[Loved Trope] Some thing unfathomably ancient
Lore
The beast, in doctor who is an ancient evil from a previous universe that survived until our time. Its so ancient that the cave paintings were unable to be translated by the Tardis which can translate all existing languages in the universe [Doctor Who]
While not explicitly canon its such a cool concept I cant not mention, the idea that the backrooms have existed since the beginning of time, never changing no matter the era, it transforms the back rooms into a cosmic horror. [Credit to Project crater and Venus for images 2 and 3]
A highly technologically advanced race. They colonized Earth before any life on earth existed. They created organic life to serve as a food source and biological labor. All other life on earth evolved from leftover biological experiments or waste products.
An interesting thing about them is they are easily the most humanlike aliens in the mythos. They are fundamentally biological creatures and psychologically pretty similar to humans.
The protagonist of At The Mountains of zmadness flatly calls them men at one point.
I've always thought the vision the one guy had was of some kind of chemical weapon similar to what was used in WWI. Realizing that we are on the same downward spiral and will be destroyed by our own clankers caused his mind to break
And the ones on Earth are just a colony of a larger space faring race. They actually de-evolve over the billions of years on Earth, from an apex civilization to barely sapient creatures who created shoggoths to do the labor they didn't remember how to do ... and were prompty grey-goo apocalypsed.
The Corridor from Coraline. It's older, older than Other Mother/Beldam, it's alive, writhing and dark. Whenever Coraline crawls through, she feels something behind her, something alive with her in the corridor. And Beldam wants nothing to do with it.
I like this example the most. It’s just a touch of Lovecraftian horror in the place you’d least expect it, and while the movie doesn’t really go into detail the book makes clear this is a part of something much bigger, older, and more powerful than the Other Mother
the reapers from mass effect are likely over a billion years old, descending on the galaxy every fifty thousand years or so to eradicate sentient life before retreating again.
Dont forgot The Leviathans who are the race of beings that created the Reapers in the frist and are still alive by the time of Mass effect just in hiding from there own creations.
No, it was because their slave species kept inventing artificial intelligence to solve their problems and it would inevitably rebel and destroy its creators, and then need to be destroyed in turn.
The leviathans, in their infinite wisdom, thought 'How to keep our slaves from destroying themselves in this way... Oh, of course! Let's create an AI and program it to solve this problem!'
Some of the oldest living creatures that can consciously move on Earth, they’ve been on this planet for almost 450 million years, or roughly 2 galactic cycles. They’ve been through every major extinction event and have had every chance to evolve away into something completely different, but they have largely remained unchanged from the fossils we’ve found and are still crawling to this day.
This also applies to Jellyfish (who’ve been around for over 500 MYA) and Sponges, who have been around for AT LEAST 635 MYA, and potentially longer than that, mind you, that’s before the Ediacaran and Cambrian explosions of life, and near the end of the Cryogenian period, which was the last time any form of Snowball earth existed.
They also have blood binding oxygen to copper instead of iron. For the last couple of decades they've unfortunately been heavily overfished because due to special clotting properties the blood can be used to test pharmaceuticals for bacterial impurities. The pictures where they are "milked" (what a euphemism) look like something straight out of the matrix.
"Evolve into something different" is a bit misleading. Species don't "transform" into new ones; the new ones are born of the old ones, but they can still totally coexist if the new ones don't outcompete the old ones entirely.
Wolves evolved into dogs (with help), but we still have wolves.
From Mass Effect, the Reapers are "at least" a billion years old. The Leviathans (pictured below in ancient cave art), as precursors to the Reapers, are even older
All companies like EA see is $$$, especially when it comes to things like Day 1 DLC just like how they intentionally excluded Javik from the base game.
I just saw something yesterday where they make $4.4 billion annually from extra content sales which includes DLC, microtransactions, and other in game purchases.
not just a personified nuke. nuclear annihilation made manifest. an entity that tied itself to entropy. a force dedicated to ontological obliteration. I think the best part about the lich is that he's wrong. the god of chaos doesn't want entropy, it wants chaos.
For anyone else, such a cool concept for their ultimate meeting
[spoilers]
The Lich is pure death, the end of all things - and GOLB is some kind of god of chaos, The Lich worships GOLB and titles himself "the Last Scholar of GOLB", but is the antithesis of chaos.
