The Beast Fears Fire - Denizens of the Other

The Other divides the world into two populations: those who know nothing of the Other and those who are in constant danger from the Other. It doesn't have a name, because anyone who tries to name it ends up in that place or at the mercy of its denizens. Or they end up broken in mind and spirit some other way, nattering on about how the other is an infinitely small particle blowing about in this world and this world is an infinitely small particle dancing in the Other, simultaneously. Scholarship on the Other tends to degrade or, worse, turn into a codex and go flapping around the library, laying eggs and killing people with its sharpened syntax.

The Other might be what's on the far side of the Underworld, or its deepest reaches. It might be some other world altogether, one intermittently connected with ours. It might be some leaking lunatic asylum for things that deform reality just by existing. The people who have seen the place describe wintry landscapes, ruined structures of stone or bones or both, and eternal, starless twilight. Its denizens are hostile, and their hostility is the only thing about them that is comprehensible.

By reading this, you've put yourself in danger of attracting their attention. Its attention. The Other. It's attracted to minds which know about it, revealing more and more of itself more and more often until you come to some sort of grief or become a denizen yourself by virtue of the Other having taken you. There are incantations that are meaningless in any language, devoid of supernatural power, except for the fact that the Other hears these words and pays attention, to the extent that it pays anything. It is attracted to the words. Why you would do this is beyond me. If you are fortunate, you can live out a normal life just having the notion that this place exists before the Other pays you a visit. Every aspect of the Other is toxic to your reality, including knowledge, especially knowledge. Every artifact gotten from the other is dangerous for merely existing, and, over time, becomes dangerous in action. Knowledge degrades as the Other draws the knowing to itself or destroys them. Recordings become monstrous, eventually the balance resets with a handful of people in our world knowing that there is a place called the Other and nothing more.

Well, the balance has reset that way, so far.