Zharnoth

**Zharnoth** (or the **Court of Azathoth**) is the primal, transcendent Chaos that spawns, sustains, and devours all realities and the Godhoods that define and are defined by them. The structure of the Court of Azathoth may be described mathematically, but its nature is perhaps best expressed as follows:

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,

Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,

Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,

But only Chaos, without form or place.

Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered

Things he had dreamed but could not understand,

While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered

In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining

Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,

Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining

Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.

“I am His Messenger,” the daemon said,

As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.

## Cosmology

### A Note on Function Spaces

It should be emphasized that the dimensions being referred in the following description are not spatial; rather, they are orthogonal functions (that is, it is possible to freely change the value of one function without changing the value of any of the others), which may take arbitrarily many forms and be of arbitrary complexity. As a simple example, in our own universe, two such dimensions in our function space are angular momentum and position. It is possible to change something's position to any value one pleases without affecting its angular momentum, and likewise something may be spun up or spun down to an arbitrary angular momentum without the position of its center of mass altering in the slightest. Our cosmos, of course, has innumerably more dimensions in function space than a mere two--to the values added above, one could add mass, charge, position along the two other axes of space, position in time, etc.--and so it is for most other realities.

### Structure of the Court of Azathoth

Mathematically, the Court of Azathoth may be described as an n-dimensional function space, where n is uncountably infinite and includes all possible configurations that the laws of physics for a given cosmos may take. Preferred bases for this space emerge entropically, and define the laws of physics present within any given reality, as well as defining the boundaries of all higher-dimensional reality. Though this structure exists outside of any temporal metric--indeed, it itself is what generates timelike laws of physics, in some of the cosmoses engendered by it--for pedagogical purposes, the following description will be given as if a definable chronology exists:

First and last, there is the nuclear singularity that is known as Azathoth. Azathoth is unique in that, whereas all other cosmoses that emerge from It possess at least one dimension, It alone has no dimension, being undefined and unconstrained by any bounding rules. As a consequence, though It is simple to the point of nonexistence in and of Itself, the uncountably infinite degrees of freedom of "motion" within the Court of Azathoth grant to It--or, perhaps more accurately, the space It inhabits--all possible qualities, in every impossible combination. Among these, of course, are such things as consciousness, self-awareness, and rationality, but inextricably joined with them are unconscious, unaware madness. Azathoth is Nothing, despite and because It is Everything. It is the animating nuclear ember that illuminates and defines the multidimensional tapestries and draperies swaying from the vaulted roof of Its Court, even as Its black, burning radiance kindles them to flaming ruin.