The Warp, this sea of souls formed from pure emotion and concepts, was quietly undergoing a silent and terrifying transformation.
As the rift leading to the Abyss was forcibly pried open, the fleeting appearance of Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One, had passed, yet the "passage" it had unconsciously widened had not completely closed. Instead, it had become an outlet for something more concrete and far more unsettling.
First came that unimaginably massive dark-green body, covered in slick scales and mucus. Like a nightmare made manifest, [Cthulhu] slowly "floated" out from the shadows in the depths of the rift.
Close behind came countless shrieking [Deep Ones], loathsome hybrids of amphibians and fish.
They were not an army in any physical sense, but entities of thought composed of pure madness, absolute obedience, and twisted worship of the Great Old Ones. Like polluted tides, they surged into the Warp's turbulent currents of energy.
Their arrival brought silent contamination.
An omnipresent [whisper] began to spread. It did not travel through sound, but seeped directly into the level of consciousness, like background radiation of the mind, filled with mad longing for a distorted starry sky and reverent worship of the sleeping lord.
These whispers were not coercive temptations, yet they subtly eroded willpower and warped perception and dreams.
Madness spread slowly from the rift like a silent plague.
Some lesser demons began behaving erratically. They no longer pursued only slaughter or pleasure, but started repeating strange movements without meaning, or praying to constellations in the void.
The Warp's mutation did not stop.
The mountain-sized projection of Cthulhu ceased its aimless drifting, as if it had found an anchor, and fell still.
With its stillness came an unprecedented phenomenon—the Warp's "substrate" in the surrounding region, that endlessly boiling emotional energy, began undergoing a terrifying "phase change."
A new