the New Praesidium, and the wolves were bay...hing from the east, and the sylvan liege ...his arboreal realm. And so it was that towa...Sentinels of land and sea, guardians of d...onis Bipedes, swift and furious beast of ba...lood in my veins... and the dragon's heart ... in the fray, faith and steel shall win the...A god to serf and king alike, the Ada...ime! We shall rule, and upon our dominion t...ke from a fantastic and somewhat ...o writhe squamously and alter their shape e...ed at once familiar and yet intrusively ali...and peer out over its p...arcane diagrams pinpointing certain astral portals and places of empyreal ...ed by some nameless and implacable gloom;

mains unidentified, and the artifact was on...ok, 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 so...ons here, six score and ten, this avatar, m...e maleficent whorls and verticils of this dark tome... but what lies at the heart of it? A vespertine viper's nest of sublime wickedness! What I discovered 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 redu...And yet, such enlightenment has not been a prize easily won...I have communed with native shamans, consulted with misanthropic diabloists, I have confronted the martial agents, acolytes and cultists of clandestine sects who would see their knowledge safeguarded at all costs. Hildebrandt and the Quorum have tre...Whorls and verticils, black wi...ighted woe, shunned and forbidden tome, ..., this vile shunned and forbidden tome, ...aught but malleable and tractable clay to be worked at by unimaginable sculptors, immortal star-spanning fiends! What inhuman eyes even now watch the inconsequential toilings of man from afar? The answers to these questions of denied primacy and direful cosmogony were too repulsively horrific to contemplate, and yet... I knew the ...And more terrifying still... The Z'xulth and their villainous ag... 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 positions of the great astral conjunction. Am I t

ich had previously, and blessedly, safeguar...my reason and prevented my mind from accepting the full and staggering magnitude of the naked truth then crumbled, fading into nothingness like the dissolution of a night-mist. At length, one oppressively miasmic night, with such malefically portentous lore preying pitilessly upon my sanity, I began to descend through a myriad veils of sombre and swirling shades, finally surrendering my grip on wakefulness. And on that fitful, fat...ery flesh, all this and more was unknown to me. I stood upon a nighted vista... unfeasibly alien, and yet at once wholly, unnervingly familiar. In my hand I grasped a glimmering crystal which although beautiful in its shimmering radiance, was as black as the impenetrable depths of the most stygian midnight sea. As I gazed into the obsidian heart of the gem, a needle of black light lanced forth from its multi-faceted surface and filled my eyes with a panoply of fantastic hues, revealing to me in between its pulses of massing darkness certain fleeting glimpses of places and things so fantastically terrifying that I could not faithfully begin to recount their hideous and yet grimly compelli... the world perished and been reborn! ...oruscating rings of arcane power? ... Praise Klatrymadon and Zuranthus! The Six ...le? Know you of the astral power permeating the multiverse and the might of the cosmic codex? Know you of the rise and fall of glorious At...T: I know all this, and more! ...CRYSTALLINE ORACLE: And what did you see th...NT: I saw oblivion, and damnation. I saw truth, and enlightenment. I saw the closure of the Great Circle Without End. I saw the Sixth Great Cataclysm. I saw the alpha and the omega, I saw the beginning... and I saw the end. The