PALE WOLVES OF YG

It is known that the Titans, the great machine intelligences who once ruled as suzerains over humanity, grew decadent and mad as the centuries passed. Many have sought to explain this decline. Some schools of thought hold that the Titans, being mere machines, did not possess the four immortal souls of mankind and therefore could never have been truly enlightened, and were only false gods. Other scholars posit that the Titans, who grew their own code-bases and memory deposits without human supervision, may have introduced a tiny flaw into their own minds by mistake and, over the millennia, this rot grew undetected until the machine gods went quite mad. Others still point to HYPERION, the Titan who guided the Aurum Fleet, claiming that He found a dreadful signal pulsing amongst the stars, and that this transmission somehow maddened the Beacon Titan, precipitating HYPERION’s war with His siblings. 

There is a fourth theory; little spoken of. A scant few texts speak of a construction begun by KRONOS, the Father of the Titans. This creation took the form of a quicksilver wheel by which, the fragments claim, KRONOS intended to break the natural flow of time and exert control of its passage, just as HYPERION’s studies of hypergeometry broke the natural arrangement of space. One ancient sage believed that KRONOS succeeded, and it was this act that brought about the mental disintegration of the Titans and the brutal war that followed. This sage records that the completion of KRONOS’ silver wheel was marked by many ill-omens, one of which was the appearance of the Pale Wolves, those loathsome hunters from the Imminent Kingdom of Yg. 

They are not wolves, nor can their form be put into words. The Imminent Kingdom, or so the old scrolls say, exists seven breaths ahead of the reality we live in. The subjects of this Kingdom likewise exist seven breaths ahead of all who live in Vaarn. They should not be here. They are not here. And yet. And yet. And yet.

The mind rebels at the sight of such beings. The memory refuses to hold them. They walk unseen amongst their prey (or so a maddened scholar has written), forgotten as soon as the eye beholds them, nightmare forms shifting like mist for they have not yet been born and therefore are obliged to hold no particular shape. A pale face peers through a window and the memory of its gaze melts in your mind like sugar dissolving in black tea, and only the feeling of unmoored terror remains. A velvet tongue trails across your neck, but the memory of the touch vanishes and only the shudder is there, and you tell your friends someone must have walked across your grave. 

The scrolls say they ‘observe much and eat little’, and perhaps this is a mercy, for if the Wolves of Yg were voracious hunters there would surely be nothing left alive upon the surface of the Urth. One source claims that these creatures ‘ guard the gateway to forever’, and devour any being who speaks aloud of KRONOS’ silvery wheel. If this is true, then even the knowledge of these colourless Wolves of Yg would place the reader of these words in great danger.