Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: N’kai

Places

K’n-yan

K’n-yan is the blue-lit subterranean world described in The Mound, written by Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop. Its principal city, Tsath, contains an ancient civilization that has conquered aging, developed telepathy and learned to alter the material state of bodies. The apparent abundance of this society conceals an economy of enslavement and a system that welcomes knowledgeable visitors while forbidding them to leave.

7 min read · 1,317 words

Places

N’kai

N’kai is the lightless subterranean realm beneath Yoth in The Mound. Ancient records describe it as the source of images of Tsathoggua, while a later expedition reports living, shapeless worshippers moving through its stone channels. The resulting disaster leads to a sealed passage, the destruction of the cult’s images in K’n-yan and centuries of uncertainty about whether the route can ever be found again.

5 min read · 845 words

Literature

The Mound

The Mound expands an Oklahoma haunting into an account of an ancient underground civilization. A modern ethnologist discovers a sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript describing K’n-yan, where extraordinary technical powers coexist with captivity, exploitation and accelerating cruelty. His eventual descent beneath the mound tests the manuscript’s claims and reveals what became of the man who wrote it. The following account includes the ending.

12 min read · 2,326 words

Entities & creatures

Tsathoggua

Tsathoggua is a deity created by Clark Ashton Smith and adopted into Lovecraft’s fiction. Its characteristic toadlike appearance, lethargy and associations with subterranean worship belong to several related but distinct narratives. A careful account separates the god from its statues and from the shapeless organisms encountered near those statues; sharing a cult does not make these beings identical.

6 min read · 1,051 words

Places

Yoth

Yoth is the red-lit subterranean region beneath K’n-yan in The Mound. Its ruined cities and surviving records belong to a civilization older than the people who later study it. Yoth provides both the archaeological evidence for an earlier reptilian society and the route by which the cult of Tsathoggua enters K’n-yan from the still deeper darkness of N’kai.

4 min read · 824 words