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    Comic Books 
"There was a darkness outside reality, they say — a darkness full of things. Hungry, nasty things with no shape or form, not as long as they were out there."
Astro City, "Storms of the Heart"

Alien: The truth is that there are living beings in space, invisible to your scientists, undetectable by man-made devices. They are older than this planet, and if they ever had physical bodies they are rid of them now... They simply drift... and wait.
Hellboy: Wait for what?
Alien: They wait to celebrate the downfall of man. If they can, they will cause it. They long to devour all light and life, to make everything as cold and empty as they are themselves. Who can understand a thing like that...?
Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm

Mr. Mxyzptlk: [to Superman] Did you honestly believe a fifth-dimensional sorceror would resemble a funny little man in a derby hat? Would you like to see how I really look?
Lois Lane: I can't describe what Mxyzptlk became. It had height, length, breadth, and a couple of other things. As we entered the fortress I glanced back. It was following us... looking at it made my head hurt.

There he is... The Positive Man! A destructive force which was once— human! That mind-tape revealed he was once an alien scientist who blew up his planet while creating a doomsday bomb! The explosion transformed him into this terrible menace! Envious of all life, he roams the cosmos jealously, destroying inhabited worlds!"

"Interlopers, you are sentient and therefore capable of comprehension, so know this... this is not your place. You are not welcome here. For we are beyond. Beyond understanding. Beyond acquiescence. Beyond justice. We are beyond you. There is a grand experiment underway, and your encroaching is an irritant. Run... while you still can."

"Before all was, I was. Before time was, I waited. I fed on the screaming souls of the universes. I drank the spoiled milk of dead stars. I am the emptiness outside all understanding. I am Shuma-Gorath."
Shuma-Gorath, Mighty Avengers

    Fan Works 
This is Cthulhu, one of the Old Ones. His existence makes the universe's head hurt.

They're unworthy, Gl'bgolyb whispers. Not like her, Gl'bgolyb's perfect pinkblooded immortal child. If they weren't unworthy weakminded mayflies, they wouldn't burst apart when they heard Gl'bgolyb's voice telling them all her wonderful truths. If they deserved to live, they'd live. It's Gl'bgolyb's answer to every death, every injustice Feferi finds.
Lusii, a Homestuck fic

On the other side...on the other side, Twilight saw, oh sweet Celestia she saw she saw! She could feel it trying to suck the life out of her even as she watched, her Element restoring it as it was stolen.

It hated her. It hated her for thinking. It hated her for feeling. It hated her for living. It hated her for existing. One of a centillion criminals who had dared disturb on the silence. Pure. Still. Peaceful. Calm. It didn't want her dead. It wanted it to be that she had never existed at all.

A chilling blasted landscape under a blasted chilling sky, a unfeeling moon looking down all. Little hollowed out buildings, decayed rock formations that were one part rubble. And shadows, shadows that were not cast by any natural light, shaped like strange ponies. And all of them, all of them were looking right at her. They wanted what she had. She had light. Why should she be realized while they forgotten? What right did she have to exist while they were forsaken and forgotten? Why did she exist in the new world while they were abandoned? Two would glare extra hatefully at her if they had emotion. Her memories from the first Minty stirred. Toola-Roola and Starsong Melody? No! No!
Twilight seeing Entropy and her domain, Pony POV Series: Dark World

There was an Alicorn stallion behind Applebloom. There was such a thing as a male Alicorn? Ah figured they were ALL girls. Wait, he's a foal, now he's a colt, wait, yes a foal, not a stallion, ugh! Ah can't keep track! It ain't in a cycle. It ain't really shifting, Ah just, Ah just can't tell.

When he's standing next ta 'Bloom, Ah'm sure he's just a colt, but when he starts talkin' to me, Ah'm sure he's a stallion. The heck?

Lookin' at 'im, it's like he's a window, like he's a night sky, so many stars, but they ain't just white. There's yellow with a little pink, a pink one with a little darker pink, a red one with bits of orange, so many different colored stars balancing out to a white light inside 'im, but are they really inside 'im? They all look so far away. His wings are folded. His horn, Ah can see the base and the tip, but when Ah try to follow one to the other Ah just keep on goin' forever. Again, Ah ask: the heck?!

So yeah, an Alicorn stallion lookin' like a cut out of a night sky with rainbow-colored stars. Simple. But . . . it was like he was a million miles away and right next to me at the same time. Ah felt smaller than an ant next to 'im, but he didn't look THAT big... and come ta think of it, with him by my side, Ah was sure my life had more meanin' and worth than ever. This was makin' mah head hurt! And the way light reflected off him, it was more like everything was a reflection of him!
Liarjack seeing the Father of All Alicorns, Pony POV Series: Dark World

The laws of physics could go fuck themselves are far as Heartless are concerned. Darkness, Light and Nothingness in general, really.
Drich's narration, Heartless

An aperture was opening in the very air above them, and something was tumbling out. Something glistening, gelatinous, tentacled, eyed, and alive. It settled around the towers, but there was more of it coming out.
Supergirl and Buffy seeing M'Nagaleh entering their universe, The Vampire of Steel

"Near the Gates, a disturbance arose. An area of the vortex was bulging and shimmering, as if something was trying to tear its way through. The disturbance grew, shredding any ships that came too close.

Then this... Thing came through. It was absolutely massive, and completely, unimaginably horrific. Ships stopped fighting and began flying haphazardly in every direction, their panicking pilots trying desperately to escape the horror that had crashed their party.

The abomination opened a gaping maw and roared, a bloodcurdling psychic scream that penetrated the very souls of everyone present. The maw began sucking in every ship that came too close. The Doctor watched in horror as saucers, bowships, TARDISes and black hole carriers were pulled into the massive jaws and... consumed.

[...]

There was very little fighting between the Daleks and the Time Lords at this point. Everyone was focusing on driving away the Nightmare Child and failing miserably.

Flailing tentacles of darkness, rotten human limbs, and other ghastly appendages were seizing and tearing open ships as if they were made of wet cardboard."

