The ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. The gray mass quobbled and quivered, and swelled perpetually – and from within it, in manifold fission, were spawned anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. Here there were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with the fines of fishes; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous. And those that escaped not swiftly ashore when they fell from the pool of the Beast were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk.
A pool of grayish, horrid mass – a choking river of mud marled with obscene offal. A horrid protean mass of dark muck. Such is the form of Abhoth, the Source of All Filth and Lord of the Zaug.
THE CHILDREN OF ABHOTH: “And from the broken, turgid mass there is given life of dark bounty.”
Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth (as the Parchments of Bido pronounce them), describe obscene monsters which crawl constantly from Abhoth’s gray mass. These warped and twisted progeny can assume many forms – from the half-functional to mammoth-like horrors. Abhoth’s tentacles and “many-formed limbs” are described as seizing many of these creations and dragging them back into the depths of its bulk. Of those that escape, a few are described as “attendants of the rivulets of muck”, while others wander into the “dark cracks of the world’s black heart”.
THE DARK MIND: The mind of Abhoth is a warped, twisted, and cynical thing. It gives forth great telepathic waves, and Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth speak of their thoughts being filled with “black rivulets of nether birth” – twisted forms of mental energy that squalm forth from creature’s mind even as its twisted progeny rip their way out of the creature’s viscous body.
LORD OF THE ZAUG: Among those titles given to Abhoth, “Lord of the Zaug” is given often. It is even possible that Abhoth is responsible for their creation. Some, including the Xillian Fragments, even describe the zaug as being “infested with the filth of All Filth”.
THE RAT GOD: Among the ratmen, Abhoth is worshipped as the “Rat God”. But this is nothing more than a guise behind which Abhoth’s true form can be worshipped.
…. a loathsome, night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime is spread its dark mind and mass like a septic contagion.
– The Dasha Codex
UBBO-SATHLA: Even older texts speak of an entity known as Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source. Like Abhoth, Ubbo-Sathla is described as a huge, protoplasmic mass resting in deep grottoes beneath the “frozen surface of man’s mind”. Some texts treat this as metaphor, others as literal truth. A few scholars have apparently tried to rectify the discrepancy between these descriptions and those which place Ubbo-Sathla in the “gray-litten crypts of Y’qaa” or “beneath the depths of four-coned Mithradeth”.
In some myths, Ubbo-Sathla is said to have “spawned all life”, yet “whatever her touch lay upon was blighted and no life could be seen in it again”. Other texts limit the extent of her creation to “all life which is dark”. Other speak of her as “the womb of all demon-kin”.
Still other prophecies, such as the Visions of Dezzerak’s Blood, say that Ubbo-Sathla shall one day “take back into her breast the life of all living things” – that all life will be reabsorbed into her mass.
The ultimate identity of Ubbo-Sathla, however, remains hopelessly confused. There are those who see Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth as the same entity viewed in different epochs and under different names. But there are also other texts that refer to Ubbo-Sathla as the “Mother of All Filth” and Abhoth as the “Father of All Filth”, suggesting some foul and horrid mating between the two. Others describe them as siblings or even as schisms of the same being.
THE TABLETS: “About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the demon gods.” Ubbo-Sathla (and thus, perhaps, Abhoth) is also said to serve as “murky guardian” to tablets containing secrets of the Demon Gods – “lore lost to all mortal minds and kept in secret lest it be turned against them before the End of Days”.
Fuller records of these tablets (or even the tablets themselves) have been oft-sought by sorcerers and scholars, but none is known to have yet succeeded in acquiring them.
Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror. And loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.
DESIGN NOTES
Abhoth can be found extensively in Ptolus and The Night of Dissolution, but was originally created by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla has been lifted from the short story of the same name, also by Clark Ashton Smith. The reference to “Dezzerak” is to an entity from The Book of Fiends (more on that later).
