To Clear the Earth

"To Clear the Earth" is a Cthulhu Mythos story by Will Murray that originally appeared in the anthology The Shub-Niggurath Cycle (Chaosium, 1996). The story introduces Murray's recurring secret government organization, the Cryptic Events Evaluation Taskforce.
Murray wrote a sequel/prequel, "Black Fire," that was published in 1995.
== Synopsis ==
An agent of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Taskforce goes to Antarctica to investigate the emergence of an ancient artefact that threatens to destroy all life on Earth.
== Characters ==
* Pickman: An agent of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Taskforce, associated with ARCHINT--archeological intelligence. He describes the CEET as a branch of the National Reconaissance Office that conducts " other, super-classified, reconnaissance" on “any unexplained or unclassifiable phenomenon." His eyes are "the clear green of the Aurora Australis."
* Evan Stark: U.S. Navy glaciologist stationed in Antarctica. Comes from Kentucky.
== Mythos Connections ==
The artefact that emerges from the Antarctic ice, a "crackle-skinned sphere of pitted brown metal" 40 feet in diameter, is called the Furnace of Yeb. Depicted in the Necronomicon--"circa 738 A.D.”--it's "the Elder engine that’s supposed to clear the Earth.” 
Yeb is described in the story as one of the greatest of the Old Ones. The offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, father to Tsathoggua. In ancient times, he was worshipped in underground shrines all over the world. In Rome, Luxor, Petra––even Teotihuacan. Two years ago when they uncovered the lost city of Irem in the Middle East, they found a cave shrine dedicated to Yeb.In the Irem shrine, the CEET found a "basalt wall tablet...the only complete surviving text of the Black Litany that is identified with Yeb." It describes something associated with Yeb called the Black Fire.
The reference to the discovery of Irem "two years ago" would seem to place the story in 1993.The New York Times, "On the Trail from the Sky: Roads Point to a Lost City," by John Noble Wilford, February 5, 1992.
== Publication History ==
Since its appearance in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle, "To Clear the Earth" has been reprinted in Murray's collection The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu: Volume One.
== References ==
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Will Murray works