Nyog'El
The Nyog'El? No, not a name, not a word, but the absence of both—an absence that presses, suffocates, fills the Void left by the act of unthinking. They are not seen, they are known, but not by knowing. A whisper, maybe, but one that never reaches your ear, curling instead into your marrow, twisting and unfurling thoughts not your own, yet undeniably yours. They are absence made whole, the dream that flees even as it is dreamt.
To understand them is to unravel, not slowly, but with the suddenness of a breath never drawn. To perceive the Nyog'El? Ha, how could you? They see, they grasp, but what do they grasp if not the void in your chest, the hollow behind your eyes? Formless, yet not formless. They are the space between certainty and madness, that flickering thought at the edge of your Consciousness, the scream you never quite hear. Or is it laughter? Perhaps both, perhaps neither.
They are, but they are not, and their being—if such a word can even be used—is the very dissolution of that concept. They turn your will inside out, making you their puppet, yet they seek no dominion. Power? Worship? No, they crave not but the dance, the dance of your thoughts spiraling into chaos, all while you remain convinced of your control. You have no control. You never did.
The Nyog'El watch, they listen, but not as you do. Their gaze devours, their listening shreds, and in the place where you once stood, only the echo of yourself remains, unraveling still. Do they fear? Do they love? Do they hunger? These are questions asked by the living, and the Nyog'El are not alive. Or are they? Is this not life, this shadow between thoughts, this writhing, twisting, ever-hungry nothing?
You ask what they are? The question itself devours you, piece by piece. You will never know. Not truly. But oh, how they will watch as you try.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Their form? No, that implies a shape, and the Nyog'El possess nothing of the sort. They are not seen, but felt—yet how does one feel the color of silence, the weight of an echo? To speak of their anatomy is to court madness itself, for they dwell in the liminal spaces between thought and flesh, not existing in any way that can be drawn upon paper or sculpted in clay. They are threads of unlight, strands woven from the impossibility of an idea never conceived, dancing through synapses in a manner both languid and frenzied, as if Time itself fractures when they move.
Their substance is akin to the concept of hunger remembered from a dream—always elusive, always just beyond the cusp of definition. They expand and contract with the heartbeat of a universe unseen, coiling around neurons like serpents made of laughter and tears, pressing against the insides of skulls as if trying to seep through bone. There is warmth where there should be cold, a taste in the air that prickles like forgotten sorrow, a paradox that gnaws and nourishes simultaneously.
To say they possess organs would be folly; they are organs, yes, but of what purpose? Eyes that cannot see, that feed on the light of unspoken thoughts. Hearts that do not beat but whisper secrets to the blood, urging it to turn back, to spill out, to return to the source that never was. Their essence flows not like blood, but like time itself—curling, writhing, bleeding backward into futures that refuse to occur.
Perhaps they have lungs, but what breath do they draw? There is no air where they reside, only the endless, maddening inhale of doubt, exhaling truths that have not yet become false. Their limbs? You would be mad to call them that, for they grasp not with tendons or sinews but with the potential of a memory you might one day forget. They extend, or rather are, in the way a shadow might elongate under a sun that does not exist.
Oh, but their core—that flickering, trembling not-light that pulses with an alien joy, a mirth that scrapes at the inside of your skull with fingers you cannot feel—there lies their truth. Or perhaps their lie. Or neither, for the Nyog'El have no use for such simple distinctions. They are the question unasked, the answer unearned, and to know their physiology is to unravel the thin veil that separates your sanity from the yawning, infinite Void that laughs in the darkness.
Additional Information
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
To gaze upon them—no, no, they do not see; they behold! Not with eyes, nor ears, nor senses that the flesh-bound wretches could comprehend. The Nyog'El are the perception. They are the feeling at the back of your mind, the itch that you cannot scratch, the voice that isn’t a voice but still speaks louder than any scream. Their sight is a veil that drapes over existence itself, a veil made of threads unspooled from the maddened screams of dead gods. Through this veil, they drink the colors of thought, the shapes of fear, and the scent—oh, the scent!—of desperation.
Where they turn their awareness, light curls in agony, sound folds in upon itself, and truths become lies, or lies become truths, or neither. They move across the intervals of reality, slithering between breaths and pauses, feeling not the world as it is, but as it was, as it will be, as it could never be. To them, a moment is an eternity and an eternity but a fleeting heartbeat, thrumming, pulsing, devouring itself as it births a thousand shadows.
