A Bit of the World's History

There was once a race known as the Rathaek, who lived on a world that orbited a black sun that gave no light, and being quite invisible, nothing would be known about it. The world was alive because at the center of it was an immense core of a certain green, glowing crystal, the nature of which would defy any attempt at scientific discussion. And the energy of it's glow gave the warmth that it's barren sun denied, and strange life drew sustance from it, forming fields of living flesh that combine the nature of animal and fungus. And for us this world lies in a distant future where few stars indeed illuminate the night sky, and from the nightmare existance of the once benign cosmos those few straggelers along the path to oblivion cast down their benighted gaze, but from those who came from there it lies in the past, and indeed is also our past. Who can fathom the nature of time, and yet retain the sanity to tell about it? But I digress....

The Rathaek stood alone as the only sentient, or indeed the only mobile, species to arise out of that seething, undifferentiated mass, and from it they shaped their world. Their cities they caused to arise as massive bones of the fleshfungi, and other parts of it they caused to produce light, of that same green hue, much as our fireflies and anglerfish do. They shaped their own forms in the same way, to their own whims, and different members of the species had entirely different physical forms, depending on the lot in life selected for them. Therefore it is not possible in any way to describe what they looked like.

In time the energy at the core of the planet began to exhaust itself, and the Rathaek became aware that soon the world would become cold, barren and empty. And as all races who face such and end, they desired a way to cast their seed unto the heavens, that they would not be forever lost in the unfathonamable void, but preserve their memory on a new planet far away. Yet it is to their, and our understanding of reality impossible to travel such distances, that even light may spend centuries traversing. Yet to others, whose vision of reality is different, their might be a way, and thus fot the first time they created an entirely new race of sentient beings.

The race they created at first as a sort of pale, slug like creature, but they would not help the Rathaek until they where given new bodies, much in the form of praying mantises. They then demanded factories of a sort quite unimaginable to these people, who had never worked with any sort of mineral, and mined great quantities of the luminescent green ore, thus hastening the planets doom for the sake of this race's survival. And in the end they built a great silver egg, and placed inside it the spores from which the Rathaek spawned themselves, and their technologies, so they could recreate their world of fungoid flesh, and in secret a great many of their own eggs. And then they, who where quite tiny, entered the silver egg, and began to make it work. It began to spin at an incredible rate, and then vanish. It had in fact ceased to exist.

The mantoid race had learned that while through space and time they could never travel far enough to escape, in a fifth dimension, which some call the shadows, distances in both space and time may be traveled far more easily. The shadows are moments before they exist, for each moment is formed from nothing and returns to it, and at points all possibilities exist simultaneously. If one where to enter entirely this state in all probability they would be lost for all time, but these mantis creatures had made their calculations well, and arrived where they had set out to arrive, a place far away in both space and time, for as they could see this world only as a distant past, in the distant past alone could they arrive there.

Their first act upon arriving was to destroy all the spores of their former masters, and condemn them to the oblivion they so feared. And then with the technologies they had been given they began to create, bringing life to this lifeless world. A great age of insects arose, and they created the preying mantis as the pinnacle of creation, in their own image. They where the lords of this earth, in those days.

But deep within the matrix of life lay the will of the masters who created it, and the technology to shape it, and they would have their revenge. And the control of it slipped away, and strange things rose from the sea, and life grew bigger. By the age of the dinosaurs, life on earth had become unmanigable to these insect overlords. They had studied much in the long ages, and through science arrived at the secrets of magic, and things much like our so called "eastern mysticism" but far more advanced. They learned many things about the nature of the shadows, it took no machines to go there, only a switch in perspective, and they learned to survive there. And so one day they all simply vanished.

They exist still, at the verge of each moment, they watch us, seeing all possibilities though knowing nothing definite. They shape the world still, influencing events as they spawn from the infinite void and primordial chaos that is it's bride. In the shadows they dwell, and from the shadows they rule, these rightful lords of the earth.