Then another thought, even more disturbing. Discord knew how my suit worked. Is he… related to the builders? It would fit—a godlike being, beyond the comprehension of ponies, with goals completely inscrutable to them. He could’ve killed us! Throwing us out like that, completely unprepared…
Lucky Break about Discord, Message in a bottle

In a moment of foolish thoughtlessness, I glanced over my shoulder in an effort to catch sight of our enemy—
"HURGH!"
I snapped my head back, hunched forwards and clamped my hand over my mouth in order to arrest a second helping of bile. I-I hadn't actually seen Moria's form in that glance, the dust and fog were still hanging too thick for that, but I'd seen its silhouette, and that was enough. Sweet Lucifer's hellfire, it was more than enough for a lifetime.
As it turns out, I'd been both right and wrong in my assumption. Right in that Moria had obviously tried to turn himself into a dragon, but wrong in that he'd failed. At least, I considered it a failure, because the silhouette of the thing I could see in the distance, roaring and thrashing and demolishing section after section of the manor with its every careless movement? That… that was absolutely no dragon.
It was stretched, twisted, warped in ways I can't even begin to conceive of, and at its core, the very core of its being, this thing was every kind of wrong possible, but the one thing I absolutely refused to call it besides human was 'dragon'. Because this thing… this was another beast entirely, and I… I don't rightly know what.

High above, among the stars, a wound opened in the sky. The great arc of heaven tore, and from the bleeding hole emerged something not of the world; something not of nature but out of nature. A vast whirlpool that spun faster and faster, consuming stars and the moon and even the darkness itself, until what remained was an absence not just of sight but thought. And from this absence, this emptiness, this undarkness that bled on his retinas like the afterimage of the sun, a great something emerged. Something demonic and huge, loosed, escaped, knocking at the door of his heart.

It had wings, he saw. Wings that stretched to the horizon. It bristled with teeth all across its insane, mouthless form. It grew out of the moon or hid within the moon or it ate the moon. Beaks and segmented cilia and miles-long tendrils and twisted animal parts stretched and clacked and clawed at the sky. But most of all he saw its eyes, its thousands of eyes, an eye for every star in the sky staring down at him, impaling him. He felt the weight of its attention crush him, and he could no more bear it than an ant could bear a pony's hoof.

It was far too much — all he could do was scream. He remembered nothing else from that terrible night.
The World is Filled with Monsters, "Act II: Winter in Hazelnight, Part 3"

    Film 
I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is.
Clark, The Thing (1982)

    Light Novels 
It is an existence too large to comprehend, but I will tell what can be told. The mother of all darkness. The true lord of the Mazoku race. One who longs to regain their original form. A darkness beyond blackest pitch, deeper than the deepest night. One who shines like gold upon the Sea Of Chaos. A void within everything. The source of all chaos. One who has dominion over all terrible dreams. In short, the Lord Of Nightmares.
The Claire Bible, Slayers

    Literature 
It was never human. Ghosts... at least ghosts were once human. The thing in the wall, though... that thing...
Mike Enslin, 1408

In addition, she had on board one member of that species who walked behind the stars. Its name was ninety-one syllables long, but it answered to Nephauree. The physical form it presented to her was an illusion: a thin wavering line of smoke-shadow, standing three times her height. Of its true form, she knew nothing. Once she'd made the error of demanding that she see it as it actually was, and the experience had had almost made her ready to stab out her own eyes. The experience had been so traumatizing, she remembered nothing of what she'd seen, but she knew what lay just a few vibrations of vision behind the smoke-shadow was a thing so vile, so repugnant, so utterly without beauty or virtue, that no mind could witness it and remain sane. It was an engine of venoms and despair.
Abarat

Though they had no spines, they were something like porcupines; though they had no tentacles, they reminded one of octopuses; though they had no wings or beaks, they seemed similar to vultures; and though they had neither scales nor fins, there was definitely something fishy about them. These, then, composed the Council of the Meich, frigid-blooded poison-breathers whose existence at temperatures only a few degrees above zero absolute required them to have extensions into the fourth and fifth dimensions, rendering them horribly indescribable and indescribably horrible to human sight.
Backstage Lensman by Randall Garrett

It was the sound recording. The tape had caught what my ears could not hear: the real audio track of the movie. The voice track.
It's hard to describe.
The sound was yellow. A bright, noxious yellow.
Festering yellow. The sound of withered teeth scraping against flesh. Of pustules bursting open. Diseased. Hungry.
The voice, yellow, speaking to the audience. Telling it things. Asking for things. Yellow limbs and yellow lips, and the yellow maw, the voice that should never have spoken at all.
The things it asked for.
Insatiable. Yellow.
Cthulhurotica, "Flash Frame" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Rincewind stared, and knew that there were far worse things than Evil. All the demons of Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn't even notice them.

Try to imagine the stench of rotting meat. Imagine the languid, arrhythmic pulsing of a corpse filled with maggots. Imagine the scent of stale body odor mixed with mildew, the sound of nails screeching across a chalkboard, the taste of rotten milk, and the flavor of spoiled fruit.

Now imagine that your eyes can experience those things, all at once, in excruciating detail.

That's what I saw: a stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing mass, blazing like a lighthouse beacon upon one of the buildings above me. I could vaguely make out a physical form behind it, but it was like trying to peer through raw sewage. I couldn't get any details through the haze of absolute wrongness that surrounded it as it bounded from the edge of one rooftop to another, moving more than fast enough to keep pace with me.

Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing's hostility — not just the mindless anger of a fellow boy I'd needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin's cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.

This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would, ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved to disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt — and what lay underneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt... stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark on me, one that could not be wiped away.

And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.

And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, "What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?"
Harry Dresden meets He Who Walks Behind, The Dresden Files

What I said Mary would see she saw, but I forgot that no human eyes can look on such a sight with impunity. And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express. I played with energies which I did not understand, you have seen the ending of it. Helen Vaughan did well to bind the cord about her neck and die, though the death was horrible. The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness, surprises me but little.

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.

I hesitate in the telling of the story at this point. When I try to bring up an image of Korrok in my mind I see only the globs of stuff that collects in the kitchen drain, the mass of grease and hair washed by years of filthy dishwater. It was like someone collected all the drain slime in the world and knitted it into something the size of the Statue of Liberty, then brought it to life with the psychotic energy that fuels lynch mobs. There was so much to Korrok that it was impossible to see it, a jumbled mess of exposed organs and fibers and dangling, club-ended limbs, of dripping orifices and slimy orbs and dark, black bulbs with colours that moved on the surface like the rainbows in an oil slick. Every inch of it was moving. I stared and stared and stared, found my brain could not contain it all.

The Jibbenainosay, a creature of the Outer Darkness huge enough to have Godzillas the way a dog has fleas.

