In Lovecraft’s work “At the Mountains of Madness”, we were first introduced to the Shoggoths, as the geologist William Dyer and a student named Danforth penetrated deep into Antarctica. Discovering a long-abandoned city of the Elder Things, they soon uncovered murals that told the origins of the Shoggoths. The question can be raised; were they even still in Antarctica at that point? They may in fact have travelled to another mystical place entirely, known as the Plateau of Leng. This mystical place may have been a real place in Asia in his Lovecraft’s works, or possibly a place in the Dream Lands, an entirely different realm that can only be accessed by mankind during sleep.
In Other-Terrestrial, Shoggoths simply live in Antarctica, and any signs of ancient civilizations – if the exist in the setting – are long gone.
But when Brooks encounters the Shoggoths in Antarctica and is brought to Kell, he finds himself transported a great distance in a very short time, showing that the Shoggoths do have access to some sort of unearthly technology – there exists great technology in the Sapient Union, but teleportation remains a pipe dream!
This ramp was more steeply inclined, and Brooks struggled up it slowly, while Kell waited at the top.
When he came out, they were no longer near Perry. They were hundreds of miles distant, in the mountains.
His system struggled for a moment before telling him that he was on Mt. Darwin in the Xi Range of the transantarctic mountain range.
Nearly two thousand miles from where he’d recently been.
“How?” he asked breathlessly, snapping his eyes to Kell.
“There are ancient ways to travel,” Kell replied. “Long-forgotten. My kind are the only ones who still know how they work.”
Brooks’s mind struggled, trying to understand this. “Your people have technology?” he asked.
Kell did not look at him, merely out upon the snow that blanketed the land for as far as they could see.
“We only know how to use it,” Kell replied, but offered no more.
Something that implied strange secrets, Brooks thought. And tantalizing; he’d never known of any history given by the Shoggoths – technologically or otherwise.
His words implied his kind had not created it – but if they hadn’t, who had?
Something stayed him in asking, though. Kell’s face seemed unusually intense as it stared out at the flat plains of the diminished Beardmore Glacier to the East.
“These mountains are tall now,” he said. “The ice has shrunk away.” He glanced to Brooks for a mere moment. “I recall watching these glaciers grow from nothing. I was saddened to see them disappear.”
The origins of the Shoggoths, and their connection to the eldritch horrors of bygone ages remains unrevealed . . . for now.
But what can be stated is the preference of Shoggoths for the cold; as Brooks found in Kell’s quarters, the being has little but a pool of water so cold it has ice in it. And indeed, any time someone has touched – or even been close to – Kell they have felt chilled by his very presence.
Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the Shoggoths dwell where they do.
Other Terrestrial 