Whirling, protean, ceaselessly manic, as easily stirred to passionate love as to bitter hate, the Kel-Tiar appear to the unwary traveler in forms alternately seductive, grotesque, mystifying and terrible, and frequently each in rapid succession; they are said to pass through solid matter as if through air, to cause water to flow uphill, to create lights that breathe noise and music possessed of unknown and unnatural colors. Those unfortunate few who earn their frequently arbitrary wrath have typically been reduced to lunacy or worse, but friends of the Kel-Tiar seem little better off, often drawn into a world as hallucinatory as the Kel-Tiar themselves: fleeing non-existent enemies, searching in vain for lost and imaginary loves, babbling in terror at the inevitable approach of the Kel-Tiar’s feared and hated adversaries, the Ul-Tiar.

The Ul-Tiar lie some seven thousand fathoms below the Gyolbrag Mountains, deep in the Ascacian rock. Their thick, flat, oily forms press through the continental shelf at a nearly imperceptible pace, absorbing stray nutrients, water droplets and bacteria along the way. Occasionally a quake or tremor from an abandoned yylimium mine will cause a few to stir, but they soon resume their glacial stillness. They are, apparently, asleep—in a massive, epochs-long hibernation begun some time before recorded history.

The two species, of course, are actually one: the Kel-Tiar are merely the dreams of the Ul-Tiar, given shape and form by these slumbering creatures’ peculiar mental energies. The Kel-Tiar, aware of this on some primal level, are filled with a terror of the day when the Ul-Tiar wake, and when they will presumably disappear. It is unclear if the Ul-Tiar are aware of the Kel-Tiar—or, for that matter, of themselves; nor is it clear what awaits the Ul-Tiar when they finally emerge from their long, sound sleep.

The Tiari were once listed in the Honored Canon of the Sixteen, but were removed in 5256 as contact had yet to be established with a waking specimen. Human/Kel-Tiar hybrids exist, and the reader may learn more of their tragic and curious plight in such works as Seskeson’s The Sleepwalking Life and Oro’kono’s A Body Without Remains.

—Recorder 3000-21