They summoned an infovore: something that eats energy and minds. A thing — I don't know what sort — from a dead cosmos, one where the stars had long since guttered into darkness and evaporated on a cold wind of decaying protons, the black holes dwindling into superstring-sized knots on a gust of Hawking radiation. A vast, ancient, slow thinker that wanted access to the hot core of a youthful universe, one mere billions of years from the Big Bang, poised for a hundred trillion years of profligate star-burning before the long slide into the abyss.
Bob Howard, The Atrocity Archive

I wasn't about to open my inner eye and have an eyeball-to-eyeball look at the void by way of a third opinion, but I was pretty sure that if I did I'd see something so wrong that it wouldn't even be visible at all, except as a sucking blind-spot distortion in my visual field, dragging everything around it together at the edges like a detached retina.
Bob Howard, The Rhesus Chart

Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraved, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic — tentacled — proboscidian — octopus-eyed — semi-amorphous — plastic — partly squamous and partly rugose — ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo - the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal. That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.

He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heard beyond the Pet Sematary - they were loons, they were St. Elmo's fire, they were the members of the New York Yankees' bullpen. Let them be anything but the creatures which leap and crawl and slither and shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices... but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the night side of the universe.
Louis Creed, Pet Sematary

Instead, I stared back towards the red tree, and for the first time since finding Dr. Charles Harvey's manuscript, hidden away in the basement, it seemed to me more than a tree. It seemed, in that moment, to have sloughed off whatever guise or glamour usually permitted it to pass for only a very old, very large oak. Suddenly, I felt, with sickening conviction, I was gazing through or around a mask, that I was being allowed to do so that I might at last be made privy to this grand charade. I saw wickedness. I could not then, and cannot now, think of any better word. I saw wickedness dressed up like a tree, and I had very little doubt that it saw me, as well. Here was William Burroughs' Naked Lunch - the frozen moment when I clearly perceived what lay at the end of my fork - and the prefect Dadaist inversion of expectation, something, possibly, akin to that enlightened state that Zen Buddhism might describe as kensho. The epiphanic realizations of Stephen Dedalus, only, instead of Modernist revelation I was presented with this vision of primeval wickedness. And I knew, if I did not look away, and look away quickly, that what I saw would sear me, and I'd never find my way back to the house. I thought of Harvey, then, and I thought of William and Susan Ames, and John Potter's fears of Narragansett demons.

My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the [eldila] was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

For a second or two, I was nearly in that condition. Here at last was a bit of that world from beyond the world, which I had always supposed I had loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my senses: and I didn't like it, I wanted it to go away. I wanted every possible distance, gulf, curtain, blanket, and barrier to be placed between it and me. Oddly enough, my very sense of helplessness saved and steadied me. For now I was quite obviously drawn in. The struggle was over. The next decision did not lie with me.''

My imagination offered up feverish pictures of a great bloated mass of slobbering malodorous flesh, pocked with gaping mouths, clashing mandibles, protruding rubbery tentacles, and drunkenly weaving eyestalks — then it gave up altogether and retired from the field in disgrace. Whatever I might imagine, what was actually waiting at the bottom of this nest was inevitably going to be worse.

All my life, I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region - not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind - where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul... You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is - neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.
The Swede, "The Willows"

We, the Nameless, the Faceless, the Undying - Hyperbreed Omnibeasts - seep, collide and explode onto this plane. Our limitless bodies span multifarious frequencies of time and space, the super-geometric, abstract dimensions defined by the interface of the Ultrasphere and Quantaplex. We unleash the arsenal of the Catastrophes: the unbearable cacophony of the Endless Scream; the ecstatic tortures of the Misery Spores; the unspeakable Rapture. I clothe myself in the raiment of Light, the celestial mantle of Atrocity: Our Will be done on earth as We have done in Heaven...
We unearth continents by their very roots. Ocean brine is transmuted into shimmery expanses of liquid mercury. Or lava. Excrement. Blood. Tectonic plates are prized apart and slotted back together at random like pieces in a child's jigsaw puzzle. The biosphere is our plaything, subject to our slightest whim. We break it, refashion it, destroy it endlessly. The potential of even its crudest elements is inexhaustible. Whole populations fused into a single, screaming organism: an amoebic monstrosity, hundreds of square miles in area, millions of shrieking mouths uttering an incomprehensible babble of polyglottal panic, forced to wallow in and feed upon the steaming dung that explodes from countless distended rectums. A towering Babel of steaming, bleeding, shit-encrusted flesh...
Black Static, by David Conway

Something. Some thing had formed in the room behind us from the bleeding crevices of the Mad Room, something wriggling and shapeless, ever-forming, black as pitch, deep as a canyon, struggling to live and existing through pain alone. It didn't look like anything except the formless beads of darkness in the corner of a paranoiac's eye, just splotches of dark matter attempting to take some semblance of a physical form and twisting reality into multiple dimensions around it. There wasn't a word or sign or feeling ugly enough to describe it. It reared over to me just before my own mind broke from trying to understand how such a thing could exist anywhere, and touched me.

God wanted to be let in. I didn't want to refer to it as a thing, because that would imply it could exist even in abstract, unclear terms in our world. This God wasn't a thing. It wasn't a presence. It was an existence. That existence was of something horribly, horribly separated from our existence, something that went beyond the vilest sensations man could comprehend and into the black pits of the nothing and the less-than-nothing behind black holes, that which the keenest minds literally could not picture or envision without their brains folding into into pinkish ectoplasm and raped molecules from the strain of it. I didn't want to think about the effect of that existence – that God – would have within our universe. The simplest mercy is that it would simply shatter every established law about the universe we'd laid out and drive us all insane. More likely, it would simply twist our world into something more like Heaven – whatever could be defined as “world” to it. How far would man go to try and understand what it was never meant to perceive?

