Sunday, July 5, 2020

Zelmkethou, The Living Threshold

Time for old kooky Enshohma to once again share his original creations with you.


Zelmkethou, The Living Threshold

NAME: Zelmkethou (pronounced Zelm-Keth-Thoo)
SUBTITLE: The Living Threshold
ALTERNATE NAMES: The Abyssal God; Great Zelmkethou
SPECIES: Extradimensional

GENDER: Nonsexual (completely lacking any form of gender in a true evolutionary sense - extremely difficult for most humans to comprehend)

LENGTH: 299 meters (roughly 980 feet)
WEIGHT: 100,000 metric tons (estimated)
EYES: None

Zelmkethou is a gigantic sea dwelling monster who originated beyond our known universe and possesses a unique feature to its biology: housed within its orb-shaped shell lies a fully stable dimensional wormhole that reacts to the willing mental desires of anyone who enters it, hence making Zelmkethou a living gateway to anywhere within The Whole of Existence that anyone can wish to be transported to.

While this sounds like a living miracle, there are several key issues with this gateway, the first being that it's on the back of a giant monster and one that's particularly hostile towards anything outside of itself. Many attempts to reach Zelmkethou's shell via spaceship, submarine, and massive-sized robot have almost all but failed.

Secondly, smaller scale attempts such as single individuals simply swimming up to the beast is as dangerous for Zelmkethou is ignorant if not unresponsive to anything too small for its notice and thus many have been accidentally killed by beast during such attempts.

Thirdly, The Zelmkethou Gateway, the orb-like shell itself, is a one-way trip as those who have made it to the portal have never returned. This is simply the nature of The Zelmkethou Gateway much like how most time travel methods are highly limited to one temporal direction. There have been evidence confirming the lucky few have survived after entering the dimensional orb but this has still led to widespread conspiracies across the universe theorizing that there is no portal and Zelmkethough is simply using a giant deception to lure in smaller-sized prey - The Zelmkethou Gateway being nothing more than a illusion-sporting digestive organ.

Finally, the fourth reason why it's nearly impossible to reach The Zelmkethou Gateway... No one agrees what planet the great monster resides upon or within. It's fully agreed that Zelmkethou lives in a water-heavy environment to support its great weight but the exact identity of said world's been lost over time.

The gorgeous water world of Jumo-Umo, the dying oily seas of Ranagader Ex-Prime, the vapory gas giant of Vinhea, the weather chaotic world of Barley Open, the silver seas of Dahmeia Third, the water-ammonia oceans of Neptune, and the briny seas of Earth, all have been believed in being the home-world of Zelmkethou but no positive identification been made on the matter.

The Great Zelmkethou is a living miracle, a colossal hazard, and a frustrating mystery all wrapped up into one gigantic monstrous package.

ENSHOHMA'S COMMENTS:

Despite my love for the works of cosmic horror author H.P. Lovecraft and his various contemporaries, I have an admittedly tertiary knowledge of The Cthuhlu Mythos as a whole. Because of this, Zelmkethou is something of a repurposed blunder since its design started out as my misinformed (and misnamed) rendition on the titular monster from The Dweller in The Gulf, a 1932 short story written by Clark Ashton Smith.


I didn't even get The Dweller In The Gulf's name right!

Also known as The Eidolon of the Blind, The Dweller is is an ancient, possibly immortal subterranean creature that dwells deep within the planet Aihai (known to us humans as Mars). It is served and worshiped by a cult of Martians who have been captured and blinded by the beast as its equipped with two proboscises for the extraction of eyes (how charming, Clark).

While The Dweller in the Gulf resembled a tortoise, albeit one of gargantuan proportions, its more alien or at least chimeric in overall form and, despite its connections to The Cthuhlu Mythos, is a relatively tangible animal instead of the reality warping cosmic entity I had originally imagined based on a scantly read character description.

When I returned to revisit this design and compared it to its source inspiration, I realized it wouldn't work as an adaptation of The Dweller in The Gulf and revised it as my own loosely inspired creature, hence Zelmkethou The Living Threshold.

My friend Jesse Alonso helped with the monster's name which is a play on the Czech phrase for globe, zeměkoule.

RELATED LINKS:

The Dweller in the Gulf at Monster Wiki:

https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Dweller_in_the_Gulf

The Dweller in the Gulf at H.P. Lovecraft Wiki:

https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Dweller_in_the_Gulf

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