The war between the Great Race and the Elder Things

The war between the Great Race of Yith and the Elder Things was an ancient struggle over dominion of Earth, remembered in fragmentary accounts rather than witnessed directly by human beings. The Great Race subdued the Elder Things and confined them beneath the surface, but could not make the danger disappear: their sealed routes, guarded ruins, and preparations for a future escape left the victory shadowed by the possibility of renewed conflict.

Origins and Opponents

The account places the Elder Things’ arrival roughly six hundred million years ago. They had crossed space from universes far beyond the familiar, and had dominated Earth and three other planets in the solar system before the Great Race reached Earth. Their bodies and consciousness were unlike terrestrial life. Only partly material by ordinary standards, they perceived the world without sight, through impressions that did not correspond to the senses of earthly organisms. They could pass their senses through solid barriers, though their substance could not; certain forms of electrical energy could destroy them. They could also move through the air without visible wings or another apparent means of levitation. Their minds differed so fundamentally from those of the Great Race that mental exchange between the two was impossible.

The Elder Things had built vast basalt cities with windowless towers and preyed upon beings already present. The Great Race’s own origin lay in a migration of minds from Yith, a distant world described in the disputed Eltdown Shards. This larger history belongs to a vision of deep time in which human existence is brief and successive forms of life rise and vanish across immense geological intervals. The war is therefore not a human conflict enlarged to cosmic proportions: humanity appears only much later, in a history already shaped by alien powers and their surviving traces.

The Conquest and Sealing

When the Great Race arrived, its instruments gave it the means to overcome the Elder Things. It drove them into caverns of the inner earth, which the newcomers had already connected to their own habitations, then sealed the entrances. The Great Race occupied most of the Elder Things’ great cities afterward. It preserved certain important buildings, not simply from scientific or historical curiosity but, the account suggests, partly through superstition. The conquered architecture remained present in the victors’ world as both a material inheritance and a warning.

The confinement was not a clean ending. The Great Race had pushed its enemy out of the surface world, but the underground passages created a boundary that had to be watched. In later ages, the Elder Things appeared to grow stronger and more numerous below. They broke out sporadically in especially remote or lightly guarded cities, including some deserted Elder Thing settlements where passages into the depths had not been properly sealed. These incursions made an old conquest feel unfinished: the threat returned not as a single renewed war, but as repeated breaches that showed the prisons could fail.

Renewed Precautions and the Future Threat

After the incursions, the Great Race increased its precautions. Many routes to the deep caverns were closed permanently. A few were retained behind sealed trapdoors for strategic use if the Elder Things broke through elsewhere. Geological change further complicated the boundary: it had blocked some passages while creating new rifts, and gradually reduced the number of surviving surface structures and ruins associated with the defeated race. The barrier between the worlds below and above was thus neither wholly secure nor static; it was altered by both deliberate defenses and the changing planet.

The Elder Things’ earlier eruptions left a lasting mark on the Great Race’s collective psychology. Their appearance remained undescribed in the records available to the narrator, who found only vague suggestions of mutable forms and temporary invisibility. Fragmentary reports also associated them with control or military use of great winds, whistling sounds, and enormous footprints marked by five circular toes. The omissions matter: the Great Race’s fear is clear, while the precise form of its enemy remains obscured. Its taboo around the subject and the guarded trapdoors make the absence of a full description part of the history’s legacy.

The Great Race foresaw a final successful irruption through its projections into the future. It understood the coming attack as vengeance rather than an effort to reclaim the surface, since its visions showed later races appearing without disturbance from the Elder Things. The threat prompted a plan for millions of the Great Race’s minds to escape across time into the bodies of a future beetle species. The account also suggests that the Elder Things might eventually have preferred the planet’s inner depths, or weakened over the ages; by the era of the post-human beetle race, they would be dead. These possibilities temper the prophecy without resolving its central fear: the Great Race prepared to abandon its own age because it believed the ancient enemy would finally break through.

Records, Ruins, and Uncertainty

The war reaches the reader through the narrator’s synthesis of dreams, myths, and imperfectly preserved records. Human traditions sometimes imagined beings from the stars and ancient civilizations before humanity, while Australian reports of carved stones and buried structures offered possible material traces of an older world. During the 1935 expedition in the Great Sandy Desert, researchers uncovered about 1,250 blocks, some bearing curved forms that resembled features in the narrator’s recurring dreams. Their age and condition suggested immense geological change, but the scattered stones did not, by themselves, confirm the entire history of the war.

The strongest apparent link between the ancient record and the narrator’s own experience comes from a book found in a buried metal case among the ruins. Its pages bore English words written in his handwriting, suggesting that his mind had once taken part in the Great Race’s history. Yet the narrator’s concluding account remains divided between revelation and doubt: the underground conflict may be real, but dreams, inherited legends, and later impressions could also have shaped what he believed he remembered. That uncertainty preserves the war’s defining tension. The Great Race won the ancient campaign, but neither its defenses nor the human evidence that survives can make the old danger fully past.