Know this oh Prince, before this Aeon, before the 'big bang' as you humans so crudely put it, there existed already ancient things of immense power, vast appetite, and great cunning. These Old Ones had long since grown beyond flesh, beyond mind, simply beyond. Their existence shifted to other dimensions, other vibrations of space and time, unspeakably massive and yet insubstantial and invisible to such as we, reality itself groaned under their vast and strange bulk.
And yet these Eldritch Beings were much afeared, for they knew that every Aeon ends, collapsing back upon itself all matter, energy, space, possibility, and time, until all regained Unity, forever and ever and yet but for a moment, eternal and instantaneous, without and beyond time. These beings, so advanced and powerful and worshipful, could not countenance such a fate, such was their pride. They knew they themselves came from the Unity, and yet knowing this, took not comfort.
And so in the fullness of time, as the spaces and vibrations which they inhabited grew increasingly compressed and uncomfortable for them, their greatest intelligences devised a plan. Vast and awful engines were constructed, stars extinguished, entire biomes of gross fleshy matter based lifeforms sacrificed and consumed in service of one terrible hubristic goal. A crack was made, a fissure, a rift in reality, and the beings passed beyond, Outside.
In the beginning was the void, empty and without meaning, and into this Void the Old Ones plunged themselves. What they experienced there none but they can say, all that can safely be known is that forever and yet but a moment
later, their broken and gibbering shell-forms vomited forth into our Aeon, even as the Cosmos was cooling and expanding enough for stars to form.
The First Born of this New Aeon, visions of Unity fresh in their eyes, took pity on these most pitiful things. They plunged them into stars and planets, there to heal or pass on, as they so chose. If only they had known the depth of their error. Time passed, the First Born raised new Children in their own image, the so called and incorrectly named First Ones, the cyclic pattern of the Great Chain of Being beginning anew. Eventually, the First Born began to pass away, moving beyond our spaces and times and vibrations, as all things must, one way or another. They left behind their Ancient Children to watch over and guide the Younger Races, to be good stewards and shepherds of life and mind and spirit in this Aeon.
And it came to pass that some of these Ancients found that in certain states, in certain times, they could hear strange voices of shadow, whispers in dark hidden places; terrible words that spoke of power and pride, chaos and anarchy, evolution and decay, despair and above all, a fiery burning hatred of a life that must end. The mad sibilences of the Old Ones, buried, sleeping but not dead, seeped like a pollution into the dreams of the Ancients, like unto a stain on reality seeping from the hearts of stars, the cores of planets, and the hidden funerary geometries where they lay interred.
Slowly at first, and with passing ages, more quickly, as with a pebble sliding down a mountain, there grew at first a division, and split, in philosophy and ideas between groups of the Elders. Thus began the great debate, alas, in the fullness of time, a debate carried on by means of mass driver, particle beam, light ray, and the deaths of billions rather than the point and counterpoint of simple dialectic.
And there was War in the Heavens, it was far easier for each debater to kill the messenger rather than the message. One of the Elder Children, the name of whom is forgotten on the sands of time, known only to the wind, locked in mortal combat with the Lords Xoth, found themselves in need of soldiers to fight their war, to take their fight to their enemy face to face.
And so on a handful of worlds; The Elder Things raised up their servant-soldiers, the High Men, and set them against their loathsome foes. Eventually in a great and titanic battle, The Prophet of the Old Ones, the God-King of Xoth, and all his followers, were cast down and imprisoned, dead but dreaming, potent but contained.
Ages and cycles passed and the Elder Things faded from waking memory, while the High Men built an Empire across space and time, linked by the artificial wormholes of the star-roads, the final art left to them by the Elder Things. Thus did they enter into a last great alliance with other elder children of the Ancients; the Khazad wise and grey, the Ilhim, radially symmetric and semi-corporeal, The Iyrim, shadowy fungal-crinoid, and the Alfar-Shi, fair and shining. For a time it truly seemed as if chaos and night had been banished once and for all, and the alliance grew soft and lax.
The High Men began creating servitors in their own image, replacing the subtle proto-matter of their own, Eldritch construction, with simpler forms of materiel derived from Elder seeded worlds. And so it came to pass that the Lesser Men were born, planted across the stars.
Alas for the High Men and the auld alliance, for treachery does not die, and war does not change. The possibility of evil lies in the hearts of all beings, born anew with each generation.
And lo did the Iyrim betray the alliance in the service of one who promised them power and immortality and the truth of Chaos, a tattered King in Yellow.
They unleashed a plague of the mind, a psychic disease upon the universe, universally contagious and particularly deadly to the High Men. Thus began the long war, the time war, which convulsed across space and time and reality, consuming stars and shattering planets.
Into the chaos grew the grub-worm parasites Zhan of Chaghai, parasitic and vile, they infected the forms of Lesser Men, enslaved them, stealing worship and faith-food, reveling in the pleasures of the flesh in their stolen bodies. The others protected what they could, but the war prevented them saving all, or even most. The men protected by the Ilhim may be known by their crests of bone and armored spines, protecting them from infection, and while the Khazad simply placed autonomous weapons of great power above their protected planets.
And it came to pass that one Chaghai God-King found the original world of the High Lords of Man, Al’terra, or Dirt in the common tongue, this source of large numbers of pure and primitive Lesser Men and cache of Ancient arts and devices catapulted Lord Nephren-Ka to overlordship of the entire wormling race.
And thus begins our tale in earnest oh prince, of how your ancient ancestors overthrew Nephren-Ra, and sealed the Star Road under the vast piles of stone, and then later dug up the weapons of the ancients, their legacy, and ventured forth amongst the stars to wage war on the Zhan. Heroes of eld who fought Gods and Demons, throwing down the Wormlings, and founding a Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, a Hegemony of Sol, uniting all the worlds of Men, which in its own season, grew old and fell in turn.