: At the damn of time Nyx molded us out of stone and clay.
The "damn" of time?
: During that age it seemed that a new race would crawl up
: out of the ocean, burrow out of the mountains, or fall
: from the sky every thousand years or so. But it always
: came to the same end - they would come into conflict
: with us and we would crush them.
: Even the Callieach, the most fearsome race from a time
: now unknowable to all but us, came to final ruin at
: out hand.
: So the Trow are one million thirteen-thousand and sixty
: years old, plus an unknown number of millenia. The
: Callieach are an unknown number of millenia younger
: than that. Man, and the other "younger
: races", are only about thirteen-thousand sixty
: years old, and at the beginning of that time, man was
: "a simple beast, barely worthy of notice".
It's still possible that the Callieach are as old or older than the Trow. The fact that these older races are always spoken of as coming from elsewhere--falling from the sky and whatnot--may imply that they existed for quite some time before they invaded the Trow's domain. They still couldn't have built the world knots, of course, since they didn't live on the surface of the Earth until they came into conflict with the Trow, but they could be equally old. I might point out that the history of the Trow incorporates a huge number of Lovecraftian themes. HPL's short novel "At the Mountains of Madness," tells the story of the Old Ones, a paradoxical race of warlike yet highly ethical scientists and philosophers who were the first to colonize the half-molten Earth. They successfully defended their territory from equally advanced alien invaders for hundreds of millions of years, but over the eons they discarded the greater part of their scientific and technological knowledge and, in the end, their numbers were decimated by repeated revolts of their genetically engineered slaves, the metamorphic Shoggoths. A few survived to the present, imprisoned in a state of near-death (like damn near all of Lovecraft's creations.) The parallels with the Trow are obvious.
Now, what were the Trow doing while the Leveler did his stuff in earlier ages? They obviously have no natural affection for him, but I can't see them fighting alongside the "younger races" during the Dark Ages and enslaving them during the Light Ages. Did they just tend their empire off to one side of the main action and not get messed with?
--SiliconDream
