The Chthonians (los cthonianos) are bodiless entities that dwell between the spaces — in the gap that separates one thing from the next — on the Malvinas Islands of 1966. They feed on human psychic energy and become visible only when they have fed enough.
| Type | Faction (Mythos entities) |
| Era | 1966 |
| Location | Malvinas Islands; the coast of suicides |
| Also called | ”Joyboard” |
| Spanish entry | Los cthonianos |
Nature
The Chthonians have no body that light can touch. They do not eat flesh but states of the soul: depression, the death drive, the fire of passion — anything that burns strongly enough in a person. Until they have accumulated enough, nothing registers them; once sated, they manifest.
They are also known by a garbled name, “Joyboard”; both names designate the same dwellers of the interstice.
Feeding
- The coast of suicides is their larder. People there throw themselves into the sea, driven by an unexplained despair that the Chthonians feed until it overflows; each death is a ration.
- Statues of salt are their visible signature. Whoever looks straight at one of them is fixed in the act of looking — piroclastizado (“pyroclastized”), turned into a column of salt, like the woman of the old story who looked back at the burning city. The salt figures on the coast are those who saw them.
In folklore
The island’s Gaelic and Celtic legends — dragons, ritual masks, “the face that takes the mask of the devil” — are a distorted memory of the Chthonians. Where the Celtic tradition placed a dragon or a masked demon, one of these beings had been.
Summoning
They are called through the Gallic brass mirror, a bronze plate two and a half meters tall, set facing north and written in a language of stone. It does not reflect faces: once the Gallic phrases on its frame are spoken, it summons, and what comes from the other side of the metal are the Chthonians. The key is the yellow egg that the Esoteric Order of Dagon unearthed on the island: exposed before the plate, it opens an eye through which they emerge.
Witnessing the summoning costs part of one’s sanity, which does not always return.
Relationships
The Chthonians belong to the same substrate that, on the Malvinas, worships Cthulhu and the powers that dream beneath the water; they are one of the faces through which that depth surfaces. On the other side of the mirror that calls them lies the land of the two suns, the yellow realm of Carcosa.