by Mark Latham
At the behest of the priesthood, the frumentarii broke into many of the shrines and temples of this strange god, and stole away with what trappings and relics they could find in such meagre places of worship. Some of the spies were captured, and tales of their torture were so gruesome as to turn the stomachs of even the most bloodthirsty Roman.
With what relics were brought to Rome, the priests of the quindecimviri sacris were able to identify the deity as Dagon, that powerful god of the deepest oceans who had once been worshipped across Parthia and beyond, but had been driven out when the Magi renounced the old gods. The Liber Ivonis records that Dagon birthed a number of vast, monstrous offspring, who patrolled the seas in search of R’lyeh, and would surely oppose the rise of Cthulhu. These monsters had, over many eons, created offspring of their own, which in time had mated with humans in blasphemous unions, creating the spawn known as Deep Ones.
The allegiance of the Deep Ones is at best uncertain, and the priesthood became wary of placing too much faith in these creatures, who once enjoyed divine status in secretive, depraved rituals across the Empire.
Using the sigils recovered from the Dagon cults of Sarmatia, the priesthood came to an altogether more disturbing realization. The Deep Ones and their hybrid descendants, for so long protected and venerated by secret Cthulhu cults within Rome, were not truly the offspring of Cthulhu, but of Dagon. That some of these creatures had long ago sworn allegiance to Cthulhu was testament to the power of the Great Old One. That so many of them now dwelt within Rome, hidden amongst the populace, became a source of great worry. If they could break their fealty once, then who was to say they would not do so again?
From that day forth, the priesthood announced strict edicts to control the number of Sarmatians who entered the city of Rome, checking each and every one for signs of ‘corruption’. The borders around the Black Sea were reinforced, and no more did Rome pursue its ambitions towards Scythia.
THE LOST LEGION OF THE FAR EAST
In 53 BC, the Roman army of Crassus, famed vanquisher of Spartacus, was massacred by Parthian forces at the Battle of Carrhae. Around 10,000 Roman soldiers were captured, the rest slain. Of these captives, many were sent to Parthia’s borders, as was tradition, to serve as border guards. Many hardened soldiers from Crassus’ legions were sent to the east, to discourage any temptation to escape.
Accepting their new lot in life, the legionaries were thrust into a war against the Chinese army of Chen Tang, where they were ultimately defeated and pressed once more into a foreign army, forced to fight for the Chinese in Gansu province.
The Romans took their strange gods with them to China, and there learned of new ones. The fabled, immortal sorcerers of the Han Dynasty took charms of Mithras – and, of course, Cthulhu – from the surviving legionaries. The latter they studied keenly, for they had long known of the legends of the many-tentacled dragon that slumbers beneath the sea, and had prepared for its coming. Seeing that their 3,000-year-old prophecies were on the verge of being made manifest, the sorcerers cloistered themselves away to begin the great ritual of balance, which would, they hoped, prevent the rise of Cthulhu and seal off China from foreign invasion for centuries to come.
The men of the lost legion had travelled further than any Roman before them, and in doing so had inadvertently hampered the great plan of the priesthood.
The Phoenicians and the Spider-God
The Phoenicians were an ancient people who first colonized the lands east of the Mare Nostrum, or Mediterranean, almost 3,000 years before the founding of Rome. A great seafaring nation, the Phoenicians were the forebears of the Carthaginians.
Throughout their long history, the Phoenicians were conquered several times, by the Persians, by the Greeks and, finally, by the Romans. In 65 BC, Pompey conquered Phoenicia and declared it part of the newly founded province of Syria. As always, Phoenician soldiers were pressed into the Roman legions, slaves were taken, nobles were forced to swear fealty to the Emperor, and the state religion was installed in temples across the land. The Romans were to find, however, that a people with such a long history would not easily forget the old ways, even if they wished to.