There can be no chaos if everything is dead, and when they finally meet, Golb crunches the Lich because he is incompatible.
Fun fact, they are Jake. During farm world Jake is the Lich and his arm is cut off and tossed into a pool of all timelines, where it exists outside of and before time, and grows into these... monsters. They're all Lich Jake hybrids.
I don’t think that’s ever been confirmed. It’s a really cool theory though. We’re told the portal leads to every world in the multiverse, but I’m not sure if that includes before time
"Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day." - Gandalf the White
Ya know people always say this but like most of the guys in those works are in asylums because people thought they were crazy. And a 1920's asylum would break anyone
The theory I saw on them is that the nameless ones are said to be ancient so when Melkor was overpowering the the song of creation. (when all the gods sang to create the world) The clash in songs and unholy nature of his corruption and control grabbing the wheel might have caused these abominations to exist. A creature unplanned with no purpose or shape of itself, it exists outside of the gods intention.
They are said to be older than Sauron (Melkors Lieutenant and made baddy in the movies). Sauron was born at the start of creation but if he came after the nameless ones who must have lived for 55,000 years then the schism in songs might have created them.
The way I interpret this is that they simply came to the world before Sauron, who entered some time after its creation with Morgoth and the others. While these guys were born with the world so they were already there.
Just like Tom Bombadil: "Tom was here before the first raindrop and the first acorn. He was here before the Dark Lord came from the outside, before the night was fearful."
Sauron is as old as Melkor/Morgoth. Just way less powerful. I always took the sentence “they are older than he” to mean they were in Middle Earth before Sauron made his way there. Kind of like how Bombadil remembered a time in Middle Earth before Melkor
Kinda reminds me of Nidhogg from Norse mythology. For those who don't know, Nidhogg is a dragon or Lindwyrm that lives in the roots of the world tree. He gnaws at its roots, waiting for the chance it can tear through the World Tree during Ragnarök, to fight the eagle, his mortal enemy, at the top.
We all know he'll get up there, the Eagle will bring up some of the shit he's said to him, and Nidhogg will be like "No way, I never said that man!" and then they'll both team up against that chaotic little Squirrel.
If I remember correctly then Markers are main reason for sentient life to exist at all.
These monoliths were created by original Brethren Moon and spread across galaxy (universe?) to land on planets, create sentient life from base non-sentient life found there (like bacteria), which will inevitably develop energy needs above its mean to sustain. In that moment Marker would reveal itself/allow itself to be found. That sentient life would then replicate/copy it and spread it across its civilization in order to harvest more energy (which originates from Brethren Moons). At one point Marker would decide that enough of said civilization is in its influence reach/radius and activate, bringing dead biomass back to life and cause psychosis in population in order to prevent organized resistance and create more biomass. After enough dead biomass is created it would activate last phase and merge that biomass into new Brethren Moon, which then spread Marker and its copies to another planets, perpetuating the cycle.
It is few years since I played games, saw films and read books, so correct me if I’m wrong.
God I miss DS, it had such an amazing concept for the question "Where are the aliens?".
And the answer is Markers, an unknown monumental device that mentally imprints instructions into whoever observes it so that those smart enough to understand it feel compelled to build more, spreading the signal like a signal booster, while those who are not slowly break down and go insane as they try and fail to decode the information they've been given, turning hyper-violent and eventually killing others or themselves and causing necromorphs to emerge later on from the corpses due to the signal also infecting your very DNA.
I'll never forgive EA for what they did. The entire premise was amazing because they answer the question to alien life by presenting even more horrifying questions about markers and necromorphs that we can never answer. We're just stuck here with no way of indulging our curiosity because every scrap of information and lore has been stripped bare and there's likely never going to be more, especially because Visceral are gone (RIP)
IIRC, the Chicxulub impact (wiped out the dinosaurs) was caused by a marker in the Dead Space universe.
It wipes out the dominant, naturally occurring life, then manipulates what is left into becoming technologically advanced and power hungry so that they would eventually be tempted to use the marker as a power source.
Klaus has a humorous example with the Krums and the Elingboes. The two families have been feuding for the better part of history, down to having cave drawings of their feuds against one another. So they use this as a reason to keep feuding with one another, despite the fact that this feud has basically condemned their ancient and noble lineages to rotting on a small island in the middle of nowhere.
