[right][i]Through us, the cosmos sees itself, and recoils in terror.[/i]

-Karolus the Pagan, [i]De rebus occultis arcanisque[/i]

[i]Find we ourselves in a dark place, and lights a little more knowledge our way. Would we that was it not so.[/i]

-[url=http://static.nichtlustig.de/toondb/001212.html]Yeti Master[/url] Oy-ad (VSO)[/right]


The cosmos. Incommensurably and unfathomably vast, and yet familiar for want of experiences extraneous to it. Although we may never sound its furthermost reaches, if of furthermost we can speak at all concerning an entity which may be unbounded, nor learn of all its evolutions and vicissitudes through aeons untold, there is nothing we know and cherish that was not wrought within its bountiful domain, where we ourselves run the course of our limited yet all-encompassing lives. Nothing has ever touched our knowledge that was not born of the very universe we tread within, and which permeates all there might be rightly said to pertain to our existence. We are one with its being, its matter and its form, and it was it which taught us that all things are or are not - that there are voids of cold and darkness, barren of all which we conceive to be bound with our living world, and that likewise there surround us countless multifarious wonders of substance. The cosmos is all to us - our cradle, our grave, our home; and yet...

...And yet, the cradle and the grave would not be such were there something which is not a cradle or a grave, even though their tenants be unaware of it; and that which is all to us may not be all, or, indeed, [i]be[/i] at all, to something which is itself not us. To every home there is a stranger; and, however immense the cosmos might be, the mind struggles to rid itself of the ever-returning interrogative of what there is beyond its limits, whether it have any or not. An idle question, it might appear, and mayhap it is so; yet its persistence is as unyielding as curiosity itself, and as curiosity reckless. For it might be that certain things it is not meet for a dweller of the universe to light upon other than in conjecture, if even thus: for if one thinks overlong of the abyss, it can so happen that the abyss think back.

Amidst the palely gleaming suns of distant galaxies, untroubled by the placid grinding of the celestial spheres, the void hovered in its quintessential nonexistence, no shard or speck of astral detritus drifting to mar the absolute perfection of its inmost nature. A stillness unbroken for epochs beyond reckoning hung over the expanse rent by wandering rays of light, its ever-shifting confines flowing at tremendous speed unperceived, yet perpetually frozen in a curious regularity of demarcation. Patterns ephemeral and inconceivable wove themselves in a matter of instants and dissolved just as suddenly, their vortices of generation and renewal seemingly chaotic, yet in truth governed by laws so ancient and fundamental that their origin could scarcely be even guessed at by the cognition of the flitting motes of vitality which peopled certain sparse nooks of this grandiose design. The cosmos lived and breathed in this strange regularity, its motions seeding the shapes of matter with new variations, and in turn by them revitalised and given structure and purpose. The universal cycle thrived in its own circularity, and with it all that was contained therein thrived also.

Anon, there seemed to come a subtle change over the scene. An unseen shadow flitted over the still radiance of the far-off stars; the flight of the spheres grew infinitesimally slower with anticipation; the great rhythmic patterns pulsed interrogatively, almost stopping in their tracks. Moments or ages, which was all one in the shifting immutability, swept by; then, there was something. One could not say whether it had come as an encroaching advance, or had been as abrupt as the incineration of a dying world, nor if it was indeed there, or that was a mere reflection of something galaxies away, nor, indeed, what it was; all that was certain about it, if certainty could there be, was that it was where nothing had been, and, indeed, should have been. The void was no longer void, and yet, through some suspension of its inmost principles, it remained void, and such a suspension was dreadful to imagine. All the while, there was no presence or entity to fill it; all there was was an emptiness which was empty no longer.

Then it came. A distortion given shapeless form, undulating as a stellar ocean of aethereal taint, spreading ravenously as a tumorous growth festering on incorruptible regularities. Welling from the abnormality of the defiled void in cacophonic silence, an un-thing which could not have been, for no language, conceivable or not, could have expressed its modality of transcosmic being-without-being, clutched with concave, curvilinearly angular extensions at the heat of stars and the shadows of drifting planets to pull its mass, or rather its conspicuous lack thereof, through a gateway which could not have been opened, for it did not exist. Its impossible presence grew with such rapidity that there could be no mention of speed in a thorough, if futile, attempt to describe it, enshrouding increasingly vast fractions of infinity, till it could have been apparent that the absence of any limits was yet a limit too harsh for its tremendous expansion to suffer. The Un-Thing's immobile forms writhed in quiescent frenzy, reaching for depths of dimension the cosmos could not have, and shaping them where they failed to find them. Though it could not be otherwise than satiated, it craved more - more of what was beyond all, yet, failing that, of all itself. And all the while, the torn, mangled shreds of the universe's patterns no longer sang, but, shrinking from a hunger which could not be sated for it never could have been there, murmured in unutterable, crushing dread one thing, and one thing only:

[i]The Outsider is within.[/i]