When the first subterranean temples were discovered, dedicated to a mysterious Phoenician spider-god, the priesthood was duly excited. The Liber Ivonis had long foretold of the Great Old One, Tleche-Naka, the spider that would one day spin a web between the Dreamlands and the waking world. The priesthood believed that, through the spells of the Phoenicians, they could at last find a way to connect Cthulhu’s infinite consciousness with this slumbering body, bringing him from the Dreamlands, and allowing him at last to break free of his prison in R’lyeh.
The priesthood ordered one of the abandoned temples brought back, reconstructing it stone by stone beneath its college in Rome, complete with a gigantic statue of the bulging, hideous spider-god itself. Using fragmentary rituals found carved on stone tablets, the priests attempted to commune with Tleche-Naka and beseech its aid in awakening their master. However, they were not prepared for the horror that would unfold as a result.
For many nights thereafter, all 15 of the priests were visited by terrifying nightmares in which they were trapped within Tleche-Naka’s web and impregnated with her hideous, voracious young. The priests were much disturbed by the dark magic working upon them, and so convened a service in which they planned to strengthen the magical shackles binding Tleche-Naka to their will. During this ritual, one of their number took suddenly ill with terrible stomach cramps, before vomiting forth a torrent of tiny spiders. He died instantly, little more than a shrivelled husk, as millions of spiders scurried to the depths of the college, to the rebuilt temple of Tleche-Naka.
Too late, the priests realized what they had done. The spider-god was no ally of Cthulhu, and no simple beast to be commanded by mortals. They had given worship to this alien deity for the first time in millennia, and awoken something evil in the depths of their own city as a result.
The terrified priests at once summoned their most trusted praetorians to them, sending them down into the labyrinthine catacombs armed with wards against dark forces, while the priests themselves began spells of purification, lest they meet the same fate as their comrade. In the tunnels beneath the college, the praetorians did battle with a monstrous spider, seemingly made of stone, whose fangs punched through armour and shields as though they were papyrus, and whose baleful screeches rooted even the bravest man to the ground in terror. Ultimately, the praetorians prevailed by assembling a ballista within the tight corridors, and smashing the spider asunder with volleys of heavy bolts. Several praetorians began to exhibit signs of infection from spider-bites, and were at once put to death before they could birth more of the creatures. It took three days of scouring the tunnels with flame before any priest dared set foot there again.
The frumentarii were once more dispatched to Syria to uncover as much of the lore of Tleche-Naka as they could, for the Sibylline texts were woefully incomplete on the subject. The spies interviewed many Syrian holy men and raided many tombs and shrines, before sending back cart-loads of relics and tablets to Rome.
After years of study, the priesthood discovered the grave error it had made. Tleche-Naka was said to have come from a land beyond the edge of the world, where vast plains of endless ice had once been home to towering mountains and fertile hills. The spider-god had spun a vast web to bridge the gap between its strange realm and the material world, and with it had come the toad-like Tsathoggua, the Old One. Tleche-Naka’s allegiances did not lie with Cthulhu, it seemed, but with Tsathoggua, whose foul image was still worshiped in parts of Africa.
In addition, the great stone idols of Tleche-Naka found in every crumbling temple of old Phoenicia were not statues at all, but the fossilized remains of the Children of Tleche-Naka. Upon the recovered tablets, the priests learned that the consciousness of Tleche-Naka could inhabit and animate these remains for a short time, and even possess mortals through the Dreamlands, impregnating them with
her vile progeny. It was impossible to say how many of the fledgling spiders had escaped the college, and now grew fat in the dark corners of Rome. The priesthood could only hope that the Children of Tleche-Naka would not thrive and return one day to plague the streets of their great city.
THE NAMELESS CITY
Beyond the province of Syria, on the Arabian Peninsula or Arabia Magna, Roman influence was insignificant. Emissaries regularly found their way there, securing trade with the Arabs and exploring the region in the name of Rome. Occasionally conflict broke out, most notably when Trajan conquered swathes of the northern parts of Arabia. Holding such a vast territory, proved impossible, however, and Roman interests eventually shrank back to the borders of the Limes Arabicus, leaving most of Arabia Magna untroubled by Roman interference.
