Primordial Otherthing
The Primordial Otherthings are creatures of the Mythos who dreamed themselves awake when the universe was young. Known by more intellectual histories as Stellar Intelligences, an Otherthing is a vastness physically and spiritually rooted into fundamental truth and myth of the young universe, more easily perceived as preternatural physical and astrological phenomena than individuals. The Otherthings saw the galaxy as their rightful playground: the due inheritance of the true firstborn children of Creation. The gods, of course, disagreed, and with the assistance of mortal races, began a systematic campaign of genocide against the Otherthings. In the end, the gods and their allies and servants proved victorious, and the surviving Otherthings were imprisoned within their own names, never to emerge in Creation in fullness ever again.
Until things changed, of course, but that's another story entirely.
Origin and Nature
When time and space were young, fluid, and not as they are in the modern age, the Otherthings dreamed themselves awake. They were not born as the gods and mortals were, and share marginally little in common with most of the other other powers that be. Spiritually, an Otherthing was a multitude like unto a pantheon, comprised of at least twelve distinct, individual, and self-aware Aspects of itself. These Aspects manifested both as sapient beings and as sapient geography -- appearing as brilliant green stars whose light cast no shadows, mountains whose tips touched the ground and base extended into the skies, self-constructing towers full of arcane knowledge, and many other things besides. Each Aspect existed simultaneously in physical, spiritual, and weirder dimensions besides, and their personality, form, and interests expressed an Otherthing's nature in a true if not complete way. As individuals, these Aspects possessed their own interests and designs, wre capable of learning new ways of interacting with the world, and frequently came into conflict with other beings of similar power -- even their own 'cousins' or 'siblings', at times.
Those who remember the Otherthings say that many of the tools and devices used to shape the galaxy were first forged by these Aspects, whose collective creative brilliance is claimed to have spawned new forms of life, created worlds and stars, and stranger things besides -- the artifact called Siahai's Cog was but one example of eldritch engineering. They used these tools -- and the worlds and lives they discovered and created -- to play at some unknown game or advance some unknowable design, to the distraction of all other things. Moreover, their nature and connection to their overself meant that each Aspect was functionally immortal: their bodies could be rent and slain, but their essence remained, and would in time renew itself to walk the cosmos once again.
The End of Histories
While some Aspects carried themselves as benevolent caretakers and gardeners of the cosmos, most had little compassion or empathy for lesser creatures, thinking of them mostly as as fodder for their own grand crusades, glories and melodramas. Their power, influence, and carelessness chafed against the rest of the Powers That Be, who had their own designs for the galaxy, but to war directly against the Otherthings was to chance mutually assured destruction; even the most gentle-hearted Aspect would fight to the death and beyond to preserve its own existence, and their wrath was a terrible thing. Thus, intermediaries were necessary, and it was decided that the mortal peoples of the young galaxy would be the best way to start the war. The First Ones, whose cultures had seen the cruelty of the Aspects firsthand and been unable to functionally intervene, were swift to agree. The young Time Lords provided a key, crucial fragment of knowledge they had themselves recently discovered: how to rend the essence of an Aspect, or even an Overthing itself, and make their deaths stick.
The Otherthings and the Aspects were oblivious to the coming campaign against them until it was too late. They were taken completely by surprise when they found their souls being systematically murdered by beings they had given no more thought to than a human farmer might pay an individual stalk of grass in a hay bale. Their surprise was compounded by horror when the first Otherthing also died -- well and truly died -- at the hands of mortals. Otherthings, as beings never born, were not capable of dying; when killing blows were struck nonetheless, their vast architectures of essence fragmented shattered into countless agonized, still-screaming shards. The death of the first Otherthing was so unkthinkable to their hosts that it was not until the second Otherthing was murdered that they truly realized what was going on. Whether or not the makers of these weapons knew that this eternal dying-death is an unanswered question, but the Otherthings fought back with such fervor that they were forced to put them back to the test.
Few other details exist regarding the genocide of the Otherthings, save that it ended in relative completion. In the end, with nearly half their number murdered, the Otherthings chose surrender rather than eternal agony in near-oblivion. By this point, the First Ones had grown weary of war, and urged the Powers That Be to accept it. The Otherthings agreed to be sealed within the vast but finite boundaries of their own Names, and were exiled to the prison of the Void. The shards of dead Otherthings were largely cleaned up and put away, where they could no longer exert their degenerative influence over the world. The Powers That Be closed the book on the Otherthings after their binding and exile, and think no more of them. In the wake of the war, there were other horrors to confront, and they turned their attention to the next threat already endangering their new order.
Connections to the Mythos
By design, the prisons of the Otherthings were not complete; a complete prison was something the Otherthings could eventually flex their full strength against, crack open, and then emerge anew to menace the world. Elements of their power, or even entire Aspects themselves, could be drawn out to wield their formidable powers at the pleasure of the First Ones or the gods. For a time, this became very popular as a shortcut to desired ends, but as the Aspects and their elements proved to be unpredictable servitors, relying on them came to be seen as weakness and unwillingness to Do The Proper Thing. The tipping point came when a handful of cultures were discovered to have been suborned by particularly clever Aspects, who began to use them as proxies for their old wars once again. The war was fought once again, and the old weapons unearthed; this time, well aware of their foes' capabilities, the Aspects wielded their host cultures as weapons for their own survival, forcing their enemies to commit a much more personal campaign of extermination.
In the wake of this second war, the surviving cultures of the First Ones deliberately obscured, downplayed, and ultimately excised the historical facts to create a narrative that better suited their own needs. The glory and majesty of the Otherthings was consigned to the waste bins of history. Despite the best efforts of the First Ones, knowledge of the Aspects and the Otherthings was not entirely scrubbed from the world. Survivors of the broken civilizations took their knowledge with them into exile, and those who were never quite interested in obeying their wiser elders never entirely gave up their practices. As the eons passed, the Otherthings and their pantheons became associated with beings of the Mythos -- one more example of hidden powers sealed away in ancient times but that could be called upon when the stars were right. Names such as Tulzscha entered the tomes of Mythos summoners along with Hastur and Cthulhu, venerated by sinister cults
Atypically for beings associated with the Mythos, the Aspects prove to be remarkably lucid conversationalists. This makes them both more useful for would-be summoners as tools and servants, but also more dangerous for their ability to influence the world around them both deliberately and accidentally. The Aspects themselves seldom speak of their own time of glory, and their recollections may or may not converge with the facts of history; while they have spent more time imprisoned than free, they still remember freedom, and while they can never be truly free, they still savor the chance to walk the cosmos they still believe to be rightly theirs.
It was widely understood that the awakening of the Otherthings was a singular, one-time event in the history of the universe. Only a young, dynamic cosmos whose reality was still in flux could permit such an event, and even the most bold of the Time Lords were not interested in recreating the events that would lead to a second chance.
The awakening of The Widening Gyre was not supposed to be possible, but so were many things before the age of the Suburban Senshi.
