The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia
Cosmographers
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Purists love spectrums, and love to place themselves in the best light. Yet we all come from somewhere, and that somewhere frustrates our sense of deep roots because it comes from somewhere else, which again comes from somewhere else, be it a continent away or some strand of DNA. We can pride ourselves on being Vicinese or Fallarian, and insist on the spectrum that defines our place in the order of things. We can note that the Kraslika extends from the northern idealism of the Vicinese to the southern anarchy of the Fallarians. Yet we can also forget that spectra contract and curve, and that balls roll away at the slightest incline.
Even within parts of a spectrum, the colours can go into reverse. For instance, The Blue Dream universe (in the Dolcezza cluster) contains planets of pure Idealism beyond anything you could find in the nordernmost planets of the Vicinese Federation. On these planets, the Blue Dreamers go as deep into dreams of bliss and beauty as Dante did “In the Heaven that takes more of God’s light” (Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende). On the planet of Cyan Sogna life is more elegantly beautiful than even the finest Vicinese poet could imagine. Only the Romantic poet Percy Shelley could come close to imagining it. And yet for Shelley it’s only the extraordinary poet, “the unacknowledged legislator of the world,” who is able to burn “through the inmost veil of Heaven.” On Cyan Sogna, on the other hand, even accountants and car mechanics become “like a star” that “beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”
Similarly, there are wastelands in the Yellow Sky and the Frozen Skiff that are more unnerving than the Inorridito Gulf, located several dozen kilometres from Fallar Discordia, the capital of the Fallarian Dominion.
It isn’t necessary here for me to give my own scholarly account of the bleak universes of the Yellow Sky and the Frozen Skiff. These have been documented in great detail by Thomas Lovecraft, whose last name is a translation of his Frozen Skiff name, Navamor.
150 years ago Navamor flew over northern Canada, where everything below him seemed identical to his home planet Úzhass. He saw pale skies, empty stretches of tundra, angry stars above, and ugly long scratches beneath, where alien beings had dragged their thrashing prey for hundreds of kilometres.
After landing his plane, Navamor saw the same scratches, although in miniature, along the dirty floors and sombre walls of Pearson International Airport. The angry customs officers were also the same: they couldn’t care less who you were, yet they suspected you of unspeakable terrorism and treachery nonetheless. So far, it was just like home.
After making use of a special neural agent to get past Customs, Navamor made his way to downtown Toronto. There he was infuriated by the ubiquity of passive-aggressive politeness, political correctness, and stifling equality. He realized that the icy, puritanical, elitist society he sought was to the south, in America, despite its War of Independence and its claims to liberty and equality for all. Using the whiteness of his skin as a passport, he soon became a citizen of New England.
It was in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, surrounded by the echo of Salem and the ghost of Poe, that Navamor first penned his strange stories. Well, they were strange to the citizens of Earth, but they were well-known bedtime stories in his home county of Kholmy Bezumiya. Despite what people say about Lovecraft’s wild and eery imagination, he was a mere scribe.
In The Hills of Madness, Navamor changes the names of places and historical figures from his beloved home county. Although he makes it seem like he’s taking the reader on a unique journey across an inexplicable alien landscape, in fact his story is taken, word for word, from a travel guidebook to Kholmy Bezumiya and its capital, the ancient city of Zuumskaraa. The writer of the guidebook, Baatar Nergui, describes its beautiful hills and mighty river, and tells about the ancient inhabitants of the city:
The Old Ones exercised their keen artistic sense by carving into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began its decent into eternal darkness.
While Coleridge had to take opium to get strange visions of a sacred river that “ran, / Through cavernous measureless to man, / Down to a sunless sea,” Navamor merely put a few finishing touches to quotes from the Frozen Skiff travel guide he brought with him from his agency in Zuumskaraa:
… many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels.
Navamor also copied this quote from Nergui:
… a steeply descending walk brings the visitor to the brink of the dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss; down whose sides adequate paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean.
Tourists come from far and wide, enticed by Nergui’s accounts of the epic battles of ancient history — “the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the Shegseths typically left their slain victims,” and “the curious weapons of molecular disturbance” used by the Old Ones to defeat the Shegseths.
But life being what it is, the potential Skiffer tourist has horror songs to listen to and slasher videos at the press of a button. The talented guidebook writer needs something beyond what can be easily restaged by the pornographic violence of AI. So Nergui seduced his prospective tourists by telling them that while the Old Ones, led by Fryth Mconnagath, triumphed over the sluggish Shegseths, there still lurked a greater danger in the bowels of the planet of Úzhass.
Nergui writes that this danger must be felt, not seen on paper or screen. It must be scented in person, sniffed out during a safe and comfortable tour, that was surprisingly inexpensive given the richness of horrors on offer. Nergui stressed that it was only by descending into the ancient caves in person, and by standing stock-still in your own quivering skin that you will hear for yourself the eery voices of the Ancient Deep. Then — and this was guaranteed by the agency — the feeling of Infinite Horror will creep up from the pit of your stomach into your trembling brain. You will see, coming at you from the very walls, the spectre of some horrible Magalithic Power rising from the deep:
In the occult county of Kholmy Bezumiya there remains a sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object — never allowed to appear in the design — found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward mountains.
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