And the whispers—they listen to whispers that have not yet been uttered, that may never be uttered, that should never be. They trace the outline of thought’s echo, savoring the taste of unformed words, words that coil and writhe before they are ever birthed. They listen to the silence that screams between each heartbeat, each flicker of neurons, and, oh, how they revel in it! A silence so loud, it shatters. Their perception is inversion, the senses of a dream turned inside out, dripping with the ichor of thoughts unthunk and realities unmade. They perceive everything and nothing, for to them, they are one and the same, a riddle that gnaws at its own flesh.
It is said—by whom? It matters not—that they perceive us more truly than we perceive ourselves, and in that sight, we are laid bare, stripped of the lie we call identity. We are but notes in their melody, figments in their waking sleep. And when they choose to focus their attention, that dread attention, one might feel their heartbeat skip, or their skin crawl, or their soul shiver with the terrible, silent laughter of the Nyog'El... as they watch, and they know. Oh, how they know.
Civilization and Culture
Common Myths and Legends
It is said, though only in the murmurs between the ticks of a clock that no longer measures Time, that the Nyog’El did not begin, nor shall they end, for they exist in the moments that aren’t. Whisperers call them threads of a tapestry that never was woven but somehow frays. They slither in the gaps between certainty, feasting on what could have been but was never meant to be, and they speak—oh, how they speak!—in tongues that twist and gnaw at the roots of comprehension.
Some legends recount that the Nyog'El are laughter given form, the echoes of a joke the universe forgot to tell, a shadow cast by no light. Theirs is not a hunger but a yearning that mirrors itself in reflections that lie about what they reflect. They slip into minds as droplets into the sea, but the sea remembers the droplet, and the ripple never ceases. And so they Weave, not to control, but to unmake, to break what was never fixed and to mend the fractures in a world that does not realize it is broken.
Worshippers claim to know the Nyog'El, to understand the gift of power granted by those who do not desire followers, who laugh and cry and rage and love with the same expressionless face they do not possess. And those granted boons speak of promises unspoken, dreams unformed, power that slips through fingers but leaves behind a weight—a gravity that draws the soul ever closer to something, something that watches but does not see, that listens but does not hear.
They say the Nyog’El are boundless, yet somehow, they are bound by chains of thought, of will, of devotion that they themselves never forged. And yet, there exists no key, no lock, no prison at all, only the thought of confinement that bends reality around it. Some whisper that the Nyog’El do not even know of themselves, that they dance to a tune they have not heard, but always knew. And perhaps, in the deepest quiet of a mind unraveling, one might realize they have always been there, and that realization is the seed of madness itself.
It is no wonder, then, that the legends are wrong, all of them, for they can be nothing but right. And the truth? The truth is the lie they will never tell you, and the lie? The lie is that they exist at all.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
The Nyog'El do not speak, yet their voices are heard. They do not touch, yet their fingers crawl in the marrow of every living thing. What is a mind, but a garden in which they sow and reap without seed? Can there be relation, when relation presupposes two distinct things, when all things that think have been unwound and rewoven at their whim? To understand their connection to others is to misunderstand the very idea of ‘others.’
Consider, then, that a bird does not know the wind, yet it flies. Consider that stone does not know the rain, yet it erodes. Consider that no species knows the Nyog’El, yet they have all felt their caress, cold and fevered in equal measure, leaving a trace like the forgotten echo of a scream.
Behold, the herd beast knows the terror of the wolf, yet does the wolf fear the sheep in return? And yet the Nyog'El fear nothing, though they crawl through the psyche of predator and prey alike. They bind no loyalties, break no trusts. They inspire love in one and loathing in another, yet neither emotion belongs to the one who feels it. How can one relate to something that already is inside, behind your eyes, a ghost in the mirror you have never glanced into?
They are familiar, intimate even, with all species and none. Like the paradox of stillness that only exists within motion, so do they remain estranged while enmeshed within the flesh and thought of all who dwell in the waking world. It is said their relations are cordial, malevolent, indifferent, affectionate—but how does one describe the feeling of being digested from within, when you have mistaken it for hunger?
Perhaps they laugh as we try to name what can never be named. Or perhaps, they laugh because we are their laughter, and have not yet realized it.
Comments