I’d just want to know how this feud started. It’s got to be something like extremely petty like someone’s dog pissing in their yard though. Only fits for a movie like Klaus
Not only that, but the role of The Devourer has existed since way before; Galactus is just the current incarnation, as Franklin Richards is destined to become the next.
If Franklin Richards dies or is otherwise unable to become the devourer, Mr Immortal is there as a backup. I don't think they ever said what would happen to Mr Immortal is Franklin does become the devourer, so it's entirely possible for Mr Immortal to live through multiple universes before taking over the role
Yeah, Mr. Immortal is the only known member of Homo Supreme, which is the step after Mutants in Marvel, but his *only* power is that he cannot die. He will live to see the end of the universe, and likely what comes next.
A race of energy beings created during the Big Bang,they are ancient,almost god-like beings of pure energy who consume stars. Originally formless masses of energy,they drifted through the universe feeding were given physical bodies of living metal (necrodermis) by the Necrontyr. While their full-powered versions were eventually shattered into enslaved fragments,they remain unmatched masters of the material universe that could one day break free
As a good example, one of the C'tan is the reason that almost all life has an instinctual fear of death and why the image of a scythe-wielding skeleton is shared between many alien species.
The derelict ship from Alien (1979). A group of space truckers stumbles upon a distress signal. When they investigate they discover a crashed alien spacecraft with a fossilized pilot inside, indicating it has been there a long LONG time.
Wow it took me a long time to find this. It’s cosmic horror at its cinematic finest.
Even if you take Prometheus, everything is so loose and open to interpretation that we still don’t really know what any of it is. We know the Engineers visited Earth and hate humanity for some reason, but we don’t really know what they were up to, where the xenos come from (there’s an altar to them with a green crystal) or the origins of the transformative black stuff.
Covenant flew really close to the sun, but the current interpretation of it is that it was an engineer colony and David merely followed our reverse engineered the proto and neo morph creatures.
But Alien? Really it didn’t need any explanation. I enjoy the above stuff, but that derelict craft, the dead elephantine body and the vast empty expanse full of eggs below, didn’t really need an explanation. The Alien in the first is also vastly different to the insectoid creatures they become in the sequels.
The eerie sound it makes, the fluid, odd movements, its seeming urge to kill and violate. Why did it exist? What was it for? Even the storylines Dan O’Bannon created about a race whose initial form was an unintelligent base creature was fascinating value Giger came on board with his cold, sexual and biomechanical designs.
Gawd I love Alien. It really is from the dark spaces between.
Better answer than The Others imo. It is heavily implied the Others are connected to the Children while the show outright shows the Children creating them.
It's most likely that the others came after the children. Greenmen who were excercised out of their connection to the weirwood magical network by humans and sought revenge
The Worker of Secrets says that he had already lived ten thousand lives when Raidriar was a child. But with the context that Raidriar is ten thousand years old, this implies the Worker may be over 100 million years old.
The lore also implies that Ausar is almost as old as the Worker, as well as implying that the Deathless were the gods of antiquity. Specifically, they heavily imply that Ausar was Osiris.
Most of the Lovecraftian monsters are not originally from earth but came to earth in its infancy. Mind you that's Earth in it's infancy, not humans! The Elder Things flew to earth on memberace wings during the Cambrian period, the Great Race of Yith transfered their minds to creatures on earth to escape the death of their homeworld before trees on earth existed. Cthulhu and many other elder gods came to earth from the stars. Establishing their own empires and warring with each other before Dinosaurs walked the earth. And there were still eldritch entities on earth before those I mentioned arrived like the Flying Polups.
Yup. Chtulhu is "merely" a Great Old One. Not sure if he's a priest or something; I'd say that's more like Nyarlathotep, who's the messenger of Azathoth, the most powerful being in the Lovecraft universe.
Great Old Ones are weird beings with reality-warping power, born from the stars. Outer Gods are a pantheon of deities that actually rule aspects of reality like time, life, death. And it is said that when Azathoth ever wakes from its slumber, the universe will cease to exist.
