a new age, and the shoggoth was but another drop of goo in this realm of slush. He could remember one name. It was the name of the man, or rather who he had been. That being Shaw. For a time this monster in the image of a man walked the world to familiarize his brethren with his fixed appearance.

The other races could feel his presence. The Ihgtrils, the Oungoths and the Ealmehks could all sense the presence of the shoggoth and, under the law of the eye and the four gods, knew not to kill him. Humans they could sense and it was humans, the offspring of a tarnished and forgotten entity, that these primeval beings hated.

Shaw, who's mind and will rested in the long dead world of humanity, began to come through the more time he lived amidst the new world. In his cells there now existed matter of energy, memories and a sense of correct and incorrect. It was Shaw, alone, who lived with the agony that the only world his consciousness could feel at peace was sitting in ashes below these newly resurrected ruins of vanquished aeons.

Of the four gods which held towers below the presence of these beyond the stars, these things were omnipotent. Things they were called, as they had no true form. Gods, they were called as they had no one name. God was their title and their title was shared in fear that one might be more cruel than the last.

Of the God of Mirrors & Smoke, there existed a reflective surface floating atop a pool of black water. Upon this reflective surface poured a sea of grey smoke which floated up, evaporating shortly after escaping the mirror. This mirror, which was massive, was a portal and this was the first God. Of the God of Crimson Halos, there were rings of shining red.

These rings, which were a variety of sized, appeared to move in and out of one another in a system of cycles similar to that of a machine. When angered the halos would grow darker and furiously thrash at the surrounding throne as it settled again to calm down. This was the second God. Of the God of Ice & Fire, there sat a pillar of ice which bent and came to a point at the top.

Within this structure was a flame that moved about the core of the solid liquid, refraining from melting the pillar which sat at the center of a great icy chamber. This was the third God. Of the God of Dancing Light, there was a column, short and flat on both the top and bottom of its chamber. Between these obsidian slabs waved a series of three long strands of light.

These visible streams of gleaming brightness wrapped around each other and fell through one another like transparent feathers in an eternal descent. It was said that to look upon it could make the vision of any creature either burn or transcend consciousness. This was the fourth God. These forces, which came at an inconceivable point, beyond a time when any thought of the simplest concept could have been dreamt up, there were the original properties.

These properties of absence, existence, nothingness and just being were commonplace before time and the creation of the mind. The mind, which became a compendium of growing, yet decaying, knowledge and understanding, was in stages of infancy compared to the minds of great old ones which manifested themselves as clusters of information.

These first beings, born from the starting properties of the universe, were the concepts of their own creation. Once a property existed the property was able to identify itself, giving the concept an identity with which to reflect those other properties that effected it. Once these properties gained minds to identify themselves and one another, the next stage of their growth allowed them limitless time to think, establishing personalities.

The first of these personalities came in the form of the first feeling. The presence of some of the properties made others happy, while others hissed in anger at the existence of each other. These were the first emotions, being assigned the identities of love and hate. Because the two seemed so similar, and easily changeable by the concepts who had created them, there came a spectrum of emotions with which the concepts clung to, wishing to be addressed by whatever emotion they experienced most.

It was in these first steps of existence that the gods that were to come would be known as being kind, wrathful, or neutral. Eventually these multiple identities, that shared one section of empty space, echoed across a multidimensional platform, across non-existent plane of absolution. It was at this time that only ideas, in the form of complete darkness, existed.

And it was through the power of absence that they were able to make themselves known. Since the start of all things, which was unheard of as there was no beginning to the properties outside the concepts themselves, there was never such a thing as nothingness. Nothingness, as the concepts believed it, was a formless essence of possible creation, able to spawn thought into physical shape.

It was the concepts who were the first to identify and master the powers of nothingness, seeing its difference from absence and utilizing their creation from it. The concepts were the first to make themselves take form. Though the concepts did not know what they desired to look like, they imagined shapes, forms, textures of light and instances of interest with which to live on in the guise of.

These essences became smoke, mirrors, fire, light, waves, wind, sound and shapes like rings. It was at this point that all the properties and concepts united, believing that separated they did not have the power to fully take advantage of the nothingness. Joining as one these living formless concepts became the Null Presence, and as a singularity were able to form a physical shape.

However, the Null Presence, soon to be called the Null, was incomplete as one of the concepts refused to join the others in union. Instead this property, less than a master of the nothingness, attempted to ascend itself, beings taken by the creative power of nothingness, losing his ties to the Null and being forced into the shape of an orb.

This orb, which swallowed all that surrounded it, had the power to create only one thing. With the power of the orb dwindling, to save itself, the being forced its energy back through the nothingness, birthing the great eye, which its creations called A’mon. After the creation of the eye, the orb collapsed within itself, becoming petrified in its own essence and remaining trapped on a plane between the nothingness and the Null.

In this form the rogue concept, after becoming the orb, transformed into a being that was forever to be referred to as the Core. It was a white ball, void of all thought, concept and nothingness, as it was a paradoxical anomaly. Something paralleled to the absence. At this point the Null, which had paid no attention or concern to the formation of the Core or A’mon, the eye, began to create beings of its own, however they were incomplete.

Shaw wandered many miles, that is to say that the concept of moving his newly created legs came easy to him, as the shoggoth could no longer vibrate himself to obtain motion in any one direction. It was now, after the consumption of the alchemist’s jewel, that the shoggoth was more man than monster, yet was still a creature that did not consume air, nor excrete waste.

It was now the unspoken duty of this strange being to wander, observing this world of arcane chaos with the mind of a human, able to understand the pillars of goo and beings of shapes he could understand, yet not described. It was the clone of the alchemist that lived the life of bacteria upon a dead planet, dying with it as the world sunk into the vacuum of empty, mysterious space.