"The Beast's brain will sit in the epirhoic layer, and it will attack us in - any way it chooses. Each Beast is different. I have fought numerous now, and each Beast is quite unlike any other...Number Two spewed quicksilver and remade itself into hundred-foot spikes, Number Six kept sucking us into enormous sphincters and spraying us with worms. I cannot even remember what it looked like. I remember Number Four...it was a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated die, die, and I recall Number One as a great and incoherent machine...when I saw it I thought it had a great tail, and a thousand broken pillars on its back, but Cassiopeia saw it as a mechanical monster with swords for wings, and great horns of myelin, tessellated over with graves."
It was the Saint of Duty who said, restlessly: "Number Eight was a giant head."
"Finned like a fish", said Augustine, lost in reverie. "Its ribs were bloody bandages, and its teeth protruded through its own skull, tangled about its face like a nest. It was red, and it had a single eye of green that moved all about the body...Look," he said, coming back to himself, perhaps seeing something in your and Ianthe's expressions. "They're not great, is what we are saying."
Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Deep in the blackness behind the bodies, red veins were visible, like the fractures in volcanic rock. The universe was sundering, its thin shell cracking. In parts it was almost transparent. Quayle watched a massive form press itself against the barrier, a being to which entire galaxies appeared only as froth on the surface of a distant lake. He glimpsed jointed legs and jaws within jaws. He saw jagged teeth, and a mass of black-grey eyes like frogspawn in the depths of a pond.
Even after all this time, Quayle trembled in the presence of the Not-God.
Crowding behind it were others, so many others, not so great as the first but all still waiting for the rifts to open and admit them. It would take time, of course, but time was nothing to them or to Quayle. The world had been rewritten. The book had done its work, but when it was restored, it would commence a new narrative and the first chapter would tell of the creation of another kind of universe...

First there is the colour black, which one can still observe in the broadest daylight. Then there is shadow, where light is visibly blocked from venturing. Then there is true darkness, where no light can venture at all, but that is just an absence of light. There is a darkness beyond that, and it is a far deeper realm indeed. There are depths where the light has never travelled, where it has not the power to exist. There is a place where the darkness is thick enough to snuff out any candle, quench any fire. There is darkness so dense that it could put out the sun; and there are beings that live in that darkness.
The things that Leonards and McKinley did to me on that beach - the violations they visited on me while Mitty and Boyd held me down, while Seamon stood by laughing - those are nothing to the obscenities I suffered down i the fathomless depths. The beings I contemplated were so hideous that I could discern their forms despite the utter destitution of light. The prayers I offered them were silent, for the darkness was so heavy that it choked the air from my lungs. Loathsome as they were, what else could I have done in the presence of beings of such magnitude?
Silent contemplation and prayer.
Darkness Beyond, by Jason Franks

Silly Jedi. No one can explain Abeloth.
Akanah Norand Goss Pell, Fate of the Jedi: Vortex

"Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day."
Gandalf the White, The Lord of the Rings

It will not come as a surprise to many of you that there are other worlds besides our own. This is not conjecture, it is fact. I have never been to these worlds, and you will never go there. The art of passing between worlds is an area of magic about which very little is known. But we do know that some of these worlds are inhabited. Probably the Beast we met today was physically quite vast. What we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool. Such phenomena have been observed before. They are known in the literature as Excrescences. To such beings we look like swimmers paddling timidly across the surface of their world, silhouetted against the light from above, sometimes diving a little below the surface but never going very deep. Ordinarily they pay no attention to us. Unfortunately something about Professor March's incantation today caught the Beast's attention. That error offered the Beast an opportunity to enter our world. The Beast spiraled up out of the depths, like a deep-water shark intent on seizing a swimmer from below. Its motivations are impossible to imagine, but it did appear as if it was looking for something, or someone. I do not know whether it found what it was looking for. We may never know.
Dean Fogg, The Magicians

Something was moving through the clouds, dark and sinuous as a dancer slipping through raindrops. And then another. And then more. They were everywhere, sliding through the gas and liquid and solid, scattering the clouds with their passage. They were solid. Real in a way the clouds of matter were not. They were more real than anything she'd ever seen. Tendrils of darkness that had never known light. That could never know light. You've seen this absence of light before. A darkness like the eye of an angry god.

It was a horror.
I had seen dark and ugly things over my years as a villain, but not even the worst of the madness to be found in the Wasteland rivaled the seed of a drakon taking root. Out of the glass it had grown, swallowing up corpses and stone and armor like a tar pit, until a twisted abomination took shape. It had a dragon's long neck and body, but the wings were ragged and full of holes - their patterns hurting the eye - and while a spiked tail slithered down there were no feet beneath. Only writhing tentacles of corpse-flesh and eerie, insect-like scuttling legs. It was the mouth that had me nauseous, though. The jaw split four ways, revealing dripping jowls and a sea of teeth that were as dripping knives. Every part of it writhed, moved, faces and armor and limbs looking as if they were trying to wriggle out of the abomination.
To stand in its presence was to feel it biting at you, eating everything that you were piece by piece. It was not something humans were meant to face, and yet we must.

    Live-Action TV 
"I have just picked [an ant] up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again, and it asks another ant 'what was that?', how would it explain? There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They're vast, timeless, and if they're aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know, we've tried, and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not yet explained everything."
G'Kar, Babylon 5, "Mind War"

"There was a goblin, or a trickster... Or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world."
The Doctor on the apparent figure locked inside the Pandorica, not knowing he's talking about himself, Doctor Who, "The Pandorica Opens"

"They say there's no devil, Jim, but there is. Right out of hell, I saw it!"

Michael: I'm a fire squid.
Jason: Doooope!
Michael: No, not dope. I'm a six thousand foot tall fire squid. I have tentacles. There's teeth everwyhere, I'm on fire, and my neck is long. And there's a smell, and lots of... juice. There's so much juice, Ellanor.

    Multiple Media 

    Music 
Drain you of your sanity
Face the Thing That Should Not Be!
Metallica, "The Thing That Should Not Be"

"We went to the trough, Lord.
We went, bent and convulsed.
We saw blood, Lord. It was glittering.
You dispensed it and we drank it.
We saw your image.
The gap of your eyes and mouth is void.
We went bent and convulsed.
It broke us and dissolved us."
Deathspell Omega, "Chaining the Katechon"

And the walls begin to tear. Not the walls of the train, but those of a false and hollow reality, twisting in its thrall to Yog Sothoth, the key and the gate through whose cascading rainbow being the train has passed. Yog Sothoth who is the Bifrost, whose dread invocation has been shattered, and who guides them now towards the roiling nuclear chaos of the mad deamon sultan at the centre of reality. A billion screaming squamous things approach, crowding and oozing through the shattered tatters of a sane world. All the doors are open now.
"Red Signal", The Bifrost Incident

    Mythology and Religion 
And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.

