These are the comforting lies the Necronomicon tells you:
There are hideous Beings out there, beyond our ordinary understanding but not quite so far that they cannot touch us, cannot touch our minds, cannot assert their Realities into our dimension.
There are Secrets of the Universe, knowledge unlocked only from the foulest and most blasphemous notes, scrawled in the blood of a dozen different half-human hands, understood—even in part, even in fragments—only long enough to destroy anything that might ever have resembled sanity.
Mankind is inconsequential; within the multifarious facets of Existence are Things, part entity, part un-space, segments of fragmental ur-Creation, compared to whom the whole existence of our species, its tiny beginnings and its inevitable end, are so inconsequential that their destruction of all things we might know or want is the tiniest accident, the merest by-product of their most passing thought.
All around us, existing at odd angles we can neither see nor access, but always among us, are hideous warpings of the Tellurian, which we can just feel at the edges of our oldest, most terrified instincts.
But this is the ghastly truth:
There are many things we cannot know, things that cannot be known; but the extent of that which we can know is so broad and vast that our ignorance is the merest guttering candle in the inexorable blackness of comprehension, of no more true comfort to us than a glass of ice-water in Hell; that ice-water would not even count as a torment, for in less time than it takes to blink (if, in Hell, one had eyelids) the ice would have been turned to boiling steam, the water dried up so rapidly it might as well have never existed, the glass exploding into shards before the mind could recognize that there even is a glass.
The truth is, we hardly need Cosmic Horror to create Multicosmic Atrocity.
The truth is, there are so many perfectly knowable bits of nigh-infinite awfulness that we ought spare little mental sweat about that which can’t be named or comprehended.
…and that’s not the real problem.
In Lovecraft’s world, one must be misfortunate on a truly epic scale, or else deranged and power-mad to unprecedented extremes, in order to delve into That Which Mankind Was Not Meant To Know.
The truth is, all you need is a little motivation, and a little knowledge.
The truth is, there are more humans alive now than at any other point in history, and more knowledge available than Mankind has ever known.
The truth is, we only wish that the truest horrors are beyond our ken.
The truth is, the truth is out there, and we don’t have to go “too far” for it to wreck every hope and dream our species has ever had.
We only need a small fraction of us to go a few inches in order to wreak upon ourselves things next to which Damnation is a comforting fable.
The truth is, we already have.
[postscript:
The truth is, everything said here is the truth.
But it’s not the only truth.
The War for Reality is not truly lost. Stay tuned. Fight on.]
