[The Testament of the Winds:]
Many thousands of years ago, they ruled the globe.
But the pressing fist of great power carried a heavy price, and now their dominion has fallen beyond time and shadow.
Look now, to the interior world...
[The Explorer:]
Ah yes, the ancient map (its true origin unknown... mayhap crafted by the same vaunted cartographer as the infamous Piri Reis map itself?) won in a game of cards at Portsmouth Docks... a fortuitous hand indeed!
(This could eclipse even Blackthorne's discoveries in Antarctica!)
Wagered by a grizzled mariner (in whose weary rum-addled gaze gleamed the knowledge of something far greater)...
Twin axial portals to the inner reaches... one at the very polar pinnacle of the world, the other hidden beneath the lost ice-bound megalopolis!
[See also: "In Search of the Lost Cities of Antarctica"]
Seeking answers to the cryptic riddles of the universe,
Secrets of the blackest (most impenetrable) deeps of the umbra,
Wreathed in frozen shadow and ice-bound peril,
Subterrene halls of horripilated wonderment...
Tatsumaki Maru voyage north, ever north!
Cleave a path through the ma**ing Arctic ice!
Agleam with all the colours of the aurora,
Far beyond Ny Alesund lies our goal.
Invocations and ideograms (dreams of the Xtaxchedron?),
Conjuration of the inner world's (tenebrous) denizens,
And their star-spanning progenitors, spawned beyond the outer-world night.
These darkling subterrene dominions, astir with strange and terrible beings, sired by entities whose genesis was far beyond the nighted void of our own outer-world! The legacy of the First Ones, spawn of the Mera! But, it is here written that one day, when even the War of the Lexicon and the cataclysmic Great Chaos War have faded to naught but distant memory, a great conflict shall be waged between the forces of Order and the dread avatars of the Z'xulth. Vile fiends of the Outer Darkness, They-Who-Lurk-And-Breed-In-Limbo, the Dwellers in Eternal Shadow unleashed through The Gate to That Which Lies Beyond! The Black Galaxy disgorges its malignant horrors! Mankind shall suffer inestimably at the hands of these sinistrous black titans of maleficent Chaos!
These stygian pitch-black vaults are filled with batrachian devils,
Dire crystalline watch-dogs of the chasmed deeps,
(For the gleaming j**els of truth are not without their protection...)
Vril-gorged adamantine fiends of the threshold,
Spawn of the ersatz interior sun.
(Behold, a vast plasma-fueled crystalline illuminatory orb... a vril-sun rising!
And marvel at the colossal terra-forming machines of the First Ones!)
Quaere verum... Sic itur ad astra!
[The testament of the Winds:]
Far, far beneath the surface of this coruscating sphere, at the very heart of our mysterious globe, lies the true path to man's dark destiny beyond the heavens...