I have come into possession of a certain ancient book, a collection of arcane scrawlings reputed to have been derived from an even earlier transcription, allegedly lost during the great fire of 1666. The Chthonic Chronicles! I cannot disclose here the precise and rather unsavoury means by which I acquired this weather-worn tome, but I immediately recognized the veracity of the fevered inscriptions contained within. Apparently derived from an incomplete Latin translation of the original source material, the text sporadically lapses into an indecipherable tongue which the transcription cryptically notes as being Old High Atlantean. Glyphs, sigils, occult pictograms, six score and ten oblations to some malign entity of colossal evil...some diabolical avatar of the Z'xulth. Khthon! I must delve further into the foreboding dept...Terrifying axioms, shadow-haunted lexicon, ...covered within this shadow-haunted volume was a terrifying axiom so inestimably terrible in its magnitude that it would shatter all man's carefully orchestrated views of the cosmos and render utterly redundant previous theories on the origin of humankind. Lore dating from time immemorial; lore surviving in the records of long extinct civilizations, be it inscribed upon parchment now crumbled to dust, etched into the sand-whipped, glyph-scored stone of hoary temples, or committed to verbal traditions long since ingrained into some collective tri...Brooding dark, deepest night...In the brooding darkness of the nig...sss, oftimes in the brooding darkness of the night, I have sensed their malefic gaze upon me, lurking, inexorably dogging my every step, their existence perceived only as some unnamable sense of fearful unease, and the occaisional glimpse of black shimmering against black in the depths of the teeming shadows... I hear them whispering when the mantle of darkness silences the world, and the sibilant words they utter are not for the minds of men to know. O' how I wish I had left those vile and fathomless depths of cryptical lore wholly and mercifully unplumbed! O', how I long for the assuaging balm of ignorance to once again soothe my ravaged mind! But such pleadings are, of course, ultimately in vain. I must keep my wits about me. Even now the stars align, the celestial spheres moving into the prophesied posi