In the second century AD, the Romans made valuable allies in the form of the Ghassanids, descended from the Azd tribes. These people had migrated ever northwards, leaving the southern territories of the Arabia Magna to settle in Syria. Of the many colourful stories and intricate traditions of Arabia that the Romans gleaned from the Ghassanids, the most interesting was a fable of a place called the Nameless City. Every tribesman claimed some knowledge of the place, but no two reports were ever the same. Some claimed that the city lay at the centre of the shifting sands of the Nufud; others that it was completely buried beneath the desert of Rub al’Khali; others still said that it was not in the desert at all, but was an underground city carved deep into one of the mountains of the Hamad.
What all agreed on was that the Nameless City was lost in the heart of the great desert, although it was once a vast port, having been lost many thousands of years ago when the gods caused the seas to retreat and scorched the land. It was inhabited not by men, but by a race of reptilian creatures like intelligent crocodiles, who crawled low on all fours and worshipped a god called the ‘Great Serpent’, known to ancient tribes as Yig.
Only a small portion of the city was said to be above ground; the rest lay sprawling beneath the sands, perhaps many leagues deep, stretching out in measureless caverns filled with unfathomable treasures left by the gods themselves. According to the Ghassanids, only a fool would set foot in the Nameless City, if it could even be found at all, for the reptile-people still inhabited its Stygian depths. Needless to say, the priesthood dispatched the hardiest of the frumentarii southwards within days of hearing the tale.
AFRICA PROCONSULARIS
After the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, Rome set about forging great provinces in North Africa. The first, taken from the Carthaginians, was Africa Proconsularis, also called Africa Vetus, a vast territory of fertile coastal land upon which enormous quantities of crops were grown to feed the burgeoning Empire. Once, this province was separate from Numidia, an erstwhile ally of Rome, but eventually that land too was subsumed by Roman ambition, creating a vast African territory that extended as far as the Atlas Mountains to the west, beyond which the Sahara desert stretches farther than any man had dared travel inland.
Tsathoggua Worship
Many of the more remote tribes of Africa worshiped gods whose names are barely known beyond the bounds of the province. Among these, the most insidious discovered so far by the frumentarii was the toad-god, called by some Tsathoggua.
According to the Liber Ivonis, Tsathoggua came to the mortal realm with the Phoenician spider-god, Tleche-Naka, where he first made his home upon fabled Atlantis, subduing all of those enlightened priests to his will, and turning them to the practice of human sacrifice to sate his dark appetites. So displeased were the other gods at the arrival of Tsathoggua that they punished the people of Atlantis by destroying their realm and sending it to the bottom of the ocean, where now it is inhabited only by Deep Ones.
Tsathoggua entered a slumbering state thereafter, though his followers carried his message far and wide. So reviled were his ancient priests, and so fearsome his dictates, that followers of Tsathoggua were persecuted wherever they went. Only in the most remote regions of the world, in superstitious villages and isolated communities, did his worship thrive. In the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, perhaps the greatest and most open cults of Tsathoggua endured. There, he was sometimes called ‘Sadogowah’, the Endless Hunger.
The frumentarii reported squat, square temples of basalt blocks, unadorned and often hidden from view in deep valleys and amidst rocky crags. Venturing within was difficult, for the temples were patrolled constantly by bloodthirsty tribesmen, always eager to spill the blood of outsiders. Inside the temples, however, the floor sloped downwards into the bowels of the earth, into a square chamber where no light could penetrate. The floor of this chamber was covered with the bones of Tsathoggua’s offerings – human bones – and the sacrificial altar in the centre of the room was overlooked by a terrible black idol, smooth and toad-like but for the deep red gemstones at its eyes. It was said by the local tribesmen that the toad-god was a hungry god, and that fresh sacrifice was laid at his feet each day. The blood of the offering was absorbed by the hideous black statue, at which moment formless demons would push their way through the solid basalt walls of the temple and cavort with the priests of Tsathoggua. The flesh of the sacrifice was carved up, some devoured by the hideous shadow-creatures, and some by Tsathoggua’s priests, whose greed matched that of their dark master.