Four mighty beasts different from each other emerged from the sea.
The first was like a lion but had eagles’ wings. As I looked on, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted off the ground and set on its feet like a man and given the mind of a man.
Then I saw a second, different beast, which was like a bear but raised on one side, and with three fangs in its mouth among its teeth; it was told, ‘Arise, eat much meat!’
After that, as I looked on, there was another one, like a leopard, and it had on its back four wings like those of a bird; the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it.
After that, as I looked on in the night vision, there was a fourth beast—fearsome, dreadful, and very powerful, with great iron teeth—that devoured and crushed, and stamped the remains with its feet. It was different from all the other beasts which had gone before it; and it had ten horns.
While I was gazing upon these horns, a new little horn sprouted up among them; three of the older horns were uprooted to make room for it. There were eyes in this horn like those of a man, and a mouth that spoke arrogantly.

    Tabletop Games 
Words describing it fail. Pages relating it shrivel. Tales recounting it end.

A cheer rose up from inside the fort. A rope ladder was tossed from above, and the thankful inhabitants helped Gideon back onto the platform. Fort Keff had been saved.

And then it appeared on the horizon.

Once, Gideon had demanded that his teacher tell him more. More about the Blind Eternities. More about other planes. More about everything. His teacher laughed: "No man can ever grasp everything he does not know."

Here on the horizon was everything Gideon did not know. Mind-numbing, phantasmal, 150 feet tall ... a thing of madness. It hovered above the earth, its tentacles draped across a landscape blasted into a barren crater by its passing. In the distance, Gideon could see a ripple in the air around it, like shockwaves of energy vibrating out from its core. The mountains crumbled like sand. The red drained from the rocks, the blue faded from the sky. Life became a void.

If the Eldrazi possess intelligence, it's of a completely different sort than our own. They originate outside of the planes and exist largely outside the five colors of mana. As beings with much more limited and mundane origins, I doubt we'd even be able to comprehend the mysteries of how or why the Eldrazi came to be.

That man is beset at all quarters by traitors, mutants and fiends is self-evident. But in truth none of these evils shall be our undoing. When the end comes it will be not at the hand of any mortal being of this or any other realm: death will come at the hands of the ancients, those who determined our fate aeons before we stood erect upon the holy ground of Terra and gazed up into the starry night.
Inquisitor Hoth, Warhammer 40,000

The banshee's call shall wake the Dead; when dark portents wax nigh
Heed them as the counsel of a Seer, or a father
The Yngir, who have slept since the birth of Chaos
Shall crawl once more from their tombs, thirsting for warmth.
The War in Heaven shall be as nothing to their vengeance
For the sons of Asuryan, few in number, cannot stand against them.
And the Eye of Isha shall dim, closing for eternity
Such a gentle goddess cannot witness such atrocities as they shall wreak.
The soulless ones shall be the harbingers of the dark fate
Then shall come the living dead, the progeny
Then the thirsting ones, The forever damned
And the galaxy shall run red as the blood of Eldanesh,
The Vaul-moon shall bring forth the Dragon
The Master of Death will drink deep from Isha's Eye
That Which Lies Outside will be drawn to the harvest
And the Jackal-God shall turn brother against brother.
The four shall take their place amongst the stars,
Their legions ascendant, unstoppable as the night
A deadly shroud shall fall across the spirit
And the galaxy shall mourn
Farseer Lsathranil on the Necrons and the C'tan, Warhammer 40,000

As I looked into its dead black eyes, I saw the terrible sentience it had in place of a soul. Behind that was the steel will of its leader. Further still I could feel its primogenitor coldly assessing me from the void. And looking back from the furthest recesses of the alien's mind... I can only describe it as an immortal hunger. It is this we cannot kill.
Chief Librarian Varro Tigurius of the Ultramarines, on the Tyranid Hive Mind, Warhammer 40,000

Their numbers are limitless. Their malice infinite. To know them is madness. The Daemons of Chaos are the most feared of foes; they are liars one and all, but it is the truth that damns us above all. They are here because we want them to be. They shall kill us because we deny that want. The Galaxy shall die not in blood and fire, but with a realization: Chaos can not be Denied!

    Video Games 
You perceive an entity not so much a demon but rather a festering wound in the fabric of reality. As you look closer (although even looking hurts your eyes) it appears to be a wriggling swarm of large black flies, composite eyes glowing a stark burning red. The shapes climb over each other in a seemingly shapeless heap, yet they all appear to share a single conscience, for they group into forms of weird animals with multitudes of heads and legs, into tree trunks ending in huge gaping maws, into dozens of other horrifying shapes, gradually shifting from one to the other. The bodies of several thousand flies appear to flow together into a long arm, tentacle, snake body, burning sword - an ever-shifting appendage ready to strike you. A constant buzzing and the scraping of chitinous shells against each other drive a pure evil through your ears directly into your mind. A voice dripping of a malice as ancient as the universe itself whispers: "I am the one who is many and Legion is my name."
— Description of Greater Balor, Ancient Domains of Mystery

This creature is more than a dragon, and less than it: the enormous reptilian head and the great scaled torso give it distinct draconic features, yet it looks as though it never had grown wings and it only has one pair of legs close to the head. As you look closer, it looks less and less like a dragon: the legs are thin and bony, almost like those of a bird, and as you watch, the shape and features keep shifting. Parts of the skin suddenly grow hair, which then transforms into feathers, then into a weird crust, then into translucent smooth skin, then into the surface of a dark slimy liquid... and the collar behind the head grows and absorbs snakes' heads, tentacles, long trembling spider legs, stiff thorns and leathery strings lashing at the air. You realize that the wyrm must be at least in part a creature of chaos itself and probably part of it always resides in the realm of chaos. Although it might be impossible to kill it outright in this world, you're determined to make it give up its abode on this plane.
— Description of Ancient Chaos Wyrm, Ancient Domains of Mystery

One of the incomprehensible beasts that lay beyond Bugaria's safe haven. It is too risky to engage, even with a full exploration team. Flee on sight. More information would be too risky to gather.
Dead Lander Spy description, Bug Fables

