A TRAGIC HOMECOMING
And so we slept for a million millennia, on the edge of our great city. So close and yet so far! Why were we outside of our fair city, our families and companions mere steps away? The reasons are lost in time. And as we slumbered, our tropical paradise became a land of neverending winter, a polar graveyard.
We were woken, those of us who still lived. Four lived and four were lost. We woke in confusion and terror, our tropic city gone, the snow and wind howling around us. Strange bipedal things cried out and lay their hands upon us, intent on experimentation, their four-legged companions barking and savage... we slew them all in our panic. Odd creatures, these bipedal explorers. Were they the new masters of this world? Were they our peers? We, the Elder Race, have few of those.
We took some of their equipment, and a body each of the bipeds and their companions for further study. We buried our dead and then made haste back to our city, to see what changes a million millennia had wrought. After our leave-taking, new explorers arrived. They discovered our city.
We returned to our home. It had became an empty palace of the dead. Where were our fellows? Where were our servants, the creatures we called Shoggoths?
Only our loyal companions remained in this terrible empty city. They squawked their excitement at our return. A million millennia is a long time! But they could tell us nothing of what had become of our world.
And as we explored our ruins, so the new explorers explored as well.
Overcome with despair, we journeyed to a refuge that had been built by our kind, a city constructed within a subterranean sea. We followed our tunnels down. And there we found not our sought-for homecoming... but another necropolis. And so we found our doom. Shoggoths! Traitorous servants! As they had risen up against our kind in ages past, they had rebelled again - but this time they had won. They had destroyed our undersea refuge and all of our kind. And as we gazed upon our shattered city within the dark waters beneath the earth, the Shoggoths rose once more... and slew the last of us.
'Twas indeed a tragic homecoming. We that remained of the Elder Race, lost out of time, born again into a world so strange, and then so quickly slain.
The biped explorers had their own meeting with our rebel servants. The meeting did not go well.
And yet, unlike us, they managed to escape the Shoggoths, and fled our city.
In their flight, did they pass near that fearsome land next to ours, beyond our mountains? Ancient Kadath. A place out of time, home to the Old Ones. Terrible Kadath! We had lived in Kadath's shadow, in the shadow of those old slumbering gods, so long ago. What did the explorers glimpse in their flight near Kadath? Were we not the only beings the explorers had woken?