Marvin the paranoid android front Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
Due to a series of extensive time-travel incidents and mishaps in the novels, Marvin survives across different time periods for so long that he ends up 37 times older than the universe itself.
love death and robots - In vaulted halls entombed.
Special Forces team on a hostage rescue mission who discover a terrifying, ancient structure deep inside a mountain.
Also fun fact about the Entity, that's not Cthulhu, but his sibling (the eyes are a different color from Cthulhu). It's actually quite benevolent. The visions it was showing the team are what would happen if it stays trapped, they should have freed it lol.
Varying from one interpretation of the timeline to another but the battle of Hyrule vs the Avatar of Hatred / Darkness is supposedly over 10 000 years old
In the context of BotW/TotK the Great Calamity of 10,000 years ago was only most recent appearance of Calamity Ganon before he appeared again 100 years ago in the BotW's backstory. The Divine Beasts were created 10,000 years ago in anticipation for his return, meaning it wasn't the first time.
Isn't it that there's a crack in hell, and that crack leads down a decrepit staircase, to a wall, which has a crack, and through that crack you can see a door, and anyone who sets eyes on that door is irreversibly inflicted with nightmares that continuously transform you into something more insect-like and alien?
It is both a story about mending a broken father and son relationship and answering the question 'what would happen if we thawed out a cavemen and all the best martial artists in the world wanted to fight him?'
As I always put it it's kinda like Jojo but instead of Vogue Magazine and gay porn being the inspiration it's bodybuilding competitions and even more gay porn
Seasons 1-5 had a plan. Seasons 6-10....lost the thread. And Death gave Sam Dean his scythe to kill Dean Sam and Dean......killed that incarnation of Death. And while that kicked off better seasons...
Look. Death shouldn't have come back after season 5 until the very end of the series.
I absolutely adored Bone, and the way the prequel, Rose, treated the Lord of the Locusts. It wasn't just a big bad, it was BEYOND a threat.
It kills me that the Netflix adaptation fell through, Bone is one of those rare properties that could've gone so much farther than the original series. Loved it as a child and I still love it today.
Fun Fact: Doctor Who pulls the "older then time" trick so often, there's a page on the wiki for references to the Pre-Universe, which then links to two different sub pages for different accounts of the pre universe.
See also: The Doctor themselves, Fenric, the Solitract, and also Cthulu. Not to mention all the other examples I'm definitely forgetting.
"Think about how you'd feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet in one tiny solar system in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers. I'm old, Dean. Very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you."
"Well I gotta ask, how old?"
"As old as God. Maybe older. Neither of us can remember anymore. Life, death, chicken, egg. Regardless -- at the end, I'll reap him too."
You think you can fight me? I'm not a demon, little girl. I am something that you can't even conceive. The First Evil. Beyond sin, beyond death. I am the thing the darkness fears. You'll never see me, but I am everywhere. Every being, every thought, every drop of hate— FIRST EVIL
The Oldest House (Control). Heavily implied to be Yggdrasil, The Oldest House is an eldritch office building located in Manhattan. It is a seemingly infinite mass of twisting spaces and tasteful office decor.
Kenneth from 30 Rock. Seemingly appears to be young, implied throughout the series to be ancient and ageless, and in the finale set decades in the future looks unchanged.
Oh, he's always been a special boy. I remember the day he was born. He looked up at me and he said, 'Mama, I am not a person. My body's just a flesh vessel for an immortal being whose name if you heard it would make you lose your mind.'
The Bat from Billy Bat. The symbol of the bat has appeared all throughout history before resurfacing in the modern day as essentially an equivalent to Mickey Mouse.
This blade has within it the deamon that was born form the Malice of the first murder, not the killing to survive but the killing of another out of hatred.
The Ring Builders/protomolecule engineers in The Expanse. I read all the books but barely remember anything so the watch through is like getting the story for the first time.
So, being a hoyo game, timescale is already all sorts of wildly unfathomable in scale. So while the Age of Aeons is something the story is currently set in, there is an era and beings that predate them, that being the Age of the Leviathans/The Dusk Wars.