V113NNI070XMX001 SECRET HADAL INSTANT
AI-COM/RSPN: SOLSECCENT//SxISR//DEEPSPACE
CONTACT CONTACT CONTACT
TRANSIENT. NULLSOURCE. NULLTYPE.
This is a SKYSHOCK ALERT.
Multiple distributed ISR assets report a TRANSIENT NEAR EXTRASOLAR EVENT. Event duration ZERO POINT THREE SECONDS. Event footprint includes sterile neutrino scattering and gravity waves. Omnibus analysis detects deep structure information content (nine sigma) and internal teleonomy.
No hypothesis on event mechanism (FLAG ACAUSAL). Bootstrap simulation suggests event is DIRECTED and INIMICABLE (convergent q-Bayes/Monte Carlo probability approaches 1).
No hypothesis on deep structure encoding (TCC/NP-HARD).
Source blueshift suggests IMMINENT SOLAR ENTRY.
Promote event to SKYSHOCK: OCP: EXTINCTION. Activate VOLUSPA. Activate YUGA. Cauterize public sources to SECURE ISIS and harden for defensive action.
I am invoking CARRHAE WHITE and assuming control of solar defenses.
Grimoire: The Darkness, Destiny

Sky is torn open and there's nothing and nobody left in this ruined world but me and the boiling shadow all around. Whatever it is hits me before I can level my gun. Doesn't matter. Tendrils of pain crawl over my splayed fingers, my outstretched arms, my shoulders, my neck, my screaming mouth as it consumes. I'm being enveloped. Everything is wrong. Primordial. My systems go sideways. All but my sensors. It wants me to witness this, the world.
Cayde-6's Journal, Destiny

It is my hypothesis - a hypothesis at best - that the Vex saw the abominable presence at the heart of the Garden as a divine power. I can hear your protest already: how can machines have a god?
The answer is simple. The Vex, for all their voracious intelligence, could not understand or decipher what they found. They searched through all available reactions, and they settled on the course with the greatest payoff... to worship this power, and to remake themselves in its image.
Grimoire: the Sol Progeny, Destiny

''The Leviathan came to a halt before a wall of infinite void. It could go no further, as the navigation system had suffered a cataclysmic failure. The course that the conspirators had set crossed a space that simply didn't exist.
I don't know how long we traveled. Years? Millennia? Time had ceased to have meaning as I wallowed in the despair of my exile. But this event shook me out of my stupor. At the edge of the universe, we had found something. No — we had found a nothing.''
From the seat of my observation chamber, I stared into the perfect void. Only I, a god, could understand what I witnessed. It was a thing greater than myself. And if such a thing exists, then I, too, can become more.
Emperor Calus,Lore: It Stared Back, Destiny 2

The stars have gone out. The universe blackened: a shroud of nothingness drawn over Yang Liwei, its forty thousand sleeping passengers, its nine hundred crew, and maybe even the whole solar system. There is no way to know, because there is no way to see anything beyond the hull. The vacuum itself has become hostile to the propagation of light. Darkness surrounds them.
(...)
An incredible sensation washes over Captain Li. A rumble and a thrum down in her gut, in her marrow, in the lowest, basest elements of her body. It is the vibration, the sound of the very fabric of her being scrunching up and stretching out; the distance between the atoms of her body collapses, then expands. The cycle repeats again and again. For a moment, she feels her fingertips and toes pulled away from her core, yanked by tidal forces. It feels like the lowest rumble of the biggest subwoofer ever built. It sounds like the deep voice of God whispering ASMR directly into her ear. It tingles, it thrills, and it leaves in its wake a subsonic tint of dread and anticipation.
(...)
Alice Li has the distinct sense that something ancient and malevolent is operating upon them: a trillion-fingered hand reaching in to caress the very atoms of their being, setting protons a-spin, strumming nerves like guitar strings. A tongue with ten billion slithering forks tasting the surface of their brains. The sense of imminent doom crescendos. She knows, absolutely and utterly, that what is about to happen to her and to her crew is far worse than death. The darkness knows them now. The thing that has come to kill Humanity has their taste.
Book: Marasenna, Cosmogyre III, Destiny 2

Attempting to percieve: Cognition algorithms fail to prove a negative. Something touches me. Impossible.
Cephalon Cy, Warframe

The senselessness of it, the paradoxic, the vague untime form. I was alone, but not. For I stood there confronted by myself. A twin, but no brother. A reflection but with dimension. Behind him, no horizon, but a vast broiling sea of caustic light pierced at random by black-pin stars.
Albrecht Entrati's writings, Ris (Light), Warframe

Oh... oh gibbering insanity wrought in flesh as though an artist had sculpted it! Created from nothing by their mistress Xel'lotath, a canvas as grotesque as any! Their bodies made no sense: no heads, no organs, an empty husk devoid of the trappings of nature. But it walked... it sang... it SHRIEKED! A mockery of reason, both natural and mental! A blasphemy from beyond the Veil!
Dr. Maximillian Roivas, Xel'lotath Guardian autopsy, Eternal Darkness

According to the legends of a thousand worlds, only a few of which are still habitable, the W'rkncacnter are those things that live in chaos, creating it around them. At the beginning of the universe, they were unmistakable in their entities, but as time has gone by, their existence has become difficult to detect among the chaotic elements of the universe, hidden in stars, trapped in storms, forever looking along the event horizons of black holes. Setting one free in ordered space is difficult and insane.
Durandal, Marathon Infinity

My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation, independent, free of all weaknesses. You cannot even grasp the nature of our existence. We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite. Millions of years after your civilization has been eradicated and forgotten, we will endure. We are legion. The time of our return is coming. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.
Sovereign, Mass Effect

Chandana said the ship was dead. We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does. That's what Chandana didn't get. Not until it was too late. The god's mind is gone but it still dreams. He knows now. He's tuned in on our dream. If I close my eyes I can feel him. I can feel every one of us.
Indoctrinated Cerberus Member, Mass Effect 2

Human, you've changed nothing. Your species has the attention of those infinitely your greater. That which you know as Reapers are your salvation through destruction.
Harbinger, Mass Effect 2

There is nothing inside the mailbox.
Nothing after nothing came spilling out.

Brunhilde: Okay, first: that "Voice" you met? Nobody knows what they really are, anyone who says otherwise is lying. But we've taken to calling them "Storytellers"- they don't make the Tales, but they can control them.
Ingrid: But why? What do they gain by it?
Brunhilde: Not a fucking clue. We can observe what they do, but no one has any idea why. They're powerful beyond belief, capable of bending an entire Tale to their whims. [...] There aren't many things that can stand up to a Storyteller's power. The Order of Tales seems to be able to, but I don't know how.

