[From a fragmentary transcription of the sixth Latin edition of the Chthonic Chronicles, believed
lost during the great fire of London in 1666:] 

"O', great and luminous ones, who came from beyond the stars to slumber serene beneath the earth of
the third sphere, hearken to me! Hear me, o' mighty one, o' great Khthon! Awaken and hear my
adulation, o' divine and glorious God of gods! From thy hoary tomb thou shalt ascend, and the earth
shall be enraptured by thy majesty!" 

"Khthon! To the ancient Lemurians, you assumed the guise of a beautiful azure-skinned woman with
great black wings, to the Atlanteans, you manifested as a brilliant fiery sphere of searing radiant
energy, to the peoples of Ultima Thule and Hyperborea, you took the form of a titanic crystalline
dragon. Yet your [bad word] form is beyond the ken of men, darker than the blackest heart of deepest
night, more terrifying than the very essence of fear itself... thou art terror incarnate! From the
timeless void you came, son of Z'xulth! Glory to They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo! 

[Excerpts from translator's cautionary notation:] 

"Behold these repositories of fearful arcane knowledge, tomes of aeons-old cursed lore which was
surely ancient even when the ill-fortuned antedeluvian civilizations which initially articulated it [bad word] such dread lexicons of terror to shuddering memory! Fear these legendary
encyclopaedia antedeluvia, these ebon necronomica of shunned rites and diabolical adulations! The
Tome of Shadows, the Forbidden Books of the First Cataclysm, the Epsilon Exordium, the Scrolls of
the Third Circle, the Oracle of Antediluvian Blasphemies, the Diabolist's Lexicon, the Arcana Atra
Libri, the Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies of Mu, the Manuscripts of the Cultists of Ur, the
Chronicle of Shadows, the Black Bible of Kor-Avul-Thaa, the Ancient Book of the Six Keys, the
Cydonia Manifesto, the Index [bad word] Prohibitorum, the Star-Maps of the Ancient Cosmographers, the
Cursed Books of the Z'xulth, the Praxeum Codex, the Chthonic Chronicles!
"I now know that there is something inestimably evil at large throughout the cosmos. It is a
ravenous and pitiless storm which rages across the universe, permeating the very fabric of
creation, existing simultaneously in all dimensions, wholly unconstrained by linear time. This
force is the black, quasi-sentient mana which sustains such ageless revenants of the Z'xulth as the
dread Dwellers in Eternal Shadow and the unspeakable They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo. When beings
whose essences are intrinsically malefic choose to embrace this darksome energy source, the
resultant sinister symbiosis can be sublimely diabolical, as evidenced by the black blight that was
the infamous pseudo-human sorcerer Lord Angsaar! And of course, the malign Zurra, that abominable
result of an experiment by the Ersatz Ones gone disastrously wrong; an ill advised attempt to clone
the K'laa genetic template of mighty Zuranthus in the Mera spawning vats beneath the Pre-Cambrian
sea, only for the matrix to [bad word] contaminated by the errant cells of a captured fiend of Z'xulth!
The result was a prime fiend whose capacity for evil and wanton annihilation was exceeded only by a
penchant for self-agrandizement and his rampant psychological instability. In many cases, the
potential [bad word] and domination that such entities may aspire to is constrained only by
their own physical and psychological limitations, as the toll which the dark mana takes upon the
host's mind and flesh is not insignificant..."