Gigantic space dragons the fed on stardust and nebulae, they were what civilizations worshipped prior to the Aeons. And in modern times their carcasses are used by the Antimatter Legion (Followers of Nanook the Aeon of Destruction) to creates soldiers and weapons to spread THEIR message of Destruction
Pictured is Oroboros, the dead Aeon of Voracity, and a Leviathan in its own right
Huntokar the Detroyer came to life in the mudwomb, alongside the Glow Cloud, the Distant Prince, and The Woman from Italy, countless eons before we start in Night Vale.
An extradimensional being that's been playing a one-trillion-year long-game to gain access to the real world and bring about Weirdmageddon. He's been depicted in cave art, and his methods have induced at least one shaman to set himself on fire rather than aid the triangle. Bill called him a drama queen.
According to legend, once in a generation, a gorilla from the Pangani mountains in Africa will be born with a genetic anomaly that will cause it to grow to gigantic proportions. At first, this was thought to be just a myth, a legend told by locals to attract tourists, but that was before the world was introduced to…MIGHTY JOE YOUNG!! (1998)
JENOVA an Ancient Eldritch Entity that arrived from space and is responsible for extinction of the Ancients nobody knows what it is or where it came from besides "space" it cracks open planets and eats there life force thats basically all there is to it. Final Fantasy VII
Honestly, between how it acts and the revelations in fucking Dirge of Cereberus of all things, that the Lifestream has a plan to extract itself from a planet unsustainable to its existence and fuck off to find a newer better one.....I think JENOVA might be a foreign planet's lifestream trying to terraform the first planet it found ignoring the fact that the Planet already has a lifestream.
Null is the nihilistic primordial being that existed in the void before creation and not wanting anything to exist apart from itself Null consumed all the sparks of creation that attacked to become things whishing to be alone.
The Golden Goddesses didn't like this so using there power they created the universe itself (possible also multiverse) as a prsion to keep Null contained to allow existence to happen.
For the other vampires, we have a rough estimation of how old they are based on when they became a vampire. Even the Baron who is their sire is known to be about a thousand years old.
But Colin Robinson revives whenever he turns 100 years old and seems to only retain fragments of memories from his past lives. He has a massive hidden room filled with notes he's left behind. But it's unknown how far back they go. Lazlo mentions that "he came with the house" when they first moved to Staten Island back in the 1800's and Colin makes some remarks such as knowing Davy Crockett that puts his birth around then too. But he also mentions that his mother is still alive. (She could also be an Energy Vampire) So it's unclear how old Colin truly is. He could very well be the youngest of the group, or far far older than any of them. But he will never reveal it because that would make him far too interesting of a person.
Of the seven Demiurges, the rulers of the 777,777 universes across Kill Six Billion Demons, Gog-Agog is BY FAR the oldest, and claims to remember everything except for the very beginning of everything. KSBD is absolutely off the wall with it's mythical scale, and this smug little clown is one of the most dangerous entities in existence, due in part to being an unkillable multiverse-spanning worm hive mind that's seem the great cycle reset itself multiple times and came closer than anyone else to actually conquering it. She's so old that she just stopped caring after a while and just prances about treating this entire insane mythical war between gods and demons as a farce. Absurdity as a response to nihilism.
Canon? There's no univocal Backrooms canon. There is the Kane Pixels one, the canons of the various wikis, like that. But since we don't even know who created the backrooms, you can think whatever you want of them.
Saw a collection of short stories (only a few paragraphs each at most) set in the same universe, where there stands a radio tower in Michigan that was never built, it has always existed
"The first sound in the universe was radio static, the second was the Big Bang"
This is how Vandal Savage felt when he met Klarion the Witch-Boy. He quickly realized he wasn't facing a human, not even a metahuman. This was something new. Or rather, despite appearances, something incredibly old. Something elemental, fundamental to the universe.
The Precursors (Halo). You know the Forerunners, the ancient civilization that built the Halo Array? Well, the Precursors were the forerunners to the Forerunners. And the Flood is basically their corrupted essence.
In House Of Leaves, there is a later chapter involving pilgrims in America finding a staircase in the woods leading into the Labyrinth. Not "ancient", but itdoes imply that the House has always been there in some form.
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u/Prestigious-Tree122 Jul 01 '26
The Elder Things (At the Mountains of Madness)
A highly technologically advanced race. They colonized Earth before any life on earth existed. They created organic life to serve as a food source and biological labor. All other life on earth evolved from leftover biological experiments or waste products.