“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.” – H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Who can speak to the shape of an entity whose visage shatters the sanity of anyone who gazes upon it? And yet, descriptions and depictions of Cthulhu exist, even if they are rough parodies of something beyond our comprehension. Occasionally, his dreams have haunted the mind of an artist, and even as their psyche snapped like dried kindling under the immense strain, they attempted to realize the images onto their preferred medium. Some artists who have experienced this sculpted an approximation of his shape from stone or clay, while others put words to paper. None truly succeeded, but from their ramblings and rude works, scholars of the esoteric have derived some idea of Cthulhu’s form.
Cthulhu is often depicted as an immense and grotesque being, his form an amalgamation of nightmarish features. Tentacles writhe around an elongated, rubbery visage that seems to mirror elements of the great cephalopods of the ocean deeps. Four baleful, crimson eyes stare from beneath fleshy brows. It is said that in the center of his head, a fifth orb remains tightly shut—his “dreaming eye,” the means by which he sees the world while he slumbers. His shoulders are dominated by a pair of huge wings, limp and tattered from millennia of disuse. Cthulhu’s body is scored in patterns that blend the biological and the mechanical, marred by thick patches of rotten, decaying flesh.
The Spawn of Cthulhu
No contemporaneous early histories of Cthulhu and his brood have been written by human hands, for if myths are to be believed, they arrived on Earth long before humanity’s ancestors first struck stone on flint. However, reports from expeditions to the Antarctic and other remote regions of Earth have left scholars of the esoteric with tantalizing clues about these beings’ origins and identity.
The Star Spawn of Cthulhu were lesser beings who resembled their master in shape, if not in stature. It is believed that Cthulhu and his spawn came to Earth from the vast cosmic void during a time predating humanity. They built their cities upon the land and, in so doing, precipitated an apocalyptic war with another species that had claimed the planet for their own: the strange creatures known only as the Elder Things. This war ended in stalemate, with each side claiming their own part of the world. But then, some disaster befell Cthulhu’s capital of R’lyeh, causing it to sink beneath the waves of the world’s oceans.
Yet as Cthulhu begins to awaken after eons untold, his mind once more boils with thoughts unfathomable to all. Some thoughts are so powerful, they create actual creatures; creatures who are born embryonic and malnourished. They are known as Cthonian Broodlings, and they hunger for their essence: thought. Arriving on our shores, they stalk the air of coastal towns looking to sate their constant hunger.