That not all of the frumentarii sent to investigate these temples returned was a matter of much consternation for the priesthood, for as long as one such accursed idol lay undiscovered in the world, Tsathoggua’s power remained a threat.
‘This was a squat, plain temple of basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing only a vacant onyx pedestal… It has been built in imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible black toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts.’
– The Mound
Tribes of Chaugnar Faugn
During the Punic Wars, the collection of Berber kingdoms that comprised Numidia swayed between support for Rome and support for Carthage. The Carthaginians had long held good relations with the Numidians, and many of their greatest generals fought alongside Berber forces, and trained in their ways of warfare.
It was while treating with Maharbal, an esteemed Numidian cavalry commander, that Hannibal was inducted into the mysteries of Chaugnar Faugn. Worship of the elephant-headed god had reached Numidia centuries earlier, though it was often restricted to the more far-flung tribes. However, the keepers of Numidia’s war elephants were devotees of this strange deity, and upon seeing their beasts in action, Hannibal was a convert. It was said that, in hidden temples sited in deep caves, Hannibal met for himself the Children of Chaugnar Faugn, who showed him a great destiny ahead. Possessed by ambition, courage – or, perhaps, madness – Hannibal left those caves after three days and three nights, determined to free his country from the nuisance of Rome.
When Hannibal departed Numidia, it was with 37 war elephants, the largest of which was a strange beast indeed, named Suru. This creature was treated with great reverence by the Numidians, being not only of great size and battle-hungry temperament, but also of singular intelligence and strange aspect. The creature had a single large tusk – while many assumed the other had been lost in a fight, the tribesmen assured Hannibal that the creature was born that way, as a symbol of its divine power. Its tusk was said to hold the power of Chaugnar Faugn, although to remove it would bring the most dreadful curse upon the land. Suru was also covered in thick, bony ridges along its back and shoulders, like a rhinoceros, affording it remarkable protection in battle. These abnormalities were always covered by a thick red blanket and painted shields, and Suru was the only elephant in Hannibal’s army to carry a howdah. Some said, during his famous campaign against the Romans, that Hannibal would spend many nights communing with Suru as though the creature were a trusted advisor.
AEGYPTUS
Egypt was one of the wealthiest provinces in the Roman Empire. Rich in gold and
slaves, its vast grain shipments earned Egypt the name ‘breadbasket of the Empire’. So pivotal was Egypt to Roman ambitions that it had even caused brothers-in-arms to turn on each other, as when Octavian had been forced to go to war with Mark Antony. The latter had discovered old magic in the Valley of Kings, and thought that he could free himself and Rome from the iron grip of the priesthood and its hideous alien god; he had not counted on the sheer bloody-mindedness of the quindecimviri sacris, nor on the sheer determination of Octavian.
Although annexed and ruled by a string of Roman governors from 30 BC, Egypt remained very much an alien land to the Romans. Its people’s worship of bizarre deities was not easily quashed, and myriad tombs and mysterious pyramids housed mysteries barely understood by most living Egyptians, let alone strangers to the realm.
The greatest regret of the priesthood was that the Romans could salvage nothing from the fabled Library of Alexandria. Once the largest repository of knowledge in the known world, it was destroyed by the Greeks, who believed that they were protecting mankind from ancient lore that man had no right to know. With the loss of the library in 48 BC, the priesthood was left with but a handful of tomes and scrolls detailing the time of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods. With so many fragments of lore incomplete, it proved too dangerous to attempt the rituals required for Cthulhu’s awakening. Still, rumours abounded that some papers were rescued by the library’s would-be destroyers, and lay in Alexandria still, perhaps sealed in forgotten catacombs, waiting to be rediscovered.
‘Some were the figures of well-known myth – gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend – black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books …’