Deepsky Horizon

What force was it that made our ancestors quit the ocean? What pushed them to climb out onto the land and grow larger? Was it perhaps out of fear of the horrors down there in the depths? The things of tendril and chela and mandible. Did they flee in panic from the violence of the abyss to crawl on solid ground? The strong biting at the heels of the weak as they escaped toward the light and out of the soup.

Out on solid land there was scant respite. The parasites and the devourers followed in their hunger. The weak had to adapt, some grew larger and smarter. Eventually primates developed the neo-cortex and they learnt to fashion simple tools and emulating the tooth and claw of their predators they invented the first artificial weapons. So they quit the forest and roamed the land becoming lords of the earth. Millenia passed and eventually their children settled and planted seeds. They built walls around their enclosures and developed art and ritual and civilization.

The barbarism did not stop there. Nature always breeds new forms of warfare.The growth of cities demanded an ever growing supply of resources. Tyrants developed the mega-machines of slavery and war. Mankind spread like a plague upon the earth and their appetite could not be satisfied. There was nothing to hold the population in check and with the globalisation of humanity the cities became ever more crowded. So man came to look to the stars, seeking new sanctuary.

...

It was like a teardrop falling from the heavens. Enveloped in the glow of atmospheric re-entry the craft traced a downward arc across the alien sky. It glided down from the stratosphere and the parachutes bloomed into life, the module feathering down to the martian surface.

Settled down in the dust, the landing craft opened its mouth and extruded its tongue. A catterpillar wheeled buggy lurched out into the sand blown mesa. The three cosmonauts dwelt in silence. Before them rose the pile. The dark mountain greeted them with malignant immplacability as they angled towards it under the hostile sky.

A schism reached out from the foot of the eminence and a strange glow rose up from the scar, a shifting aurora of sickening colors. The strange hues of the auroral anomaly seemed to creep into the compartment with them as they descended into the rift. As they went deeper, they became aware of massive skeletal things reaching out from the cliff faces, as if trying to escape from the rock. Giant things like the leviathans of earth's prehistory but of too many bones, as if parts of different organisms had been fused into singular abominations. Now in front of them they were piled in their multitudes.

The cosmonauts were in sight of their destination. A piece of alien architecture broke out fom the precipice at the end of the canyon. The shape of it resembled that of a gothic cathedral, though of decidedly unholy aspect and of dimensions dwarfing anything human. The construction of the frame, somewhat eroded by the passing of the ages, was a grotesque carcass of bony scaffolding, echoing the delicti that was heaped up in front of the temple. Adding to the aura of death and decay, the alien shrine and the area surrounding it was suffocated in some kind of fossilized fungal growth. A latticework of mycelial cords that clung to everything and enormous mushroom bulbs sprouted up the sides of the towers like cancerous growths.

When the rover could get no further through the mess they abandoned it and continued on foot. They had to struggle on through remains that were now hideously regenerating flesh, pieces knitting themselves together. They bore on through the madness, scrambling through the gore, hypnotised by the call emanating from the sacellum. Its presence grew stronger with every step, crying out for communion.

Their pilgrimage was only half complete when they eventually arrived at the bottom of the enormous steps which led up to an alien god's doorway. The stairs were of stone blocks too large for human feet and they had to climb laboriously from one step to the next, crawling all the way. One man fell and his head depressurised through a crack in his helmet. The others showed no sign of noticing, they merely clambered on.

Finally they stood before the massive doors. The surface of the stone was covered in strange reliefs. Alien heiroglyphs, which as the men looked, began to change shape, morphing in a nauseating kaleidoscopic fashion. A hallucinatory slideshow of images unfolded before their eyes. Some intelligence had reached into their minds and was revealing to them its history in its terrible cosmic narrative.

It drew them back through nameless aeons and inconcievable dimensions, to the elder, outer entity. It sang of Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat with a Thousand Young. Of Him in the Gulf, Azathoth. Nyarlathotep, the Messenger, who comes down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. Of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua and of Him Who is not to be Named.

It told of the elder things arrival here when the sun was young. Of their black science and the vile experiments performed in their shadow labs, the creation of their servants and their pets. It told them of the earth and how these entities had tilled the land, sowing the seeds of life as a farmer sows his crop.

But the day of harvest had been delayed. There had been wars in heaven and the elders had been weakened, almost fatally, and they had been forced to retreat into their vaults to sleep and dream, waiting for the time to rise. The presence of consciousness here had awoken them from their slumber.

Around them now the horrors were rising from their graves with the hunger of their long rest.

A sound, like a demonic chorus, vibrated through the world, signalling the opening of the gate. The doors now started to change. Not merely retracting but rather revolving, moving about an impossible axis of symmetry. The doors dissapeared to be replaced by a liquid mirror of dark matter. Something was coming through...