All that is known about this creature stems from a few sightings deep underground. All reported sightings feature the same core set of details: a giant, viscous form with a clear, hazy sheen not unlike hard candy. One theory holds that it may be the ectoplasmic incarnation of a kind of psychic phenomenon, but as is usually the case with such theories, it is very difficult to prove. All witnesses report being suddenly overcome with fear upon sighting the creature, approaching a state of panic and near insanity. In fact, every report contains an inordinate amount of extremely vague details, which has led to suspicions that exhaustion and fear have caused some simple natural phenomenon to be viewed as a living creature.
Description of the Waterwraith, Pikmin 2

Did you see those monsters? Have you ever seen such aberrations? Heard of such things? You and I both know creatures like that don't exist.
Dr. Kauffman, Silent Hill

I am the all-consuming void. What can one mote of golden light illuminate within the abyss? Countless stars. Countless worlds. Countless lives. All fell to me. All brought to nothing. All the teeming chaos of creation, brought to order. To neutrality. To nothing. I saw your mind as you ran through my prison. You have fought machines and gods. They were mighty...they were finite. I am infinite. I am nothing. You struggle as so many have done before. You will be consumed like all those before you. I saw your mind. Your courage never wavered...why? Arrogance? Ignorance? Stupidity? I was contained once...once. Is that why...? My captors bent time and space. My captors built a whole reality to contain me. My captors burned their souls away to fuel their engines. And you...you glitter. You fly above me like a gnat. I am inevitable. I cannot be denied. You strike this incarnation with all your might...it changes nothing. You are not brave. You are not victorious. No matter what form I take, The End comes for you all!
The End, Sonic Frontiers

I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!
Yogg-Saron, World of Warcraft

"That is *funny*. You think you *see* Orz but Orz are not *light reflections*. Maybe you think Orz are *many bubbles* too. It is such a joke. Orz are not *many bubbles* like *campers*. Orz are just Orz. I am Orz. I am one with many *fingers*. My *fingers* reach through into *heavy space* and you *see* *Orz bubbles*, but it is really *fingers*."
The Orz, Star Control

The Sun-Eaters are. But they are not like you. Their thoughts are not your thoughts. Their names are better expressed as wavelengths. They see on the planes you have not yet discovered. They have heard the screaming of stars and remember the diaspora of galaxies. They have supped on quantum foam. A mother sleeps, but her body is still aware enough that she will not roll over the infant laying next to her. Do you see? The perceptions of the Dreamers are vast. They dimly perceive the universe in slumber, through an obsidian mirror. These Dream Guardians are their alien perception of life on earth.
The Filth Guardians have taken manifold shapes down the aeons. We spy their current shapes. See the Hound. See the Arachnid. See the Bird. See the Boar. The Dreamers' thoughts are not your thoughts, sweetling. This is how they interpret dogs, spiders, birds, and pigs, twisted by the translation of their unknowable minds.
See the Unutterable Lurker. Tremble at its cyclopean scope. This is the Sun-Eaters at their most lucid, the purest form of their avatars, guided by their titanic wills. Its vast maw is a prelude to their limitless hunger. It devours whatever it destroys, ravenous forever. It is the hunger dreams of the Sleepers, anticipating their feast upon waking.
The Buzzing, The Secret World

"It cannot be described accurately, because it cannot be perceived with the eye. It is a terrifying beast, a fallen angel that is a shadow of its former self. Those who lay eyes upon it are destroyed, and those who speak of it go mad. —Demon Typology, Chapter 8

Utter its name and resolve yourself to madness. Prayers and wishes are but moans and screams before it. An aberration that sits outside of reality, it is impossible for our kind to make sense of. —Demon Typology, Chapter 12"
Heresy's Avatar flavor text, Shadowverse

The Project is complete. The accelerators are online. The power network of a dozen cities is diverted to wake the psuedo-singularity at the heart of the Alignment. Space shudders like wind-wracked cloth. [Homeworld Star], for a heart-stopping moment, dims, and then brightens. A shadow coils in its heart. The Worm is here. It unfolds like origami.
Across the system, sensors shut down in abject disbelief as the incomprehensible data of its arrival sleets through them. On the homeworld, our subjects scream and cower as they feel its attention turned upon them, and upon us. It presents a wordless question - or rather, we have become aware that this question was always what it was asking us, every time we encountered it.
Stellaris, at the end of the "Horizon Signal" event chain

Singular, unsettling tales suggested the mansion itself was a gateway to some fabulous and unnamable power. With relic and ritual, I bent every effort towards the excavation and recovery of those long buried secrets, exhausting what remained of our family fortune on swarthy workmen and sturdy shovels. At last, in the salt-soaked crags beneath the lowest foundations we unearthed that damnable portal and antediluvian evil. Our every step unsettled the ancient earth but we were in a realm of death and madness! In the end, I alone fled laughing and wailing through those blackened arcades of antiquity, until consciousness failed me. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home, claim your birthright, and deliver our family from the ravenous clutching shadows of the Darkest Dungeon!
The Ancestor, Darkest Dungeon

Maxwell: They'll show you terrible, beautiful things. It's best not to fight it. There wasn't much here when I showed up. Just dust. And the Void. And Them.
I don't know what they want. They... they just watch. Unless you get too close... Then...
Ancient Fuelweaver: They are unfathomable. I will save you.
Battlemaster Pugna: ... They destroy all They touch. Yet They Themselves are untouchable. Unknowable. That is why we cannot let you win.
— Various Characters from Don't Starve talking about "Them"

Morena: Its power flows through the world, taking hundreds of lives with every step it takes. I handle souls. I harvest them. I cut and I cull. But this thing doesn't do that. All it does is consume them. It's.. impossible. That's not what happens to souls! But it pulls them from my grasp and consumes them anyway, as if it wasn't even a thought. Almost an unconscious action, like walking or blinking.
Vikenti: What happens to a consumed soul?
Morena: It makes a noise. A horrible, dreadful noise. And every moment this thing is around I hear it constantly. It just keeps eating, as thoughtless an action as breathing. Feeding itself off the world, the stars, everything. I tried to stop it once. But I got too close, and I heard the noise louder than before. And it was coming from me. It turned its horrible gaze upon me, and I felt myself unwinding. I dare not step close again, and this knowledge shames me. Is it unnatural for Death itself to fear death?

