What Is the Great Race of Yith?

The Great Race of Yith, or the Yithians, are ten-foot-tall, cone-bodied beings who survive extinction-level threats by projecting their minds across time into the bodies of other species. They swap consciousness with a host for years at a stretch. They are scholarly rather than violent, and their chief interest is the full sweep of history, which they catalogue by living it. The Archive files them at a low threat level to humans directly, and as historically displacing, because the displacement is the offence.

The five years

The one witness on file is Nathaniel Peaslee, a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, who lost five years of his life between 1908 and 1913. His body walked, spoke and travelled throughout. The mind in it was not his, and it spent the interval reading and writing in the Great Race's libraries; when his own returned he carried dreams of a vast city and its sealed archives that did not stop with the dreaming.

Pnakotus

The library-city is stamped UNCHARTED. The Archive has a position for it: beneath the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, at 22°3′14″ South, 125°0′39″ East, where basalt rooflines barely break the surface. A funded university expedition opened a trench there in 1935, and what Peaslee found at the bottom of it is the reason the lower levels of Pnakotus remain sealed.

The Field Survey marks the coordinates with the firmest pin on its chart, which says more about the precision of the witness than about the safety of the place.