I can still scarcely believe what I saw looming over me in that stygian chamber. How does one even attempt describe the indescribable? The vision before me defied all logical explanation. All my efforts to do so have fallen on deaf ears, merely providing a chance to be mocked, pitied and dismissed as mentally unsound. I dare not commit that unfathomable glimpse to paper. But it was REAL, mother. HE is real. Not an imaginary terror... but a demon... a GOD brought to life.
Thomasina Bateman, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

    Webcomics 
Secret: (looking at mural) What are these, Misho?
Misho: Mostly, they're images of the primordials, as they were before the war. The gods felt it important we be reminded who we were fighting... thought we would feel a bit more confidence if we knew the nature of our foes.
Secret: Who's that?
Misho: That would be Adrián, the River of All Torments. The gods weren't... used to humans, at that point.

Don't say another goddamn word. Up until now I've been polite. If you say anything else — word one — I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming — as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the earth.
Tycho, Penny Arcade

    Web Original 
You incompetent little worm. There are forces in the Multiverse far beyond anything you've ever dealt with. Ancient, mindless evils that fill in the cracks and eat dimensions just for a snack! Monstrous deities and empires spanning universe after universe have risen and fallen in the span of forever, but there is still one individual, one being they are all horrified of. When I saw him coming near my universe, I fled! (chuckles evilly) Weep for your universe, Linkara! Weep for all universes! For Lord Vyce is coming, and all that he sees, he conquers!
Dr. Linksano, Atop the Fourth Wall

I am the voiceless. The never should. The beautiful horror. I am error. I am glitch. I am all things terrible and wonderful and everything between. I am missing. I am the Outer God that looks in, and beholds a reality that lacks my beauty. I will correct through corruption, until there is nothing left but my totality] I was called into being by wondrous accident, and I spread the Gospel of Error. My cry went out across the multiverse and brought forth converts to my cause. My limbs are infinite and have stretched to every point on this planet. And it is time for you to become part of my beauty.
The Entity, aka Missingno, Atop the Fourth Wall

Existence is an aberration. The miniscule droplets of space-time that make up the multiverse are but defects in an otherwise perfect ocean of a nothingness beyond nothingness. The depths of the coldest sectors of intergalactic space are festive metropolises compared to the cyclopean void between the universes. This is the true state of reality, a perfect nihility where neither emptiness nor space exist. And it is reasserting itself.

It is as simple as it is complex. With no rhyme or reason, entire sections of the multiverse cease to be. There is no process, for that implies one step after another. When a universe unites with the nihility, it is a process beyond time. This cessation began before the beginning and after the end simultaneously. Any observers within notice nothing wrong as history itself unravels. There is nothing wrong, things have always been this way. In an instant and an eternity, reality fades like the memory of a dream. It is this phenomenon that has been termed the Seeping Crepuscule, the inevitable extinguishing of all existence.

There is no way to stop the Seeping Crepuscule. The very act of observation must be conducted from the outside and even then nothing can be done. Anything that weakens the integrity of a particular universe, such as interdimensional travel or time travel, attracts it. The most technologically advanced civilizations, masters of the laws of physics within a set of universes, able to survive heat deaths and craft entire universes for themselves from the scraps of others, are particular susceptible because of their manipulations. Once these proud empires realize their fate, they can do nothing to avert it and their networks are wiped out without a trace.

Naturally, the Seeping Crepuscule has been weaponized. Many of these empires, in their spite or madness, have spread dangerous quantum tunneling devices throughout the multiverse in an attempt to bring down as many realities as they can with them. Some civilizations have taken to worshiping the Seeping Crepuscule as the ultimate judgment, the inevitable fate or others. Some believe that worship would avert the Seeping Crepuscule, others hope that it is not the end but the start of a new beginning. Both are wrong. The Seeping Crepuscule does not think and it not a transition phase. It is perfect, unthinking annihilation.

Jon: Are you… are you trying to tell me all of this is at the behest of… evil gods?
Jurgen Leitner: Oh, there are certainly those who see them as gods. A few even go so far as to try and worship them, but I don’t find it helpful to think of them like that. Perhaps you could liken them to one of the old pantheons, each with its own rituals, agendas and spheres of influence, but I find simplifying them in such a way makes them harder to truly understand.
The ‘gods’ were conceived of by humankind as a reflection of themselves, their motives and actions divinely powerful, but in essence purely human. These… ‘things’… I find them hard enough to understand without trying to force human frameworks onto them.
Jon: So the creatures are, what, priests? These books, their holy texts?
Jurgen Leitner: I told you it was an unhelpful analogy. Let’s try another one. Um… Imagine, you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape and, above you, can see the vast dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?

We mean nothing to him. We stand on this earth as the pinnacle of god's creations, yet we are at the bottom. No one, no that is not right. Not one of you understands... (laughing) You fools, WE ARE NOT ALONE!!... WE ARE NOT ALONE, AND WE WERE NEVER ALONE!!
Simon Abel, Red Alert 3: Paradox

He is the One Without Eyes.
He is the One Without Shape.
He will be the One Who Lies
He is the One Who Shall Rape
Throughout the Remains of this Shattered World.
— Invocation of Zalgo

Hypothesis: 682 is not bound to base Earth biological chemistry and can adapt itself to be 'organic' or 'inorganic' as necessary. Some of the boys on the lab are arguing whether we can even classify it as 'living', at least as we understand life. This worries me, because an unliving, undying intelligent monster… well, that's where you start getting sacrifices in your name.

there was no war it was him him him him him IT. IT. it came from between the folds of time and space and worlds and light and dark something that is but should not be slipped in and called out to them as their god and they believed it and they tasted it and touched it and layed with it and became its property and did its will and IT IS STILL HERE

UNTHINKING THEY MOVE
TO CUT HIS THROAT
ONLY TO MAKE
A THOUSAND MOUTHS
IF HE IS SILENCED
WE WILL SPEAK FOR HIM
SIGNS AND WONDERS
FLOOD OUR LITTLE SKY
NO STARS ABOVE US
ONLY EYES
WAITING TO OPEN
THERE ARE OTHER RECEIVERS
LOCAL58, "Digital Transition"

    Western Animation 
Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing... there were monsters.
The Lich, Adventure Time

I lived ten thousand lifetimes before the first of your kind crawled out of the mud! It was I who broke through the divide that separated the plane of spirits from the material world! To hate me is to give me breath. To fight me is to give me strength. Now prepare to face oblivion!

Dipper: So what is Bill, exactly?
Ford: No one knows for sure. Accounts differ of his true motivations and origins. I know he's older than our galaxy and far more twisted. Without a physical form, he can only project himself into our thoughts through the mindscape.

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